Former OSU All-American still has hope for tomorrow
Yolanda Thomas has always told her players that her door is open. Need to talk?
Come on in.
As a soccer coach — now the girls director of coaching at the Tulsa Soccer Club — communication is key. But really, being open is her personality. She was that way as a kid in Sweden, then as an All-American at Oklahoma State when she was known as Yolanda Odenyo.
Still, she admits one topic of conversation always makes her feel a bit of dread. Race.
“I don't want to rip that band-aid off right now,” she will think when it comes up.
As the child of a black father and a white mother, she has first-hand knowledge about issues of race. She has endured racism. She has
experienced ugliness. But being stopped by the police when she isn't breaking any traffic laws or noticing people stare when she walks into a store is not something she talks about, even with those closest to her.
It takes too much energy.
“We don't sit around and think about it because it's second nature,” she said. “It's what you've had to learn. You adjust to survive. And in the most extreme cases, you adjust to not upset the majority. You adjust because you don't want the attention. You adjust to not be a burden on others.”
But those adjustments have become a burden on black people in America.
They are suffocating.
All of us have seen the video of George Floyd being suffocated on a street in Minneapolis, a police officer's knee pressed down on Floyd's neck, a final desperate plea coming from Floyd's mouth.
“Mama … I can't breathe.”
People of color in America understand that feeling of constraint, of constant and unending pressure, and they are letting the world know they are fed up with it. That has been the message underlying more than a week of rallies and protests across the country.
Yes, police brutality was the spark, but the outpouring of outrage is about more than one incident. It's the constant worry. It's the unrelenting microaggressions.
“They do tear your soul,” Thomas said.
She believes her husband, Phillip, associate pastor at World
Outreach Church in Tulsa, explained the situation perfectly. He was talking to a white friend and trying to illustrate why there has been so much anger in this moment.
“My kids,” he said, “if they come to me and they go, `Daddy, Daddy. Look at this. Look at it. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy,' and I don't listen? They go, `DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!'”
Thomas is encouraged by the outrage she is seeing from people who didn't seem to care much before about issues of racial inequity and social injustice. She doesn't enjoy seeing property damaged or businesses burned, but she hates the threat of harm that constantly hangs over every black person in America.
Thomas feels it when her husband is going to be the last one at the church at night. Several times as he's been locking up when police have
pulled in and asked him what he's doing.
Thomas feels at it when she looks at her children, especially her son. People say how cute he is now, but what will they say when he's no longer a toddler? Will they see him as a threat?
And Thomas feels it when she goes to her gym to workout before sunrise and the last exercise after the squats and snatches and bike sprints is a one-kilometer run. A short distance for her, but when she got to the door one morning recently, she stopped.
“Should I really run?” she thought. “I'm the only black person in the gym. I don't know people on this street. They don't know me. I'm new at the gym. It's still dark.”
She thought about running with someone.
“That way if a cop happens to drive by, I'm not alone and they can help explain why it is OK for me to be running
down the street in the dark.”
Thomas not only had those thoughts and fears, but she also wrote about them on Facebook last weekend. She said she doesn't normally share such things — it goes back to the drain that always seems to accompany conversations about race — but she had sensed a change in the discourse. She was seeing outrage about George Floyd's killing from friends who didn't normally post about social justice or racial issues, but she also noticed they didn't always seem to grasp the bigger picture.
“I felt compelled to say something,” she said.
Not to get sympathy but to offer insight.
“It made people cry,” she said. “I saw people, and they're like, `I never knew you had to deal with this.'
“I'm like, `Girl, please.'”
She chuckled. “But I also recognize, it should make them cry.”
Yolanda Thomas knows t alking about being black i n America will always be t ough, but recent days have encouraged her about t he good t hat can come f rom such dialogue.
“I recognize t he i mportance of also having conversations, uncomfortable conversations, with people of various backgrounds,” she said. “Having t hose conversations i s what's going t o t ear t he barriers down a l i t t l e bit and make strides.”
Her door has always been open, but her hopes have never been higher.