A community I have grown to understand and be a part of is the Dartmouth football team. My team consists of an increasingly growing and diverse culture, filled with many dynamics that create tension and forge bonds that last a life time. From the surface, the team and I look like a bunch of over masculine men, that are only concerned about playing football and partying on the weekends. Sexual orientation or identity was never questioned. One could only assume you were a masculine heterosexual man because you played football. I fell into this assumption, but realized from media that this is not always the case. I myself hope to analyze this and the many concepts that make up our team, and show that there lies much more than what many see to be.

In August of 2014, when I first joined the Dartmouth football team, I understood from the start that this team would be very different from high school. My team in high school was roughly 90 percent African American which created a vibrant team culture, that I was familiar with, unlike what I was getting myself into. Here the team was a majority white with roughly 24 African Americans out of 130 players. A culture shock that could be handled in two ways: one that is open to learning and one that pushes people away. In addition to experiencing this culture shock, I found myself battling over my individual identity and how I wanted to be looked at from other players. This scenario could go two ways, one being like Dorothy Allison’s statement: “I copied the dress, mannerisms, attitudes, and ambitions of the girls I met in college, changing or hiding my own tastes, interests, and desires” (Allison 1998, 81). Her experience was for hiding her lesbianism, but mine could be for hiding my own background and moral beliefs. One could analyze this community at the time, and produce a conclusion that if you did not go out on the weekends, your chances of creating bonds and team’s chemistry would be subpar. I had to go into a situation like this realizing that my results would not be the same as a majority of my team. In addition to my team being more white than African American, there were issues of social class, religious background, and the fact that many talked about women as if they were objects. Our team had multiple layers of facets that were connected in some way. My own belief and physical representation kept me from getting those results that so many others received. I was a middle-class African American man, with a Christian background, that had a lot more respect for women than a great majority of the team. Instead of going into a situation without thinking of race or socio-economic status like a lot of my teammates, I had to. My beliefs could change in a matter of seconds, but my skin color could not and my current bank balance was only going to change if I decided to work for it. I was being hit by multiple facades at once, not knowing how much they really overlapped each other.

Looking at this from my current position in October of 2017, there is a clear indication that those that I have forged friendships with in this community are facing the same problems that I am. We could relate on topics and discuss how they affected our lives. Forming groups like this were common among the football team. We were a big community with a lot of sub-groups within that allowed us to connect more off the field than at practice. This was an important part in my development into who I am today, but it also showed the extent of understanding those unlike me. Within my friend group on the team, we talked about intersectional concepts all the time because we lived with them every day. Yet for our peers, many of them did not understand. One could say they had this sense of “privilege” that did not need to be challenged. A status that was protected by social, political, and economic barriers, creating problems for those who were not included. Peggy McIntosh in White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack speaks of this privilege and quotes a statement that some of my teammates may have encountered growing up, it says, “My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture” (McIntosh 1989: 1). From the outside its so obvious, but when you have lived with it every day since birth, understanding the vastness of this advantage is futile.