Many accomplished high school, collegiate and professional athletes possess the tools to compel a plurality — if not most elected officials — to reconsider and deviate from their racist policy positions as this country enters an overt neo-Jim Crow existence.
Social constructs and political structures are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of America’s sports culture. Sports has been, and still is, weaponized by those holding political power to influence public opinion and legislation, disrupting the economy in the process. And economic disruption, more than almost anything else, determines political outcomes.
Evidence: Over 90% of U.S. congressional candidates who have a larger war chest than their opponents win their respective races.
Today, the agency of athletes, especially Black athletes, is urgently needed as arms in the battle against the intensifying existential perils with which people of the African diaspora are confronted in the United States, the name a misnomer in a decidedly divided country.
On April 29, when the United States Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, ruled 6-3 on the Louisiana vs. Callais case pertaining to racial gerrymandering and redistricting in Louisiana, it effectively disemboweled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision by the court’s Republican supermajority is another iteration of the intentional and strategic decades-long assault on the self-determination of this nation’s Black population by extreme right wing elements.
Then this past Monday, through what’s known as a shadow docket order, the Supreme Court further suppressed the legal capacity of Black people to have equitable and proportionate electoral representation in state and federal legislatures by effectively allowing Alabama to erase one of its only two primarily Black congressional districts.
It provides Republicans the ability to now redraw its current congressional map and use a map in the November 2026 midterm elections that lower court rulings had previously disallowed on the basis it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Lane Kiffin, the new LSU head football coach, said the quiet part out loud about race and sports in the South — quoting players he recruited at Ole Miss to make his point. Kiffin took the LSU job in late November, leaving Ole Miss mid-season as the Rebels were making a run to the College Football Playoff semifinals.
“(They would say), ‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’” Kiffin said to the publication.
“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’ diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”
Given the sordid history, past and present, of Louisiana, Kiffin’s viewpoint is either ignorant, disingenuous or both. It is the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, an appropriate idiom for this issue. His assessment is more self-serving than impartial. LSU’s nickname, the Tigers, is adopted from Louisiana Confederate Civil War regiments.
The grandparents Kiffin referenced, along with parents, coaches and other caretakers should educate the young recruits on the targeted systematic regression of Black people’s status in what is taking place not just in the South, but across the nation. Inform them how President Donald Trump and Republicans are employing federalism, commonly called states’ rights, buttressed by the Supreme Court, to enact their sinister plot to take this country in essence back to a time before the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments — the Reconstruction Amendments — were ratified.
The Republican Party controls 28 of the 50 state legislatures. The Democrats have the majority in 18 and four are split. So they will gerrymander and eliminate the Black and progressive political dynamic across the vast American landscape.
Thus, there is a clarion call for athletes to stand up, and be forcefully felt and heard!