#herb carnegie

"A long time ago, the NHL was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move."

The following is my submission to a movement to induct Herb Carnegie into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Please visit   https://www.hockeyfansforchange.org/herbcarnegie to sign the petition and write your own letter of recommendation. 

I was born into a hockey family, my fandom has been lifelong. From the time I could talk or think hockey has been a big part of my life, and I as continue to grow, learn, and understand more about the world we live in and it’s history, so to does my understanding of the great game evolve.

In my youth I played at Herb Carnegie arena for the Goulding Park Rangers, thus from my early teen years I was somewhat familiar with his story. It was around that time that I would include him when recreating legendary players in my NHL video games. Honestly, at the time I didn’t understand a lot about racism, and even less about how much the very institutions that raised me, namely Canada and hockey, have been shaped by it.

It should be beyond clear that the only things that kept Mr. Carnegie out of the NHL were the bigoted views of the league itself. Moreover, since the earliest days of the sport, hockey has been shaped and augmented by Black and Indigenous peoples as well as people of Colour. Most notably the Coloured Hockey League being credited with the creation of the slapshot and goalies leaving their feet were both years ahead of their time. Not only were these bigoted views that kept Mr. Carnegie out of the league hateful and racist, they were the in open defiance to the history of the game itself. Had the league been open to players of Colour, who knows how much greater its impact on the world would be. Considering the demographics of Toronto, having a prominent star player of Jamaican Canadian descent would undoubtedly impact generations to come. How much was robbed from Mr. Carnegie, from the BIPOC before and after him, from the game itself because of this one decision? If you can see it you can be it. Representation is so important.

Unfortunately, what’s done is done. The vile and hateful mistakes that have been made in the past cannot be changed. Those mistakes which set the sport back decades, that obscure it from its true history, and that whitewash it into a pale form of its true self continue to happen to this day. In part, this is because of the world in which we live, but undeniably another part of it stems from the decisions made by the hockey community itself. We cannot change the past, but we can change the way we look back on it, and what we do going forward.

Smallthoughts: Old School Tuesday … Herb Carnegie

was a Canadian ice hockey player. He was born in Toronto, Ontario to Jamaican parents. He played professional hockey at a time when there was racial discrimination in the NHL that prevented him from playing for the New York Rangers in the 1948-49 season. After his professional hockey career was over, he became a successful businessman working in the investment industry. In 1954, he founded one of…

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