For many in the Sunshine State, Florida isn’t a particularly sunny place for many of its citizens as Governor DeSantis’ “war on woke” has aggressively implemented policies attacking LGBTQ+ rights, higher education, and black history, culture and studies
The climate of the state has become fertile ground for normalized bigotry the recent shooting of black residents at a Dollar General in Jacksonville and Neo-Nazi groups openly expressing their venom without any condemnation from the governor.
In the midst of this chaos, teachers are walking a delicate tightrope that they have never experienced previously regarding what they can and cannot teach. One of those teachers is 2004 Olympic Gold medalist, Moushaumi Robinson.
After winning the 4x100m relay in Athens, Robinson became an educator and taught high school for the Orange County Public School System in Florida for over a decade and also became a yoga instructor.
Over the course of her teaching career, Robinson witnessed firsthand the racial inequities in the system and fought to rectify them along with providing the services to those students who needed it the most.
In 2017, she spoke at a school board meeting about the issue of suicides among students, which included one of her own students.
As a result, the school board implemented a five-year plan to include social-emotional learning into the curriculum.
After becoming a certified teacher for a gifted program that typically requires seven state tests to complete, she found out that Orange County only provided two. Teaching at a school with a 70% minority population, the tests were culturally biased toward the white male IQ.
She ultimately quit her role as a program-certified teacher and took action to address this issue.
“From third grade on they use the program to segregate the program,” she said. “The superintendent took a look into what was being talked about. When I sent an email and I spoke to it, the school board chair forwarded it to the chief of staff and checked to see how to expand the program.”
The school board program eventually provided the rest of the tests to secure federal funding.
During the Pandemic, Robinson discovered that many of her students didn’t have access to the laptops and hotspots needed for virtual learning from home. In yet another lengthy email to the district, she unabashedly addressed the idea of forcing kids back into school at the height of the pandemic when the death toll was rising and had a disproportionate effect on the black community.
“In the email, I spoke to the problem, that if they didn’t offer laptops or hotspots to all their students, you would be committing genocide given the high death rate of students,” she said.
Her email did the trick.
“They decided to take all the listeners or people who wanted to speak. Superintendent Barbara Jenkins was on her way to talk to me and said we got all the laptops and we are going to get those out. We are just waiting on the hotspots.”
It is that spirit of advocacy combined with her experience as an Olympian that led to additional opportunities to make an impact.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Robinson became an instrumental force behind the creation of the United States Olympic/Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Racial and Social Justice Council, a collection of current and former Olympians, scholars, and advocates aimed at advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion for Team USA.
In 2022, disgusted by the current state of educational affairs, she retired and is now teaching math and tutoring at a private school. She also helps families understand the 504 plans they can take for their student who has disabilities.
The current state of education in Florida angers Robinson, and she isn’t the least bit shy in placing blame on one person.
“It is one of the most unpatriotic things I have ever seen in my 42 years of life,” she said. “To use the education system to now breed separatism and isolation and that is what Ron DeSantis is trying to do.”
She adds that this all could be potentially rooted in a new sense of perspective amongst the younger generations to try to write the wrongs of the past.
“He started seeing unity and being a part of this American public, ” she said. “He saw white children question the atrocities coming against minorities. He wants to have an America where it is a white male patriarchy.”
The sports community has been largely mute on the current assaults on black history, a far cry from the mass movement during the summer of 2020 when athletes at all levels marched, spoke up and advocated for long overdue systemic change.
The usual reasons for such an absence of voices from athletes are money, status, and fear, among others. Robinson knows better than most as an Olympian, where the cost of speaking up can be much greater than for other professional athletes.
(Photo credit: Moushaumi Robinson)
Olympians, outside of the select few who receive lucrative endorsements, essentially live paycheck to paycheck and make enormous sacrifices to live out their dreams. After the games, many athletes have trouble finding employment and many struggle with mental health issues as a result of those kinds of vulnerabilities.
For black athletes and Olympians, the pressure can be even greater.
In many ways, they have to practice the double consciousness of WEB DuBois where they try to live out the expectations put forward by American society while staying true to themselves.
The very history that is currently being whitewashed would teach about athletes such as Rose Robinson, a track runner, activist, and pacifist who famously went on a hunger strike to protest US militarism. She also refused to be a pawn for the United States in the 1950s in meets against the Soviet Union to create a false impression of American exceptionalism during the height of Jim Crow.
The 1968 Olympic protest featuring Tommie Smith and John Carlos followed suit of shining light on grave injustices while achieving great heights, the same as true with the so-called “forgotten protest” at the 1972 Olympics by Wayne Collett and Vincent Matthews.
Black Olympians typically bring home the bulk of the Summer Games hardware earned and given that labor plus the current circumstances surrounding race gives Robinson the motivation to advocate for black Olympians, particularly black women, to not compete in the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, given that black women are very much the prime movers and shakers of social change.
“The black women are the strong focal point of bringing in the medals,” she said. “We have a lot of reasons to stay. It will only be worse to go to Paris and not address the core issues.”
While the expectation is that most athletes will go, Robinson does provide some guidance.
“If we don’t speak about what is going on in the United States, we are continuing a cycle that is going to be hard and break or change for a country that is not showing up for its people in earnest.”
All this proves Robinson’s point that it starts with education.
To her patriotism is about telling the truth about America in order for it to be better. She has lived through the best and worst of this country and her message is more unifying than anything most politicians put forward.
“America is a huge blanket that is woven together with different and unique threads and fabrics. If any one of them is torn or tattered, the entire blanket will fall apart,” she said.
