About the Joe Mixon video
Two years is quite some time.
It’s enough time for a person to experience quite a bit of life. It’s enough time for someone to grow. But it is certainly not enough time to fully rid someone of their past, especially one as haunting as Joe Mixon’s history.
I watched the surveillance video of Mixon striking Amelia Molitor (the link redirects to the video, which contains graphic imagery and should not be viewed if you are triggered by any type of violence against women) for the first time on Friday. I was horrified two years ago when I heard he struck a woman at a restaurant I eat at often. I didn’t feel right saying whether he should’ve been kicked off the team immediately, because while domestic violence and violence against women becomes more of an issue by the day, I still stand by you are innocent until proven guilty.
Take a look at what literally just happened at Kansas this week with another promising young student-athlete.
But as the situation unfolded and was illustrated on my iPhone’s screen two years later, my first reaction was how on earth could Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops allow Mixon to stay on the team after watching what I just saw.
I was furious.
As someone who grew up in a house with four women, as someone who is a women’s and gender studies minor at the University of Oklahoma and as someone who deeply cares about gender equality and women’s rights, I was disturbed and frightened by the actions of Mr. Mixon.
I needed some time to collect my thoughts. I didn’t want to watch the video more than once, but I felt it was necessary to break it down and fully understand the situation as best as I could given my resources.
The action committed by Joe Mixon is deplorable. And I understand every bit of anger being thrown his way, Stoops’ way, Joe Castiglione’s way and David Boren’s way. Is OU cultivating an unsafe environment? Were they really letting the likes of Joe Mixon, Dorial Green-Beckham, Frank Shannon and now Dede Westbrook step foot on campus? Were they letting them get away with their choices and wear a jersey for a university I will one day be a graduate of and not think this sends a terrible message of “we care more about winning football games than we do women”?
It left me in an odd place, but I don’t think any of those men truly care more about football than women and their safety.
Boren and Castiglione showed me so much compassion a year ago when I went through one of the most traumatizing times of my life. Boren was side-by-side with students during the SAE scandal and has always been a listening ear to students who feel unsafe at the university whether they are Native American or identify within the LGBTQ community. So I do think they care about their students.
Boren didn’t have to call me when I was in the hospital after I was involved in a near-fatal car accident, but he did. I’m still surprised every time Castiglione addresses me by name and asks me how I’m doing. But he does.
I think these men care about their students. I think the handling of this messy situation, with all of its legal implications, was going to be a hard one for OU to ever spin positively.
What I do know is people are capable of change.
You can call Mixon a monster. His actions warrant it. What he did is sickening, and there’s no justification for it.
But let’s not forget that he is human.
I’m not saying you should forgive Mixon. Time will tell if this was one a time incident.
See, Mixon’s case is not one of domestic violence. It is violence against women, but it is not domestic. Mixon didn’t know Molitor and wasn’t dating her. He also has no history of hitting woman. But all it takes for the public is one time.
Mixon’s image will never be the same. He will never not be “the guy who hit a woman on his 18th birthday.”
But I do think there is a case to be made that Stoops kept him for more than football reasons.
If college football players were truly employees to the universities they make millions of dollars for, then student-athletes like Dorial Green-Beckham and Dede Westbrook wouldn’t make it past the background check and would’ve never made the OU media guide.
But these are students. They are student-athletes. And I guess in a perfect world, it’d be nice to assume Stoops kept Mixon around to help him grow as a young man and develop him into a better citizen, because these coaches do have an impact on these players off-the-field as well.
It’d be really nice if I could confirm that was the case.
Stoops has shown he is willing to give young men second chances. But his decisions are highly questionable. And there must be an effort toward making women feel safer on college campuses. Because at the rate at which Stoops is going, he’s doing the opposite of making progress. The progress we thought he was making when he brought in Brenda Tracy to speak with his football team. Was it a PR stunt? Maybe. Or was it the first of more efforts to come?
You can make a good case and probably persuade me that Mixon didn’t deserve a second chance at an institution like OU — the same university that banished an entire fraternity not too long ago without a second thought.
Every situation is different. Mixon wasn’t fostering racism to 18-year-old fraternity brothers for a century on OU’s campus. He was a man, an 18-year-old with the build of Adrian Peterson, who did something so despicable, he will likely never overcome it, because society has already deemed him a lost cause.
I hope for Mixon’s sake, he overcomes this one day. I hope he is molded by this situation, as well as OU’s administration, and they use it to make serious changes within themselves to promote a culture of zero tolerance for this behavior and that any violence against women, physical or vocal, is no longer an issue in college football.
We live in an America that throws people in prison at an alarming rate without much effort to rehabilitate them and their actions.
Change must come from within. But what are we doing to help these people? Are we a society that gives up on people at age 18? Do we believe people are guilty until proven innocent? Where are our ethical lines?
In no way is this an attempt to defends Mixon’s actions. I hate what he did. Simply put, it was disgusting. It’s not something I’d want my sister or daughter or any woman I know to ever go through. The sad reality is, this can happen anywhere. It’s not just an OU problem.
It’s a cultural problem.
As much as we can not stop lobbying for gender equality and putting an end to violence against women, we must not lose our ability to be compassionate individuals that are willing to forgive, so long as those people prove they are worthy of it.
