This week ESPN talk show host Bomani Jones had a conversation with GQ magazine interviewer Eve Ewing about America's struggle to reconcile a love of sports with its hatred for blacks. Ewing set the stage for the discussion by pointing out that "the sports arena is the place where America has been trained for centuries to fear and loathe the black body."
Jones and Ewing, a sociologist of education at the University of Chicago, struck up a great rapport as fellow race baiters. She also wrote that black athletes remind America of its sins and that makes whites uncomfortable. Thus Jones, who appears on ESPN television and radio ...
"... is really having a conversation about white supremacy, about white America’s struggle to reconcile its love of sports institutions with its hatred of black people."
Jones tells Ewing it's impossible to have an American sports institution that is not racist, asking: "Can a sporting institution truly sell itself with the notion that black people are representative of the goodness within it? … Can blackness be the representation of what is good?”
"Or of heroism," Ewing shot back in response.
Jones says the realm of sports is "really the one place that black people have an advantage at what is the hardest thing to do. And that makes everything really tricky because then you need them. And then what do you do if you need them?”
Inferring the controversy that ensued earlier this year when Fox News' Laura Ingraham chided LeBron James to "shut up and dribble," Ewing said whites think that the blacks who have made it "should therefore shut up."
Ewing brought the interview round to the controversy surrounding sports teams' nicknames. Jones is an opponent of the Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo logo that's been outlawed by MLB after this season. To make a point, he once appeared on the Mike and Mike program and wore a baseball shirt bearing the word "Caucasians" in the Indians' team logo. Ewing said some white people got angry about that, but "the rules of the game are, ‘white people get to make fun of Native Americans; nobody gets to make fun of white people.’”
During the interview, Jones also took a shot at people who oppose the NFL anthem protests, wrongly assuming people only paid attention to the national anthem when football players began kneeling:
“If the issue is the anthem, why are you booing guys who are kneeling before the anthem? If you never paid attention [to the anthem] before, why are you doing these things? Why is the league dressing this stuff up in this way? Why do all of these things happen? What are the differences?”
ESPN is launching the new television program High Noon on June 4, featuring Jones and Pablo Torre. Ewing pointed out that Torre is every bit the social justice warrior that Jones is, suggesting the program may be top-heavy on social justice issues:
"Torre has also commented publicly about sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia in sports, and the ways that gender discrimination interact with racism."
Torre has also commented that President Donald Trump "uses sports as this political cudgel.”
