By Rebecca Renee Hess
I am a Black woman hockey fan. Not quite a unicorn, but sometimes it feels that way. Hockey culture is quite white, and the first thing Black folks ask me when they find out I’m a hockey fan is “Why?” I’ve gone to live games without seeing a person who looks like me for the full 3 hours. I’ve been verbally assaulted because of my Blackness at a hockey game. I’ve been called the “N-word” on hockey forums. There’s something unnerving about being the only Black person in a white space—a remembered fear of things that have been and will be.
My initial enchantment with the sport surprised everyone, including me. I stumbled upon hockey in Pittsburgh seven years ago and became fascinated with the speed and athleticism of the players, the complexities of such a simple premise. I’ve spent hours researching rules, teams, and the history behind the sport and hundreds of dollars on merchandise and tickets. When friends, strangers and the National Hockey League remind me that hockey isn’t meant for Black folks, I have exhausted myself emotionally to justify loving a sport that doesn’t love me back.
When it comes down to it, hockey brings me joy. Almost nothing could make me give it up, not even the alienation I feel on the outskirts of a fandom where hardly anyone looks like me. In fact, I critique the League and its fans out of love. I want to see hockey become more inclusive so that little Black girls and boys can find value in one of the best team sports ever played.
Currently, there are 32 Black hockey players on 31 NHL teams, meaning, on average, one Black man per team. With the exception of newly hired Executive Vice President of Social Impact, Growth Initiatives & Legislative Affairs, Kim Davis, I’ve yet to see a Black person in a position of power in the NHL. The only Black assistant coach, Paul Jerrard, was hired and fired by the Calgary Flames within two years.
To say the lack of diversity is disheartening is an understatement for Black hockey players and fans. Not only is there a lack of representation, but the sport is expensive. Rinks are scattered through suburbs across North America, but very few reside in low income neighborhoods. There is gate-keeping in hockey that begins with economics and ends with racial slurs thrown at Black Stanley Cup champions like Trevor Daley and Devante Smith-Pelly by coaches, teammates and opposing fans.
For championship hockey teams, an invitation to the White House is a tradition celebrated since 1991, when George H.W. Bush invited the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Rose Garden. In the past two years, the honorable intentions of such an invitation from Donald Trump and the subsequent acceptance of that request by athletes has become subversive. When the Warriors won the NBA Finals in 2017 and Steph Curry refused to go, 45 took back his invitation. When the Patriots won the 2017 Super Bowl, some of the team went, but when the Eagles won in 2018, Trump invited them and rescinded the invitation when less than 10 members of the team planned to go.
In 2017, the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Stanley Cup and then bittered the experience by accepting a White House invitation from Trump, becoming the only full team to attend a sports championship celebration at the White House since the 2016 election. The visit didn’t go over well with Black hockey fans, but the action wasn’t surprising. Hockey is not for everyone. It never has been. Each person on the Penguins, from the support staff to star players, is a rich white man. Regardless of their individual politics or even country of origin, not one of them would be personally attacked by the current administration’s racist, xenophobic or misogynistic views.
Still, there are Black hockey players out there, and one of them happens to be on the 2018 Washington Capitals Stanley Cup Championship winning team. Devante Maliq Smith-Pelly, a 26 year old Black man from Scarborough, Canada who plays right wing for the Capitals, has already stated he will not be attending any White House ceremonies. In the 2018 playoffs, Devante had 7 goals in 24 games, 3 of them in the last 3 games of the final series. In February 2018, Black History Month and Hockey Is For Everyone Month in the NHL, 2 Chicago Blackhawks fans yelled racial slurs at Smith-Pelly while he sat in the penalty box during a game. Racists are emboldened by the normalization of racism through legal tactics, media coverage and presidential decree—and no one knows that better than Smith-Pelly.
By refusing an invitation to the White House, Smith-Pelly joins the ranks of athlete activists who stand (or kneel) for injustice and, most likely, he will be persecuted as such. His white teammates, when asked their opinion on a White House visit, extolled the honor of the invitation. For most, it would be “a cool experience” that they will never forget. For them, it isn’t an endorsement because their politics are their own, separate from their job, personal life, friends and moral beliefs. As with many things, this false separation of “real” life and politics is a luxury reserved for rich white men.
Unfortunately, the NHL is not a democracy. There is a “team first” mentality that may make it impossible for Devante to refuse the invitation. It isn’t easy to be the only Black face in the room, the only person to stand up and stand out. It could be easier for Devante to accept the invitation, in the long run. When J.T. Brown, a Black hockey player currently on the Minnesota Wild roster, raised a fist at his first game of the 2017-2018 season, he was benched for 6 games and traded from the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Anaheim Ducks 3 months later. He received death threats. White fans lambasted his politics, his play and his motives online and in the media.
By refusing to go to the White House, Devante shows Black fans that he stands by his principles and his community, that he is thinking about those that suffer, those that are abused, those that are killed. He shows us that Black Lives Matter. By refusing to go to the White House, Devante can rest his own mind, knowing that he took the opportunity to make a difference to Black hockey fans everywhere.
By refusing to go to the White House, Devante can make a stand in the whitest sport, an action that his coworkers could care less about because the deaths of Black and brown bodies and the lives of Black people don’t affect them and probably never will.
Rebecca Renee Hess is a hockey fan from Southern California with a background in African-American Literature, acafandom and pop culture. Renee is currently a staff writer for Black Nerd Problems and enjoys penning pieces for various sources when she’s not teaching Argument Writing to college students. Her most memorable moments as an entertainment journalist include an interview with Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura, “Star Trek: The Original Series”), speaking Russian with the creators of the independent film “Майор Гром”, and chatting on Skype with some of her favorite black hockey players for a book she is writing on black hockey culture.
