Notre Dame Football Players Call For Expanded Cultural Curriculum

Sometimes we go looking for the moment, and sometimes the moment finds us. 

For Daelin Hayes, Notre Dame’s senior defensive end, Friday’s Juneteenth gathering and peaceful march through campus made it clear that he was ready to meet his moment. 

Shortly after noon on a 90-degree day in South Bend, Ind., Hayes took the microphone and began to speak. Even amid the stifling conditions, even while wearing a black T-shirt with the Black Lives Matter logo, Hayes stayed cool throughout.  

“I speak from my heart,” he told the crowd of 1,500 that had gathered on campus, one that included members of the Fighting Irish football team, university president Rev. John Jenkins and coaches from all 13 varsity sports. 

If not for a season-ending shoulder injury last September, Hayes would likely be back home in Michigan, preparing for his rookie season in the NFL. Instead, after being granted an injury redshirt, Hayes got engaged to be married and got involved in the surrounding community. 

He told the story of stopping in at the Robinson Community Learning Center last fall and asking how he could help. Soon, he and his fiancee, Jasmine Abass, were visiting Lincoln Elementary two days a week so they could work with fourth and fifth graders on conflict resolution. 

“When we walked into the building, the kids, the principal, the teachers, the janitors, they all looked at us shocked, as if we were some type of ideal that was not accessible to them,” Hayes said. “We’re right down the street. We’re right down the street from these little black and brown kids that need our leadership, that need our mentorship, that need our service, that need our love, our compassion.”

Hayes urged his teammates to become more involved with community outreach programs. Only by showing the way to future generations, he said, could they properly parlay the opportunities they’d been given. 

“Notre Dame cannot just be an ideal,” Hayes said. “It can’t be something that our community looks at and says, ‘Wow, that’s great, but it’s never going to be for me.’ To hell with that.” 

Like teammate Max Siegel, a junior offensive lineman from an Indianapolis suburb, Hayes called for a greater awareness of the Black condition among Notre Dame’s faculty and students. As the football program builds out its recently formed Unity Council, Hayes and Siegel said the entire campus could benefit from mandatory cultural competency classes for incoming freshmen. 

“There’s a harsh line of demarcation,” Hayes said. “It’s either, you’re racist or you’re not. Either you hate black people or you don’t. That’s not true. It’s much more complicated than that.”

Siegel recounted “disheartening stories” of Notre Dame professors going silent as “my own white peers bash minority focus retreats” in classroom discussions. He spoke of “various micro and macro aggressions that happen every single day on this campus” and cited a petition started by Black Notre Dame alumni that had gathered more than 10,000 signatures. 

This effort to combat systemic racism, Hayes said, must begin with the curriculum itself. Beyond that, he called for Notre Dame to diversify its perspective, leadership and power centers. 

“I would argue a majority of our campus, faculty and students included, are just not educated,” Hayes said. “They don’t know what they don’t know. Not to say that they wouldn’t do anything for you. No, that’s not it. You just don’t know what it means to be a Black man in America.”