TONI SMITH & DEIDRA CHAPMAN–

TONI SMITH & DEIDRA CHAPMAN– women of conscience: The incident happened Sunday, here in Charlottesville, Virginia, but it only made our local paper, The Daily Progress today. At the home game here Sunday, freshman center Deidra Smith of the University of Virginia women’s basketball squad refused to turn to face the flag during the playing of the national anthem.
She became the second female college athlete to undertake this small act of free expression, joining 21-year-old senior Toni Smith of Manhattanville College, some 40 miles north of NYC, who’s been doing it for some weeks now.
Both women seem to be feisty, strong individuals. But Smith, who says her protest is motivated mainly by her disgust at the growing economic inequities in this country but also in protest against the plans for war, has gotten a lot of support from her team-mates and her college. Feb. 25th, her team captain Latasha Carlos told an International Herald Tribune reporter, “We’ve been to a lot of places in the last few weeks, and Toni has been taunted, and people have said nasty things to her. I couldn’t have taken it. I probably would have cried. But Toni was poised and so composed. I’m so proud of her.”
Manhattanville includes on its Web site a statement from President Richard A. Berman supporting Smith’s protest. It reads in part: “It is irrelevant whether I, or anyone else, agree or disagree with Ms. Smith’s position. Her right of expression is fundamental.”
Chatman’s situation could not be more different. Her coach, Debbie Ryan, said she had not even noticed Chatman’s protest Sunday. But once Ryan and U.Va. athletic director Craig Littlepage found out about it, Littlepage “had a talk with her” on Monday, after which Chatman came out with a statement saying she had not intended to offend anyone and would thenceforth join her team-mates in facing the flag.
(What if the team-mates as a group– as a team— went to Littlepage and told him that they totally supported Chatman’s right to express herself freely regarding facing or not facing the flag?)
U.Va. President John Casteen has maintained his very frequent delphic silence on this issue. So altogether the 18-year-old Chatman didn’t seem to get a lot of support for the idea of freely expressing her conscience regarding the flag.
The Washington Post, which reported about Chatman’s actions in both its Monday and Tuesday editions, reported that right after Sunday’s game Chatman said that her actions were prompted by her opposition to a possible war in Iraq. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in Richmond, Calif., she said her mother does not acknowledge the flag and raised her children to believe they could choose not to as well.
I guess the mother had not had the benefit of a University of Virginia “education”.
I should note, in the interest of full disclosure, that I have a senior research fellowship position with U.Va.’s Institute for Practical Ethics. They pay me nothing for this– indeed, I’ve discovered that by skimming “institutional overhead” out of a research grant I got last year, I have ended up paying U.Va. for this privilege. (Though okay, they do “give” me library privileges, and webhosting/email services, so I guess it comes out somewhere in the wash.)
So maybe a discussion of this facing-the-flag issue is something the Institute for Practical Ethics ought to investigate a little more closely?