After his own experiences with racism, Zac Diles supports K-State football boycott
The Kansas State football team had just defeated Texas on a last-second field goal at Bill Snyder Family Stadium, and Zac Diles was ready to celebrate.
Manhattan was rocking like only a college town can after the home team pulls off a thrilling victory against a top-five opponent. Fans poured onto the field, then flocked to the nearby Aggieville bar district and kept the good times going after hours at house parties. It was a memorable Saturday night in 2006.
Diles, a former K-State linebacker who went on to play eight years in the NFL, decided to join in on the fun with some of his teammates, expecting to receive a hero’s welcome at the first party they came across.
Instead, the Black football player from Los Angeles was refused entry because of his skin color.
“That was the first time it really registered with me that I was a long way from home,” Diles said in a phone interview. “I remember standing there and thinking, ‘We go to the same college. You were just cheering for me. What does this mean? What does that say about you as a person, that you could cheer for me and my homeboys a few hours ago and now we can’t even fellowship because of what we look like? We represent the same university. What does that say about you as an individual?’ That kind of racism and backlash was alarming. I mean, what the (expletive)? What am I to you?”
It’s a painful memory for Diles, but he was motivated to share it this week after he watched current K-State football players decide to boycott all team activities in response to an insensitive tweet about George Floyd from one of their fellow students. They vowed to not play until K-State’s administration created a new policy against racism on their campus.
Diles is one of the most prominent former K-State players to throw his support behind the Wildcats as they demand change. Last week, he sent out a tweet saying he stood with the team, particularly outspoken sophomore receiver Joshua Youngblood, for standing up to racism at his alma mater. He implored K-State players to “keep letting your voices be heard” because he wasn’t “tolerating it anymore.”
He was happy to do so. In some ways, he feels like a proud parent from afar in Los Angeles, where he now works as a Realtor.
“What they are doing is dope, because these kids have a platform,” Diles said. “If this stuff was going on in 2006, when there was no Twitter or Instagram and the only thing we had was MySpace, they wouldn’t have a voice. We didn’t. Now, these kids are fearless. Their generation is using their platform and they have sparked some real change.”
Relating to their situation
Many, including K-State football coach Chris Klieman, have supported the Wildcats even as they have essentially gone on strike.
The athletic department says it will start promoting Black Lives Matter at its home games and work to create a more inclusive atmosphere across all sports. University president Richard Myers announced that the school will try to give the players exactly what they are asking for, in the form of an 11-step plan that will “stop hate at K-State and combat racism on our campuses.”
But not everyone is a fan of the football team’s protest. Some players have become the targets of hate speech.
That is one reason why Diles feels like he should be supportive.
“I don’t care at all if they don’t play,” Diles said. “Unless something happens, why should they play?”
When Diles first saw the insensitive tweet that sparked outrage across the K-State community, he was just as angry as some of the Wildcats’ current student-athletes.
The tweet was posted by Jaden McNeil, a white K-State junior who has made news in the past for spreading bigotry across campus. It read: “Congratulations to George Floyd on being drug free for an entire month!”
Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man killed under the knee of a white police officer on a Minneapolis street in May. His death has sparked protests against police brutality and led to a national movement against racism.
Many have called for the student’s expulsion. On Wednesday, Myers made it clear that the message was “disrespectful and abhorrent,” but he said it would be unlawful for K-State to remove him from campus.
“Everyone is hiding behind freedom of speech, but he is making a mockery of George Floyd,” Diles said. “That is so insensitive with everything else that is going on the world right now. People are out here sparking a much-needed change, and that wasn’t the time nor the place to spit that kind of rhetoric. It’s stupid as (expletive). When I found out the kid went to K-State, I understood the players’ reaction to it.”
Diles can relate to the way Black football players can sometimes feel out of place on K-State’s campus.
He chose the Wildcats after two years of junior college because he watched them whip Southern California in back-to-back seasons and demolish Oklahoma 35-7 for the Big 12 championship in 2003. He fell in love with their style of play and was over the moon with excitement when Bill Snyder reached out to him late in his recruitment process after a coaching change derailed his original plans to play for Utah.
“That is why I go so hard for Kansas State,” he said.
Few players were more motivated to wear purple than Diles. He made 149 tackles during his two seasons in Manhattan and remains a huge fan of the Wildcats. But his first few months on campus were a bit strange. Unlike his California home, he was surrounded mostly by white students.
“You have to understand these are African-American kids from Florida and Texas and Georgia. Now they’re going to Kansas, which is white America in the Midwest. There aren’t many of us out there,” Diles said. “You’re surrounded by a lot of people who don’t look like us, people who are from Kansas that graduated from a small high school and have never met a Black person.”
“When I was a student there, the only African-American students on campus were athletes. There were maybe 10 regular Black students on campus. So to have one of your peers saying (stuff) like this makes it really uncomfortable to be around. You’re like, ‘Wait a minute. I chose to come represent this university and this is what is going on?’ That can’t be easy.”
Dealing with racism
Diles has more stories.
He said he heard racial slurs from fans at seemingly every road game and was always confused by that, because half the players on the home team were also Black athletes. Later in life, he said, he was told by police officers to exit his car at gunpoint in Los Angeles for what should have been a routine traffic stop.
Instead of wondering if he could talk his way out of a ticket, he feared for his life.
As an NFL veteran who now appears on the VH-1 show “Love & Listings,” he eventually learned to develop a thick skin and not allow those moments to bring him down. But that is more difficult for a college athlete to pull off.
Had Twitter been around 14 years ago, he isn’t sure he would have found the courage to take a public stand against racism when he encountered it as a college senior.
He may not know how he would have handled things back then, but he hopes he would have been as fearless as K-State’s current football players.
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 12:25 PM with the headline "After his own experiences with racism, Zac Diles supports K-State football boycott."