Lane Kiffin and America’s Blindness to Racism in Sports

The polarizing coach’s comments about LSU and Ole Miss reveal how some white people have no problem overlooking discrimination until it inconveniences them.

By Carron J. Phillips

Lane Kiffin has finally seen the forest for the trees, despite having always lived in the woods.

The new head football coach at Louisiana State University and former head coach at the University of Mississippi, recently stirred controversy by sharing with Vanity Fair why he left one SEC program for another. The deciding factors had to do with money and Ole Miss’ inability to distance itself from the racist symbols connected to the school.

Photo by Jessica Tan on Unsplash

“Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,” he claimed top Black recruits would tell him. “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.”

Apparently, a white man whose entire career has been dedicated to a sport predominantly played by Black athletes was apparently stunned by the realization that racism in the Deep South plays a role in recruiting. However, what makes Kiffin’s revelation so comically absurd is that he’s also spent time coaching in states like Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee.

“I just hope [my comment] comes across respectful to Ole Miss…. There are some things that I’m saying that are factual, they’re not shots,” he explained, as the author of the article went on to note that “the population of Baton Rouge is about 51% Black and 36% white; Oxford is about 66% white, 26% Black.”

Those percentages indicate that this conversation about race and sports in America was between two white men. A Black reporter would have pointed out how meaningless those demographic statistics are without context, as places like Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, and New Orleans prove that advantages enjoyed by residents in predominantly Black cities can still be diminished in red states.

Days later, after Kiffin’s comments stirred public debate, he apologized for stating what he had seemingly only recently come to understand — a truth that had been apparent for some time. It was the expected move for a man who earlier this year posted a picture of MAGA-inspired LSU-colored hats to social media that read “Make Baton Rouge Great Again.” He tagged President Donald Trump before deleting the post.

The notion of a white football coach elevating this topic at a time like this isn’t the problem. The issue is that this subject matter has been historically ignored when Black Americans address it. Additionally, if Kiffin was so bothered by the way things were in Mississippi, the state’s highest-paid employee could have used his influence to change things. But he didn’t.

You can’t pat yourself on the back for leaving a place like Ole Miss because you’re supposedly “above” their heritage, when your new school chose its nickname based on a Confederate unit during the Civil War. LSU students, players, faculty, and alumni, the Tigers, are not represented by a ferocious feline but by a group of racists who participated in a war against their own country because they wanted to keep owning Black people. “The name Louisiana Tigers evolved from a volunteer company nicknamed the Tiger Rifles, which was organized in New Orleans. This company became a part of a battalion commanded by Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat and was the only company of that battalion to wear the colorful Zouave uniform. In time, Wheat’s entire battalion was called the Tigers,” reads LSU’s athletic department’s website.

Given the Supreme Court’s ruling that has facilitated voter suppression and allowed states to undermine the Voting Rights Act, people have started asking whether Black college athletes should stop playing at schools where the gerrymandering is taking place. Alabama added itself to the list of Southern states speeding up the adoption of congressional maps to squeeze out Black districts, and the state where Kiffin lives is on the verge of putting Confederate monuments back on display in public parks.

The intersection of sports and politics is proving that the racist desire for Black bodies but not Black minds is alive and well.

“It gives us a chance to look at all of them, if we get some reprieve from the courts, so we’ll see how that goes and certainly hope that the Supreme Court will overturn Amendment 14,” Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter recently said at a press conference.

“All we need now is for the courts to overturn 14 and we can look at a new election,” he added.

The overt racism that players, recruits, parents, family members, coaches, and fans have to stomach when indulging in sports is just the price of admission of being Black in America. From million-dollar settlements at a school like Iowa over racial discrimination in their football program, to athletes of color in the state of Florida who still had to suit up and entertain fans after the George Zimmerman verdict, to players being forced to stay on the field after games at the University of Texas while a song with racist lyrics like “The Eyes of Texas” is sung — Kiffin’s awakening and the discussion over where Black players should play is just the latest chapter in the long history of enduring prejudice and intolerance.

“The idea that only Black athletes are responsible for dealing with racism and using their platform to address racism in a sports media is just naïve,” LA Times Columnist LZ Granderson recently explained on CNN. “It actually embodies the very reasons why we keep having these race conversations to begin with because they characterize it as a Black person’s problem as opposed to an American problem.”

A decade ago, Colin Kaepernick revealed the measures that America would take to punish those who disrupt sports by raising racial awareness. Ten years later, Lane Kiffin ostensibly is just now realizing that the South is unkind to Black people. Not only has this country learned nothing, it’s chosen to be obtuse.

Carron J. Phillips is an award-winning journalist who writes on race, culture, social issues, politics, and sports. He hails from Saginaw, Michigan, and is a graduate of Morehouse College and Syracuse University. Follow his personal Substack to keep up with more of his work.

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