QUESTION OF BLACKNESS
Opinion: New Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel doesn’t owe anyone an explanation about his Blackness
Mike McDaniel getting the Dolphins coaching job led to some questioning if he was indeed biracial as he says. McDaniel doesn’t owe an explanation.
Check out this story on usatoday.com: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/mike-freeman/2022/02/08/mike-mcdaniel-miami-dolphins-coach-black/6691026001/
In February for Black History Month, USA TODAY Sports is publishing the series 28 Black Stories in 28 Days. We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race two years ago.
When I saw that Mike McDaniel was hired as Miami Dolphins coach, and the scarily ugly racial twist the hire started to take on social media, the first person I thought of was my daughter.
The McDaniel hire, and subsequent conversations, focused on a central question: what is Black?
And it comes at a time in American history where race is everything. It’s always been everything but the influence of the white nationalist former President is still strong. He inspired a group of mostly white supremacists to storm the Capitol. Not coincidentally hate crimes have risen in recent years. In other words, the uglier parts of racism are making a comeback like the hockey-mask wearing Jason from Friday the 13th.
It’s impossible not to put the McDaniel story in this context.
As for my girl, she is a dream of a daughter: smart, funny, and a stunningly good athlete. My daughter, like McDaniel, is biracial, and she looks white. With straight, blondish hair and blue eyes. Her looks, combined with my dark Black skin, have led to some staggeringly racist moments when we’re in public, since apparently people don’t know how genetics work. Once, a white woman thought I was her babysitter. Another thought I was her driver. “Are you her chauffer?” she asked.
Just recently she was on a playdate with one of her friends. The friend was driven to it by her grandmother who when seeing me hug my daughter and say to her “have fun” had a horrified look on her face.
“Who are you?” the grandmother asked.
“I’m her father,” I said. “Who are you?”
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She awkwardly tried to laugh it off while I didn’t crack a smile. Again, racism is so strong in our society that it blinds people’s common sense and ability to comprehend what melanin is.
My daughter looks white but we often talk about about her Black ancestry, with her asking questions, making her own observations, and a back and forth, with my emphasis on her having pride in her Blackness. We talk race often and she will not be someone who passes: a light-skinned biracial person who can pass as white and does to avoid the stinging and destructive impact of racism.
Which brings me back to McDaniel.
After his imminent hiring was reported, there was a great deal of skepticism and, frankly, vitriol, centered on a 2021 interview in which McDaniel said his grandmother and father are Black. The insinuation, in some cases the direct accusation, was that McDaniel had spent much of his coaching career passing as a white man and didn’t experience the same career difficulties and racism that biracial or Black coaches do.
In other words, many people, including people I greatly respect, and mostly Black people, were basically saying McDaniel wasn’t Black enough. Or, in even worse cases, they were saying he needed to prove his Blackness. It is some of the most vile and disgraceful things I’ve seen on social media and that’s saying something.
There are even people questioning the compensatory picks the 49ers will receive from the league (two third-rounders) for developing a minority assistant coach under the Rooney Rule. The tin foil hat belief is that the 49ers are getting picks for someone who isn’t really Black.
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“I’ve never ever seen anyone in sports have to prove they were biracial, multi-cultural before,” tweeted Omar Kelly, columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Usually, people just accept it. Or … don’t discuss it. This is a sad time in this country.”
“I guess we need to start doing DNA and ancestry tests next?” he added. “Very disappointing, and it’s more my people I’m disappointed in (than) anyone.”
He’s right again.
Where things go wildly astray is the assumption McDaniel has spent his life passing, refusing to acknowledge his Blackness, until he was in sight of an NFL head coaching job.
There’s a problem with this theory: we don’t know if it’s true.
McDaniel may have talked about his racial dynamics with coaches or players on past teams. The fact he was biracial may have been known. Just because the nature of his race wasn’t discussed on CNN doesn’t mean he was hiding it.
Again, there’s another complicated layer. If he was hiding his Blackness, he was wrong. Incredibly wrong.
That still shouldn’t prevent him from getting an NFL head coaching position. Or the 49ers from getting those draft picks.
Again, we’ve never asked for light skin biracial brotha’ ID cards before. Why now?
I’ll take McDaniel at his word. The people questioning it don’t know him and questioning him is cheap.
McDaniel doesn’t owe anyone, any explanation about his Blackness.
Normally, what people say on Twitter doesn’t necessarily warrant a reaction but this is different. Race is America’s original sin, remains a plague, and was worsened by Donald Trump. The way to address racism, whether it’s Trump’s, or anyone else’s, is to directly confront it.
Now, anyone who says McDaniel’s story, and the story of race in America, isn’t complicated, is someone you should never listen to again. It is immensely complex. In part because of the NFL, which historically, and now, handles issues of race with great putridity. That’s part of the issue here, and I get it, because the NFL is completely untrustworthy on issues of race. It’s why former Dolphins coach Brian Flores is suing the league.
“Your world is kind of changed when you consciously start to understand what race is in general,” McDaniel said in that interview last year. “
I remember one particular day, walking around and all of a sudden noticing that, ‘Hey, I’m the only fair-skinned person in all these picture frames.’ “My grandmother on my dad’s side is Black. My dad’s Black.
“I can honestly say up to that point, I hadn’t noticed that I was different in two fields. I was different in that I was multi-racial to the world. But even within my own family, I was different from them. I was just kind of a unicorn.”
Now he’s a head coach. A biracial one.
Put away your DNA tests.
Sent from Mail for Windows
DOING STP W/ E BIKE
PHIL NAJITSU NASH
SB304 will go a long way toward vaccinating our state’s children against the scourge of racial intolerance… Instead of walking on eggshells, Maryland children of every background will develop the confidence that comes from understanding those around them and working with them to build a sustainable world of peace, justice and understanding.
STEPHEN COLBERT: GOAT
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
NFL RACISM. REALLY??
GOAT
HATE CRIME??? AHMAUD ARBERY
Why “hate crime” has to be determined in court just shows how embedded racism in all American systems of justice.
PROSECUTOR READS RACIST MESSAGES BY AHMAUD ARBERY’S KILLER
Posted at 9:03 PM, November 12, 2020 and last updated 9:40 AM, October 13, 2021
By RUSS BYNUM Associated Press
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — The man who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery had previously used racial slurs in a text message and on social media, a prosecutor said Thursday as a judge weighed whether to grant bond for the defendant and his father.https://players.brightcove.net/6009760719001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6209523115001
Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, have been jailed since their arrests in May, more than two months after Arbery was slain. The McMichaels, who are white, chased and fatally shot the 25-year-old Black man after they spotted him running in their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick.
In this image made from video, from left, father and son, Gregory and Travis McMichael, accused in the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia on Feb. 2020, listen via closed circuit tv in the Glynn County Detention center in Brunswick, Ga., on Thursday, Nov. 12, as lawyers argue for bond to be set at the Glynn County courthouse. The McMichaels chased and fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, after they spotted him running in their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick.(AP Photo/Lewis Levine)
Questions about whether racism played a role in the killing sharpened during a previous hearing when an investigator testified that a third defendant, who took cellphone video of the shooting, told authorities he heard Travis McMichael, 34, utter a racial slur after he blasted Arbery three times with a shotgun.
In the courtroom Thursday, Zachary Langford — a friend of Travis McMichael’s since boyhood — testified his friend was a jokester who got along with everyone and had at least one Black friend.
Then prosecutor Jesse Evans asked Langford about a text message Travis McMichael had sent him last year that used a slur for Black people when referring to a “crackhead … with gold teeth.”
Langford at first said he didn’t recall receiving the message. Then after reviewing a transcript of the exchange, he answered: “He was referring to a raccoon, I believe.”
Evans also cited a photo Langford posted to Facebook last year to which Travis McMichael replied: “Sayonara,” along with an offensive term for Asians followed by an expletive. Langford said he didn’t recall that, either.
Defense attorneys for both McMichaels have denied any racist motives in the shooting. Right after the Feb. 23 shooting, Gregory McMichael told police that he and his son armed themselves and got in a pickup truck to pursue Arbery because they suspected he was a burglar.
“These men are proud of what they have done,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, told the judge as she asked him to deny them bond. “They want to go home because they think in their selfish minds that they are the good guys.”
Prosecutors say Arbery was merely jogging when the McMichaels pursued him. Their defense attorneys insisted in court Thursday that’s not true.
“We have substantial evidence that, on the day in question, Mr. Arbery was not a jogger,” said Robert Rubin, one of Travis McMichael’s attorneys. “He was there for nefarious purposes.”
Rubin gave no evidence in court that Arbery was doing anything wrong the day he was shot.
Langford’s wife, Ashley Langford, testified that Travis McMichael expressed remorse about shooting Arbery.
“He told me he wished it never happened like that,” she said. “He prayed for Ahmaud’s mother and his family daily.”
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley adjourned court Thursday evening without a bond decision because there was still more evidence to be presented. He planned to continue the hearing Friday.
The McMichaels weren’t arrested until the cellphone video of the shooting leaked online and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case. In June, a grand jury indicted both McMichaels and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, on charges.
In this image made from video, from left, father and son, Gregory and Travis McMichael, accused in the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia on Feb. 2020, speak to each other via closed circuit tv in the Glynn County Detention center in Brunswick, Ga., on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020. The McMichaels chased and fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, after they spotted him running in their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick. (AP Photo/Lewis Levine)
Each is charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
Travis McMichael’s mother, Lee McMichael, testified that he lived with her and his father, has a 4-year-old son and doesn’t have a passport. His attorneys cited his past service as a U.S. Coast Guard mechanic as proof of his character.
“In no way, shape or form is Travis hateful towards any group of people, nor does he look down on anyone based on race, religion or beliefs,” Curt Hall, a former Coast Guard roommate of Travis McMichael who described himself as “multiracial,” wrote in a letter supporting bond for his friend.
Gregory McMichael, 64, is a retired investigator for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit district attorney’s office and a former Glynn County police officer.
The McMichaels’ attorneys are also asking the judge to reject the indictment’s malice murder charge, saying it was written in a way that improperly “charges two crimes in one count.” They made a similar argument for tossing out a charge of criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
Bryan was previously denied bond. His attorney has argued in court motions that the entire indictment should be dismissed.
WHEN ALL WHITE WAS ALL RIGHT
There is no legitimate or logical argument against inclusion. Consciously including racial groups can be one of the most effective reparative remedies for centuries of racial exclusion.
Only when we disentangle the concepts of whiteness and maleness from the concept of power can we see the damage the association has done. Only then can we truly accept and celebrate the power of inclusion, diversity and equity. Only then can representative democracy in a pluralistic society begin to live up to its ideals.
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