With racism in hockey coming to the forefront this week after Calgary coach Bill Peters admitted to using the N-word while coaching Akim Aliu with Rockford, several players have started speaking out about their experiences. One of them is Georges Laraque, whose parents immigrated to Canada from Haiti before he was born. Laraque's experiences were far from pleasant, to put it mildly.
“In my minor hockey, obviously, when I was a kid, back then — we're talking about 30 years ago — I experienced tons of racism coming from parents, from coaches, from everyone,” Laraque told Sportsnet. “But I was a kid, and it was different. As a kid, there's nothing you can do. You're not a man yet, you can't defend yourself. You're alone.”
"My parents didn't support me in hockey because they hated that racism and they thought it was going to affect me,” he said. “There was so much racism when I was a kid that they refused to go to games because they were going to fight in the stands — so they said, ‘If you want to go, if you want to play, well you're going to be on your own.' … And when I was there alone, no parents, parents were shouting names at me, the N-word at me — so much that if you came to a game, you would think that the N-word was my name. It was insane.
“It was coming from coaches, from the other team. All my years, that's what I had to fight through.”
Laraque fought through it and eventually carved his path to the NHL. He told Sportsnet his experiences weren't easy, but they were far from unique.
"All of us that made it to the NHL had to endure all kinds of racist comments to be there. We know that,” Laraque said “Back in the day it was harder, and more and more that you go on and on in the years, it's getting better. But we all had to go through bad stuff. … The guys that made it to the NHL today, we all have thick skin and we endured stuff to play the sport that we love, to eventually be role models, knowing what it takes to be there and how hard it was.
“It takes courage, if you're a minority, to play in the NHL, because we know it's not easy.”
Source: Sportsnet
