I couldn’t describe what “Game Recognize Game” actually was before I had attended it (seen it? witnessed it?). Nothing had changed when I left. That may rather be the point. I experienced discussion between Emory Douglas, the Minister for Culture for the Black Panther Party from ’67 until the party disbanded, and Dr. John Wesley Carlos, the famed Olympian who raised a gloved fist atop the podium with Tommie Smith at the 1986 Olympics in Mexico City, all moderated by Karléh Ashanta Wilson ’16, a record-breaking Yale athlete. So perhaps it was just that: a discussion.

The phrase “game recognize game” is an aphorism of alliance. I first encountered it when Tomashi Jackson, the MFA student who brought all the speakers together and is the reason this discussion even happened, would share articles about black artists, athletes, or activists on Facebook, captioned “game recognize game.” The title, then, makes perfect sense, as the discussion centered on the intersection between political action, art, and—most prominently—athleticism in recent black history (the earliest name that came up was Jesse Owens). This is always revelatory; like many Yale students who have sucked hard at the canonized teat of David Foster Wallace’s essays, in this case on sports and media, my understanding of celebrity athletes off the court or the pitch or wherever is an experience of phenomenal, near-heartbreaking boredom. Thus when an athlete such as Dr. Carlos pours forth—indeed, commandeers—a discussion, with passion and profundity, it is a new, moving, and delightful moment.

When asked about himself, Dr. Carlos spoke briefly about his childhood in Harlem and how he watched heroin corrupt the community. He spoke of watching Robin Hood on TV: “Any kid in any ghetto in the world would be impressed with his antics… I wanted to be the Robin Hood of Harlem… I felt it was necessary to do a Robin Hood move.” Very quickly, we arrived at the 1968 Olympics, and the raised fist, upon which the discussion centered. And with good reason: it is perhaps the most visually striking act of resistance in modern athleticism. The fist was a gesture always associated with the Black Power movement, but as Douglas pointed out, Dr. Carlos “gave it a world symbolism.”

Both Douglas and Dr. Carlos stressed the significance of “talking about it in the context of a moment”: in 1968, Dr. King was assassinated, there was the first Panther assassination, the Civil Rights Act passed, black students were being murdered on southern campuses, and white students had been murdered when they protested against Vietnam. In Mexico City, prior to the Olympics, hundreds of students were massacred by the government. Dr. Carlos pointed out that the death toll is to this day infamously apocryphal, with the numbers alleged to be in the hundreds but perhaps even over 2000. The moment on the podium had to come when it did.

And it was more than just a gloved fist. A cursory look at pictures shows that both Tommie Smith and Dr. Carlos are barefoot. Dr. Carlos told us that this too was a symbol, a recognition: as he recalls, “there were kids in the south running to school 10 miles with no shoes on their feet.” So too with the black sweatshirt he wore over the shirt he ran in: “I covered up the USA jersey with my black shirt because at that time I was ashamed of America.” And he spoke about the beads he wore around his neck, a detail scarcely noticed by the public: “I see stories, today, where people are putting nooses on trees. I put the beads on my neck because I knew there were still people in trouble, still people being lynched.”

The discussion moved from Dr. Carlos’s gesture to the gestures of a contemporary athlete, Marshawn Lynch. Lynch has famously been fined $225,000, chalked up over three separate occasions, for refusing to talk to media, which is a violation of his contract. In the past, when he has talked to media, he has said things like “I’m only here so I won’t get fined,” or more notably answered every question in an interview with a forlorn “yeah.” He has dodged nearly every question posed to him, except for one about heating pads in his cleats, breaking his silence to bring up a benefit for the inner-city youth out in Oakland, and his attempt to raise money for a youth center. Dr. Carlos observed that “this is Marshawn saying ‘ask me some questions about the players that didn’t make it, about problems with drugs, with money. The questions about the game don’t interest me.” Two days after the “yeah” interview, his team mates Richard Sherman and Doug Baldwin appeared with a cardboard cut-out of Baldwin from behind which he crouches and speaks.

“His teammates came to say ‘they can fine you, they can ridicule you, but we are here to support you,’” Dr. Carlos said. Game recognized game. Back at Yale, Wilson commented on the similarity of her position to Lynch’s: “When I break records here, I have to give interviews, and like Marshawn Lynch I hate these leading questions that force you to give the answers they want to hear.”

While much of the panel’s conversation was centered around the 1968 Olympics, there was a shift of focus in the Q&A, with many of the most challenging and serious questions coming, to my surprise, from high school students in the auditorium. Here was a chance for Douglas to speak, since many of the questions were directed to him. When asked about the role of women in the Black Panther Party, he was unmistakable about delineating them as the “backbone” of the Party. When asked about what young people can do to be activists, he mentioned the significance of college walk-outs, and how he had been talking to the DREAMers in Miami, a group who help raise awareness and support for the plight of undocumented college students in America. Of course, Beyonce’s “Formation” video did not escape mention: “in regard to the young people, that was a consciousness-raising level. That went all over the world. Was it revolutionary? No, but it was consciousness-raising.” It is unfortunate that there was not more time for Douglas to speak, not only on account of his eloquence on all current issues, but about his work in the Party; after all, in Stanley Nelson Jr.’s documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” (recently screened at Yale), many individuals testify to the fact that Douglas’s artwork was one of the most memorable and impactful aspects of the Party.

So, in light of all these impactful stories, why did I leave Game Recognize Game feeling confused, unsettled, and unable to articulate the point of the event? I ought to return to where I began: this is the point. As Chris Rock observed in his monologue at the Oscars a few nights ago, Hollywood movies about sport purport a science-fiction where white athletes are as good as black athletes. At Yale, I think a mental science-fiction may exist in a not-dissimilar fashion. Do we differentiate sufficiently between what it may mean to be an athlete at Yale and a black athlete at Yale? Consider the difference, of any and all kinds, between Wilson and anyone you might know on the heavyweight crew team. Consider Claudia Rankine’s essay within her lyric Citizen on Serena Williams. From which a rather lengthy quotation, which you can judge as unwarranted or not: “Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background.” Wilson, Dr. Carlos, Douglas, and, of course, Tomashi Jackson, engenderer of “Game Recognize Game,” have displayed not only how athletic acclaim, in all its different forms, is stratified in toxic and tragic ways through race, but what forms and strategies of negation, resilience, and resistance look like.

Such forms and strategies fiercely test our most human mettle. In the solemn and disquieting words of Dr. Carlos, when asked what young people today can do to advocate for equality and justice: “When I saw that there was such a negative response [to the ’68 Olympics], I knew that I had done the right thing. You have to make a commitment. Many people put their lives on the line, many people have lost their lives. If you’re committed about making positive change, you have to get over the fact that you may you lose your life. The ideals are greater than the time you get on this earth.”