A trooper’s shove showed stardom doesn’t protect Black athletes from police

It was 1996, my first day stepping foot on Syracuse University’s campus. I saw a big student protest was taking place so, with my freshman’s inquisitive mind, I ventured over to see what was going on.I listened to a passionate sista named Kathy Ade, the president of Syracuse’s student African-American Society. She stood there with her Bantu knots and a megaphone addressing the crowd, discussing the fact that campus security was now going to be able to carry pepper spray. In the 90s – which my daughter Baby Sierra calls “the 1900s,” just to keep me humble – campus security carrying pepper spray was a big deal. Now, they all carry guns.The fear was that they’d use the spray on Black and Brown students without hesitation, at the slightest perceived sign of trouble. Syracuse’s campus newspaper, the Daily Orange, printed a photo of myself and Roland Williams, who would go on to play in the NFL, standing at the rally alongside the sista with the megaphone. A few days after the protest, Kathy found me on the quad to thank me for lending my visibility and privilege as a basketball player to their cause. She said she seriously doubted the police would ever pepper spray one of us. She talked about how the university treated athletes as if we were different – valued and welcomed – while other Black and Brown students were made to feel like trespassers, constantly asked to show ID just to prove they belonged. (This was Rudolph Giuliani and Eric Adams’s stop and frisk before it was called that, but I digress).Those memories came back to me on Saturday when a Texas state trooper was “sent home” after a run-in with South Carolina player Nyck Harbor during a game. Harbor, as a star athlete, was among the group of people that Kathy lumped into a protected class of Black people when we spoke all those years ago in Syracuse. A quick recap of what happened on Saturday. ESPN’s broadcast showed the trooper appear to intentionally barge Harbor and his teammate Oscar Hadaway III after the receiver had scored a touchdown against Texas A&M in their home stadium. In doing so, the trooper came off like a school bully with low self-esteem – the kind of senior who gets his kicks plowing through a sea of freshmen, daring them to speak up so he can enjoy pummeling them in front of everyone. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), which employs the trooper, later said he had been sent home. There’s a lot to unpack here. Why didn’t the DPS call an immediate press conference and condemn the trooper’s actions? Why didn’t they say his behavior was appalling, disgusting, and unacceptable and not what they teach their state troopers to do?If this trooper behaved like this in the middle of a football stadium, during a nationally televised game, how does he behave whenever he stops a Black person on the side of the highway? Harbor did not retaliate, despite the trooper’s provocation – he turned around and made his way back to the field. But if he had responded, what would have happened? It happens all the time: the person being mistreated by police is expected to respond perfectly, or risk making things worse. Yet there’s no such expectation for the officer – no demand for restraint, professionalism, or even basic decency.Before they try to “no angel” Harbor, it’s important to note that he won the 2023 Franklin D Watkins Memorial Award, a prize which honors African American high schoolers who excel in athletics, academics and charity work. Aside from his football career, Harbor has won national titles in track, volunteered at a soup kitchen and worked with Generosity Global, which campaigns to improve women’s health in Africa. Harbor is majoring in public health and has been on the SEC Academic Honor Roll two years in succession. I asked retired police captain Sonia Pruitt what she thought of the trooper’s behavior. “People say maybe he was having a bad day. But no, as an officer of the law, you do not get to abuse the public because you are having a bad day … People want to be treated with dignity and respect from their police officer,” she said on my show The Collision: Where Sports And Politics Collide. “However, far too often, in police training that simply isn’t the focus or conversation. And when it’s not a focus, you see acting out like what we observed with this Texas state trooper. That’s not a ‘bad apple’ issue, that is a bad system issue”Captain Pruitt, I couldn’t agree more. Etan Thomas played in the NBA from 2000 through 2011. He is a published poet, activist and motivational speaker