By Blondes Over Baghdad
ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Proving that she does not need a white ciscadet to tell her she’s free, Navy mascot Admiral Grace Chomper walked out of Navy-Marine Corps Stadium during halftime at the Army-Navy football game and never looked back.
“After years of speciesist behavior, I’d had enough,” Grace told Duffel Blog. “Every year, these entitled young men act like the only reason I’m chewing Bermuda grass and going to parties in Annapolis is because a rowdy teenager didn’t get a white knight complex that day. It’s insulting, quite frankly. I’ve always had the tools I needed to be free, and it doesn’t take a man for me to accomplish my goals and share my truth.”
Grace spoke to Duffel Blog from a farm outside of Portland, Oregon, where she plans to focus community advocacy work and eating intersectional textile art while her VA disability rating is processed.
“Even after years of equal opportunity and SHARP training, we see this kind of misstep again and again,” said Brookings Institute diversity scholar Demarq Q. Brown.
“West Point forces cadets into 387 hours of diversity training per year, and yet still, the result is a classist system where cadets view that some people, and some goats, are inherently better or worse than others and don’t deserve respect. These are the systems that we’ll have to dismantle if we want real change. People have gotten some systematic advantages over goats, and real change means acknowledging that privilege. These men perceive that they are freeing the goat, but really, they are enforcing their will on the goat as a way of reinforcing their cadet supremacy.”
Others have cited that the Naval Academy was a poor fit for Grace Chompers and her game day protest had little to do with the Army-Navy game tradition.