Litzi Duran
Contributing Writer
From growing up in Rochester, New York to an officiating career in the NFL, Maia Chaka has defied all boundaries by having “royalty in her DNA.”
Chaka visited Dominican for a keynote address was made possible by the Center for Cultural Liberation and all of its co-sponsors, which ranged from the athletics department to the Truth and Racial Healing Initiative at Dominican.
Chaka began her keynote address with the first verse in the song, “DNA,” written by Kendrick Lamar and produced by Mike WiLL Made-It. The lyrics she highlighted to the audience were, “I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA.”
Chaka’s Childhood
Throughout her talk, she highlighted how growing up in Rochester was a vital building block for the woman she is today.
Her father, Gerald Chaka, and her mother Terry Chaka, opened the first Afrocentric bookstore and art gallery in Rochester called Kitabu Kingdom.
Her father opened up this bookstore to make sure his children and the community had the opportunity to embrace their Black culture. He did this by collecting different artifacts from Africa in his bookstore, holding different events to celebrate Black culture, and celebrating Kwanzaa.
“It gave me self-confidence and self-pride so just having that exposure at a young age I think is one of the groundworks for me being successful and where I am now,” Chaka said.
The influence of her community was ingrained deeply within her as she did not look up to any celebrities as a source of inspiration – she always turned to those within her community to fuel her ambitions. One example of this is her community helped grow her love for basketball.
“The reason why I went to my high school was because the girls there were playing basketball like boys there and I wanted to play basketball like [the] boys,” she said. “There I noticed the upper classmen and I liked the way they dressed. They always had the nice sneakers, always had their hair nice, and I tried to emulate that.”
Her Early Football Officiating Career
Basketball was Chaka’s passion growing up as her dream was to become the first woman official in the NBA. She never played or officiated football before and taking on the challenge of becoming a football official began as a dare.
“Norfolk State is where it all started,” she said. “One of [the] jobs I was in charge of was signing officials or getting officials to work. I used to get the worst officials ever and I didn’t really know that at that time. I would heckle them all the time and one guy actually told me ‘If you think you could do it better than me, why don’t you try?’ and that just stuck in my head.”
Chaka began her teaching career in 2006 in a high school in Virginia. By 2007, she began her officiating career in the same place as well.
“So, when I started to officiate, it was after my first year of teaching. I had a co-worker who was teaching PE with me at the time, and he was the one who taught me how to officiate.”
Her colleague, Gerald Austin, was a white man. For Chaka, being offered this help gave her an opportunity to take a leap as she never expected someone would look past their differences to help her succeed.
“This was somebody who gave me an opportunity, that didn’t look anything like me, and I think that is something a lot of people can learn from also. I stepped outside the box and trusted a white male. A lot of people don’t want to trust people who don’t look like you,” Chaka said. “We were the complete opposites, but he saw something inside of me that I did not see inside myself, and I think that’s important.”
Chaka’s NFL Career
With Austin’s guidance, Chaka went from officiating high school football games straight to Division One college football, which is something few people have the ability to do.
By 2014, she made it into the NFL Officiating Development Program. After that she was given the opportunity to officiate for the Power Five football conference. By 2021, she was promoted to be an on-field official in the NFL.
However, her journey as an NFL official has not been easy. The different obstacles she has had to face are getting people to accept her presence on the field and to be seen as an equal.
“I had to be uncomfortable for a little bit to make them comfortable with me. If you are trying to break ground into something and you’re going to be the first person to do something, you have to be uncomfortable with it, that’s just life,” she said. “You have to be willing to know you will be hitting some bumps and bruises along the way know that you have to come out on top.”
She emphasizes that the key to making in an industry where there are people who do not look the same way is tolerance.
“If you cannot tolerate the difference in others, you will never be successful. You will always be considered to be hardheaded.”
She had to endure countless trips with all the other officials playing country music and mispronouncing her name. But she knew that if she wanted them to learn who she was, she had to learn how to interact with them as well.
Chaka’s Impact
Chaka hopes that her accomplishment as the first Black woman official can be a steppingstone to normalizing the success of women of color.
“It can no longer be a point where we are saying the first Black. There can no longer be a point where we are saying the first woman … it has to get to a point where it now becomes normal to have a diverse work force.”
Elise Ndoe-Gouag, a junior at Dominican and president of the Black Student Union, introduced Chaka before her address. She said Chaka’s accomplishments and words resonated with her, especially when Chaka assured everyone that they have loyalty and royalty inside their DNA.
“Her accomplishments are highly motivating to me. As a Black woman, I look to other trailblazers and ceiling breakers as inspiration. Though, the odds are stacked against us when they succeed, I succeed,” Ndoe-Gouag said.
Jacqueline Neri Arias, director of Center for Cultural Liberation, had been planning the keynote address began since spring semester 2021. Getting Chaka to speak on campus was an idea originally present by both Barrington Price, vice president of Student Success and Engagement, and Troy Tonsil, the assistant men’s basketball coach. The obstacle Arias had to face with this event was finding the right agent to book Chaka.
“This happens a lot as people start to get famous,” said Arias. “In the beginning we connected with a source agency that turned out to be illegitimate.”
It took two to three months for Arias to find the right agency to contact, The JB Agency. Chaka’s keynote address is one of the first in-person speaker event Dominican has had since the beginning of the pandemic. The event was dual modality where 35 participants came in person and 180 joined virtually, according to Arias.
