Below is a letter to Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney, who went out of this way to criticize Colin Kaepernick for “taking a knee” before the national anthem at the football games of the San Francisco 49ers to bring attention to the unconscionable and unending killings of Black men in the streets of our country.  And he did so by turning the life and legacy of Martin Luther King into Kaepernick’s adversary. Dr, Chenjerai Kumanyika, a member of the Clemson faculty, sent a letter to Swinney challenging this gambit. It is long, but well worth the time to read.

Dear Coach Swinney,

I’m a professor at Clemson. We’ve never met, but we work with many of the same students.

I listened to your comments on the issue of athlete protests on the field, and I wanted to share some of my impressions.

I winced when I heard a reporter ask you, a white man who makes somewhere in the area of $5 million a year from the physical labor and bodily risk of unpaid black athletes, if he would “discipline” them for making a political statement. Given that you and I both work on the former plantation of John C. Calhoun, the historical significance of the question is staggering and troubling.

To your credit, you said that you would not discipline a player for not standing during the national anthem, an act of defiance most recently started by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

You did acknowledge Kaepernick’s right to protest, and you encouraged other players to exercise those rights if they want to. I was glad to hear all of those things. For a moment, I felt even prouder than I already am to be a professor at Clemson.

But then you started talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Coach Swinney, I really wish you hadn’t done that.

First, let me say that I understand why you did this. Your statements reproduce a long history of folks, conservative and otherwise, positioning Dr. King as the palatable Christian alternative to unruly black protest.

What better way to silence the profit-threatening specter of black athlete protest than by offering the image of a civil rights activist who protested in a way that was more “professional” and “convenient” for everyone?

There’s only one problem. There was nothing convenient or palatable about Dr. King.

In his speech to the SCLC board in 1967, King argued that “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” He brought the civil rights struggle to the most public platforms at the most inconvenient times.

You did get one thing right about Dr. King when you mentioned, “He changed the world through education in the face of ignorance.”

On the topic of education, I wonder if you have ever read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It’s okay if you haven’t. Dr. King wrote many things, and it’s challenging to read them all. Although this letter was widely circulated in the 1960s, I find that less and less people are familiar with it today.

Perhaps after reading it, you’ll work with me to change that.

Like today’s protesters, Dr. King faced critics who claimed that they agreed with his ultimate aim of justice but simply disagreed with his methods. They said that they agreed – as you do – that citizens have the right to protest, but they felt that there was an appropriate time and place for it. Your statements encouraged athletes to keep their protest off the field. Dr. King’s critics didn’t say that his methods were “wrong.”

Instead, in the letter, Dr. King reminds us that his critics called his tactics “unwise and untimely.”

Dr. King began his response by reminding his critics of why he was in Birmingham. He said, “I’m here because there is injustice here.”

Coach, you may be thinking that Dr. King was in Birmingham in 1963 and here we are at Clemson, South Carolina, in 2016. You would be right to point out that our circumstances are very much different.

However, it may also be possible that your position as a well-paid and celebrated white coach has shielded you from some of the injustices that persist here and now.

The fact that our state leads the nation in women killed by their domestic partners is injustice. It is injustice that Clemson students, including most athletes, will face a post-job economy with record poverty and unemployment. The criminalization of the mentally ill and the exploitation of prison laborers in our state is injustice. The deaths of people like Walter Scott, Joyce Curnell, Ernest Smalley Jr. and Zachary Hammond at the hands of police officers were injustices.

The lack of answers and accountability about the death of Clemson student Tucker Hipps is an ongoing injustice. I could go on, but you get the point.

And there are also opportunities for change at our own university.

I want the best for our students that are also working athletes. But when I heard that we were building a $55 million dollar facility that won’t be available to most students, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other challenges at our university could be solved with $55 or even $30 million.

The insecure working conditions and low pay of our dedicated and excellent custodial, food service, and administrative staff is injustice. They work relentlessly everyday, with a positive attitude, running this university. But they also suffer a variety of ongoing problems and challenges.

The abysmally low levels of recruitment and especially retention of students and faculty of color at Clemson is injustice. In truth, the low recruitment of people of all ethnicities from the poorest parts of our state is injustice. The treatment of Clemson’s vulnerable international graduate students is injustice. The lack of a day care center is injustice. The fact that our most recognizable building bears the name of the white supremacist terrorist Ben Tillman is injustice. It is injustice when students protest these conditions and they are arrested, their reputations tarnished, and their careers threatened.

In the face of the injustices in his own time, Dr. King called for direct action, not press conferences.

He and those that fought with him brought the struggle to buses, games, counters, workplaces and other places that were deeply inconvenient and often illegal. Dr. King points out that none of these direct action efforts were “well timed” in the eyes of his vocally supportive but privileged and paternalistic critics.

Coach Swinney, based on your statements, I think that maybe you would not have liked Dr. King if you had known him.

Dr. King worked closely with Jackie Robinson, whose presence and success on the field was a protest. But his relationship with Dr. King became closer when he rejected the idea that his individual success was enough and that he should only engage with docile forms of protest that didn’t inconvenience anybody.

Dr. King also came to be friends with Muhammad Ali, who used his platform in the most confrontational ways to stand up against the Vietnam War. When people criticized Dr. King’s own stance against the war, he quoted Ali saying, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all — black and brown and poor — victims of the same system of oppression.”

As Dave Zirin reminded us in an article in The Nation, the two men also appeared together at a fair housing rally in Ali’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

You mentioned that you felt that Colin Kaepernick’s protest was divisive. Dr. King’s critics also called for unity and claimed that protesters in Birmingham were raising tensions.

Dr. King reminded these critics that “Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”

People who are fighting for civil rights are tired of hearing that we’re divisive. And we’re tired of calls for unity that are really calls for silence and accommodation. Rather than accepting the false and deceptive claim that our tactics are working against unity, I would ask you instead: What terms of unity would you have us accept?

One particularly confusing part of Dr. King’s letter for you to read might be the section where he talks about his disappointment in what he calls the “The Negro’s great stumbling block.”

Coach Swinney, I know that you are not racist and that you probably hate the Ku Klux Klan. I’m also not a fan. However, in the letter, Dr. King writes that he had come to feel that the Klan was not the greatest obstacle to the advancement of black people. Instead, he discusses his disappointment in “the white moderate.”

I’m not sure if you would describe yourself as a white moderate, but you ended your speech by saying that you thought “Kaepernick’s intention was good” but his “method was not.”

Dr. King describes the white moderate as someone who says “”I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” In short, he describes the white moderate as someone who is “more concerned with order than justice.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

I think the most important and most challenging part of the letter for you to read is Dr. King’s comments on the church. Like you, Coach Swinney, Dr. King made his case on religious grounds. Only Dr. King arrived at different conclusions than you did.

To quote him, “There was a time when the church was very powerful — in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’”

It seems unlikely to me that Dr. King would encourage you to baptize student athletes on the field and then encourage them not to stand for what they believe in — on the field. Dr. King’s interpretation of his religion inspired him to challenge rather than acquiesce to people in power or profit in the face of injustice.

If after reading the letter, you find that you disagree with Dr. King on these matters, I think that’s fine. I actually think it can be a refreshing and important part of education to clarify your values.

If you do find that you disagree with Dr. King, as your comments indicate, please spare us the continued distortion of his legacy.

Sincerely,

Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika
Department of Communication
Clemson University

Happy Birthday Bruce and keep running, singing, dancing, guitaring, song writing, and being you!

Bruce’s “Born to Run” below is one of the iconic songs of Rock and Roll music. But his body of work includes many more, which speak to his genius. If growing up you had some ragged edges and experiences, or didn’t meet what other people’s expectations were for you, or just rebelled because it felt like the right thing to do, even if you had no idea why, it is hard not to really like the song’s lyrics, “But tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.”

And if you’re a bit older now and life’s curve balls have brushed you back and knocked you down a few times, those same lyrics, I would guess, still pick you up and put some bounce in your step.

Is there any way to explain the outrageous and provocative “Skittles” tweet by Donald Trump Jr. yesterday? “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

Was it misspeak? The words of someone unschooled in the art of politics? A campaign messenger going off-message? An overzealous son?

None of the above, in my opinion. This was calculated, planned, and cynical. And it wasn’t the first time that Trump Jr. has taken on the assignment of saying something that goes beyond the pale of human decency and the boundaries of the permissible in politics.

That it triggered an avalanche of media criticism around the country and world was no surprise to the ringleaders of Trump’s campaign. They assumed it would. But they also assumed that it would be music to the ears of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters.

In the remaining weeks of the election, we will hear and see more of this from Trump’s surrogates. They will — with rightwing talk radio and Fox News giving loud amplification — throw out rhetorical red meat to the meanest and most backward of Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump himself will strike a different posture and tone down his inflammatory side.

It is hoped in Trump’s camp that this division of labor will serve two purposes going into the home stretch.

One is to make Trump sound presidential, and thus electable. There are, after all, lots of voters, including Trump supporters, Trump-leaning voters, and undecideds, who wonder if he has the necessary temperament and experience to sit in the Oval Office. The other purpose — and it is here where the over-the-top rhetoric of his appointed firebrands comes into play — is to keep his most zealous and backward supporters in the game and revved up, while Trump himself pivots towards the mainstream of U.S. politics.

Whether such a strategy, resting on deception, duplicity, and demagoguery, will work is another matter. My guess is that it won’t. And I would be willing to stake an evening at a bar of your or my choice on it.

First, undoing the widespread perception that Donald Trump is a loose and dangerous cannon is easier said than done. Once a negative image becomes embedded in popular consciousness, it is difficult to dislodge. Especially if it’s the candidate’s own doing, as is the case with Trump. Out of his mouth has come a steady stream of hate, threats, taunts, insults, lies, and outlandish proposals. While it got him the nomination of the Republican Party and normalized to a degree racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and other forms of hate and division, it also fixed in the minds of millions that Trump is unstable, divisive, and dangerous — a powder keg who, if elected president, could erupt to calamitous effect. Shit sometimes sticks, and in this case, it won’t easily wash away.

Second, it isn’t easy for megalomaniacs, like Trump, to stay on message. His overweening sense of self and contempt for people, and especially for people of color, immigrants, and women gets in his way. Every time his enablers assure the public and Republican Party leaders that he is going to clean up his act, he goes wilding.

Third, the biggest social constituencies — labor, communities of color, and women, and many others — that educate and mobilize voters will not be fooled by the efforts to sanitize Trump. From the moment he announced his candidacy, this coalition understood that Trump was a real danger to everything that they hold sacred, and his end-game verbal gymnastics won’t change that.

Of course, it will still be a dog fight. But I strongly believe that despite many obstacles — the Republican Party’s painting of Hillary as dishonest and unlikable, the innumerable ways that sexism has burrowed into people’s thinking, and the inability of some who should know better to appreciate the larger dynamics of the moment — she and the people’s coalition that supports her will make history on November 8 and set the stage to move to higher ground.

According to some on social media, the election is a contest between neoliberalism on the one hand and the descent into fascism on the other. But this strikes me as wrongheaded for a number of reasons. But for this post, I will mention only one: Many of the underlying assumptions and practices of neoliberalism have been discredited.

So much so that many of the advocates and practitioners of that particular form of governance in the past have become its critics today. Hillary Clinton is one of them. She hasn’t jettisoned that mode of governance entirely, but by the same token she doesn’t embrace now some of its defining features such as fiscal austerity, de-regulated labor and financial markets, tax breaks to the wealthy, downsizing and privatization of the “welfare state,” to name a few.

Moreover the disenchantment with neoliberal policies extends broadly into the Democratic Party, especially its progressive and growing group of elected representatives, many of its caucuses and interest groups, and its multi-racial working class social base. No longer is it the Democratic Party’s incontestable “common sense.”

Finally, the attitudes and actions of millions of people – reflected in the the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, the scaling up of several mass movements, and innumerable public opinion polls – are another bellwether that suggests neoliberalism is neither the inevitable nor likely political mode of governance on the other side of Election Day, assuming, of course, Hillary and other Democrats down the ticket win.

To say otherwise, I would argue, misses the changing political dynamics of the present moment. It is also an implicit and negative, if unintended, critique of the power and influence of today’s working class and democratic movement. Admittedly, the present day, loosely constructed people’s movement (coalition is probably a better word) doesn’t yet possess the political and practical capacity to fundamentally transform social relations across the board, but it is nonetheless on an entirely different level than it was in the heyday of neoliberlism in the Reagan and (Bill) Clinton years.