I love this sense of benevolence being dragged through the city streets as the cross to bear.
The people exercising power portray themselves as compassionate protectors of the people over whom they exercise power.
This is a fight over who gets to define discrimination, who gets represented in institutional governance and what happens when a mechanism created to guarantee representation is recast as discrimination itself.
Let’s be clear: The IHSAA does not merely have a board that happens to include Black people. Its bylaws deliberately create 19 seats: 12 open seats and seven designated seats — two female, two minority, two urban and one private-school seat. The minority seats are elected positions on the governing board.
The Indiana Attorney General’s lawsuit seeks to eliminate the two minority seats and permanently prevent the IHSAA from using race as a criterion for allocating board leadership. Attorney General Todd Rokita’s stated argument is that racial classification itself is discriminatory and that leadership should be determined without regard to race.
That is the legal theory.
But what happens when the language of nondiscrimination is used to challenge a mechanism whose stated purpose is representative governance?
That is the question.
Ah, the “White Man’s Burden.”
Kipling wrote the poem in 1899. But the dismantling had started long before he put it in verse.
In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act to protect Black citizens from terror, and from the states that looked away. By 1883, the Supreme Court had gutted it. United States v. Harris struck down the provision that made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive citizens of equal protection. That same year, in the Civil Rights Cases, Justice Joseph Bradley struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and wrote that the formerly enslaved must at some point cease to be “the special favorite of the laws.”
Twelve years. That is how long it took to dissect the protection. The Court didn’t need Congress to repeal it. Nobody had to call it racism. They only had to call it too much.
Special favorite. Burden. Quota.
Different centuries. Same move.
Kipling dressed domination as duty. Bradley dressed abandonment as equality. Now the State of Indiana dresses the removal of two seats as protection.
We are protecting you from discrimination.
You who?
Who decided that our representation is the discrimination from which we need protection? And who gets to make that decision? That question matters because representation is not merely symbolic. Representation is access to institutional power.
The IHSAA has chosen to construct its governing body around designated representation. Two seats for women. Two for minorities. Two for urban schools. One for a private school.
So, if minority representation is impermissible because it uses a racial classification, what is the state’s legal and philosophical distinction between minority representation and the IHSAA’s other designated seats?
Where are the women seat holders in this argument?
Where are the urban seat holders?
What happens to their designated representation if the legal principle being advanced is that identity-based representation itself is discriminatory? And if the answer is that these categories are legally different, then explain the difference.
This is bigger than the two seats.
If the state succeeds in establishing that the IHSAA cannot reserve board positions based on race, what other institutions or governance structures could confront the same legal reasoning? Nonprofit boards? Scholarship programs? Advisory Councils? University programs? Professional associations? Arts organizations? Cultural institutions? State-created commissions? Organizations receiving public money?
This is not a prediction. It is the question the legal theory demands that we ask. Where does the principle begin? And where does it end? Because once you establish that a mechanism designed to ensure representation is itself discriminatory, you have changed the argument. You are no longer merely debating who occupies two seats on an athletic association’s board. You are debating whether an institution may deliberately create pathways for historically underrepresented communities to have a voice in the rooms where institutional decisions are made.
That is a question about power.
Ah, the white man’s burden.
This is where I return to benevolence. What happens when the language of protecting people becomes the language used to determine who gets protected, from what, and by whom? When does the language of protecting people from discrimination become a mechanism for determining who gets to define discrimination — and therefore who gets to structure institutional power?
Wake up. This is not the time to sleep. Pay attention to the principle being established. The danger is not whether an institution calls itself woke or unwoke. The question is whether the language of neutrality can be used to dismantle mechanisms that were created to make representation possible. Because equality is not simply the absence of a racial classification.
The question is also who has the power to define equality, who has a seat when that definition is made, and whose presence can be declared unnecessary in the name of protecting everyone else.
You who?
Who decided?
And who gets to decide next?
Contact Health and Environmental Reporter LaTasha Boyd Jones at tashaj@indyrecorder.com or follow her on social media @iamtashajones.
LaTASHA BOYD JONES
Tasha Jones is a poet, writer, researcher, and educator whose work explores language as a tool for liberation and resistance. She hosts In the Beginning: The Spoken Word Podcast, the #1 spoken word podcast on Apple and Spotify. Tasha is also the Poems & Parables Literary Journal editor and is currently writing Pyramids. Plantations. Projects. Penitentiaries. You can follow her on social media: @iamtashajones, @itbspokenwordpod, and @poemsandparables.
