By Rashad Christian
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
With racial tensions sparked by police brutality and systemic racism running high across the nation, a new Towson University athlete-run group is stepping up to combat social injustice.
TUAIDE (Towson Athletes for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity) was formed in late September by athletes on the Towson Volleyball team with sophomore and defensive specialist Asia Goins helping lead the effort.
“George Floyd had just been shot and killed, adding onto another act of police brutality within our country,”said Goins, referring to the incident in Minneapolis last May in which Floyd was killed by police. “Many of my teammates followed the news about this, which raised conversation amongst our team.”
According to the group’s Twitter feed, the goal of TUAIDE is to create a “platform to provide resources, awareness, and education about social injustice for sustainable change.”
The group plans to use the power of social media to educate the public on different topics, which will cycle every month. The month of October is National Hispanic Heritage Month and TUAIDE plans to interview some Towson University athletes about their background and stories.
The group will have a dedicated page on the Towson Tigers official athletics website that will house “different articles, videos, and educational pieces for our topics as well.”
“One program we currently have in the works is with OIIE (Office of Inclusion & Institutional Equity) that will be a dialogue training offered to student-athletes,” Goins said.
The program in partnership with the OIIE will teach student-athletes how to handle difficult conversations about social injustices, systemic racism, and discrimination. There is hope for TUAIDE to possibly have speakers and virtual events in the future to further its reach.
There’s always a worry about how powerful a student voice can be. However, Davon Robb, co-chair to TUAIDE and the assistant athletic director for facilities and event management at Towson, said college athletes, in particular, can raise awareness about systemic inequality.
“I believe that anybody has a loud enough voice to create lasting change,” Robb said. “The only difference is that student-athletes have a larger platform than most college students.”
This sentiment from Robb becomes more substantial when you consider that the Towson volleyball team went 29-3 over its last season, including a flawless record in league play. To top it all off, the team took home the Colonial Athletic Association championship and won a trip to the NCAA tournament, where it beat American University in the first round. Safe to say, they have an audience, boasting over 2,500 followers on Instagram alone.
“As an athlete, you are given multiple platforms to speak on and reach people that some don’t have [the same] access to,” Goins said. “With the help of student-athletes igniting needed conversation, it does allow us to unify other people within our Towson community.”
Robb sees no major differences, besides, when it comes to “regular” students and student-athletes. Each has a similar duty to fight injustice.
“Student-athletes are men, women, Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, students and so much more,” Robb said. “Their identity isn’t based in their sport. It’s based in who they are as human beings.”
Unity in the Towson community is a common theme across all the goals for TUAIDE. Goins voiced several hopes for the group, including getting involved with other communities outside of Towson.
TUAIDE isn’t the first collegiate inclusion-based group working to combat social injustice and discrimination in Maryland.
The University of Maryland — Baltimore’s School of Social Work has one too. The Anti-Oppression Work Group (AOWG) aims to advance social justice principles by making policy recommendations and ensuring the curriculum critically engages and challenges all students, within the UMB community.
The group has held events, like voting panels, in hopes of creating change in their community.
“We are working to organize the student body to be critical of the social work curriculum and challenge university contracts with Maryland Corrections Enterprise,” a representative of AOWG said in an email. “Decolonize the way we think about therapy, medical/healing professions, and research practices.”
The grandiose plans of the AOWG are brought to fruition through the help of about 200 students on its list-service along with five current social work students that co-facilitate the organization.
The AOWG has been very proactive since its 2014 inception. The group has helped usher in a mandatory “structural anti-oppression” class for incoming freshman at UMB. The group submitted a letter this past summer to the Council for Social Work Education (CSWE) advocating for the inclusion of “anti-racist pedagogy.”
While TUAIDE doesn’t draw inspiration from any group in particular, it hopes to learn from similar groups.
“We are aware that other groups at different universities are creating similar groups,” Goins said. “We hope that they are successful.”
Goins says that, in the short term, TUAIDE plans to reach out to not only Towson athletics but all of the Towson community with its messages of inclusivity and intolerance to social injustice.
“We want everyone to have a true understanding and continue to have conversations about the social injustices and racism that minorities are facing in our country,” Goins said.