Where the White Woman A?!t: The Hiring of an SEC Coach

As I left my job today, I was in a great mood. As I said in an earlier post, I’m a teacher. It’s exam week and I’m done with my grades, so I had the rare fortune of getting to leave work at 2 pm. I had plans on writing a lighthearted pre-bowl season post when I got home, but an interview on ESPN radio has changed my plans. I was listening to the Tirico and Van Pelt Show, which has quickly emerged as my favorite show not involving Mel Kiper, Jr., and SVP was interviewing Charles Barkley. Yeah, the chance for 7 minutes of unfiltered and possibly uncensored Barkley was more than I could pass up.

Not surprisingly, Barkley was asked about his comments earlier in the week about Auburn’s selection of Gene Chizik as football coach. What did surprise me, however, was Barkley citing an Outside The Lines interview of Mark Schlabach in which Schlabach said two SEC coaches told him Tuner Gill had no chance at the Auburn job because Gill’s black and his wife is white. I have read a lot of Schlabach’s columns, and even if his picture on ESPN.com is misleading about the amount of Wendy’s Triple Stacks he has devoured since his hire, I like his work. This is a guy who loves the SEC and, in my opinion, has played a major role in the media’s obsession with the conference, so if he’s saying anything negative about the conference, I’m inclined to take it as truth.

This story is incredibly despressing, but it does prove what many people in the media have been insinuating or outright declaring in the week since Chizik’s hiring: race played a major role in this coaching decision.

Two reactions to this news, one quick, one longer.

First, Van Pelt asserted two or three times during his show that he couldn’t understand how college football has such an inexcusable track record of hiring black head coaches, while college basketball does not. Van Pelt’s main point was that the ACC this season has 12 teams and 7 black head coaches. My refutation to him is that it’s about money. You’ll notice what schools are left off the list—North Carolina, Duke, Wake, you know, all the basketball schools—so these coaches are not the most high profile coaches in their Athletic Deparments, unlike say, the football coach at Auburn. The last black coach to head up a major basketball school? Tubby Smith. Remember? He was run out after winning a national title because he couldn’t recruit. How he managed to score two top 20 classes in his first two tries at Minnesota, however, remains to be explained by Kentucky fans. So, I would disagree that college basketball is infinite farther head of football on minority hiring. There's also this whole story coming out of Oxford.

My second point is a little harder to put into words. In a weird way, I’m really happy that Auburn made this decision because it is actually forcing people to face this issue. There is nothing that makes white people in the United States more uncomfortable that having to confront race relations in the 21st century. We (as a white person) want to believe that as a country, the United States has moved beyond racial issues after the Civil War and, more importantly, that Civil Rights Movement. We want to believe that racism was the problem of the “Greatest Generation,” not the Baby Boomers or the Baby Boom echo. We were raised on the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement about toleration and diversity. We learned about the horrors of segregation, slavery, and racial injustice in history and English classes. We no longer discriminate against black people like we did in the past, so we think that race is no longer a problem.

I think this is the reason so many white Americans get frustrated when they hear people bring up race and racial discrimination today. Whites realize the errors and horrors of the past and do not want to be associated with it. Unfortunately, this fear of guilt by association has made many people completely turn off any conversations about race. People complain when members of the sports media like Barkley, Steven A. Smith, or Michael Wilbon bring up modern structures of racial discrimination and try to trivialize their complaints by saying the authors are merely “Playing the race card” and ignoring their points. The old barriers to the past like Jim Crow laws are gone, whites claim, so these authors are simply another example of a “black man asking for a handout.” It’s an incredible shift in the political discourse, one from black discrimination to white victimization by “reverse discrimination,” that historians have charted in books like this, this, this, and this. Yeah, I'm one class short of a PhD in American history, so I know books.

The reality is, however, that while we have made tremendous strides in terms of language and behavior, many ancient racial preconceptions remain. In college football, how many times have you heard that a team is platooning two quarterbacks: one, a “more traditional, dropback quarterback, a guy who makes good decisions;” and the other, “The more athletic, gamebreaking quarterback with big risks.” Guess which QB is always the white guy? It’s a continuation of the Sambo-myth from colonial America and the modern, scientific racism that appeared in the early 20th century, arguing whites were inherently smarter that other races. Now, do I think that college football fans are trying to consciously make racist statements when they make comments like this? Absolutely not. If I was a black athlete and heard these comments, would I question how I’m being viewed by these fans/media who describe me in this way? You better believe it.

This is why, in a really twisted way, I’m happy that Auburn passed over Turner Gill for Gene Chizik. It is forcing us, the predominantly white college football fan base, to come to terms with some sobering realities. Last week, when all we had was the selection of Chizik to go on, it did force us to confront the fact that while there may not be discrimination, white favoritisim to other whites has certainly not gone away in college football. Chizik was a candidate that alums could better relate to, that would appeal more to the fan base, in short, he was “one of them.” Now, with the new allegations about Gill’s wife coming to the fore, we also see that some old prejudices die hard. James T. Patterson charted how the fear of white women beginning to date black men was one of the primary reasons for white resistance to integration, and it seems we have the same situation with Gill. If he didn't get the job because his wife is white, that's pure racism. I firmly believe that at least 90% of college football fans are not racist, and that the press and outrage over Auburn’s decision will inspire fans to demand change in the NCAA. It has people, good people, talking, which means that there is a chance to actually use this terrible reality to generate positive change in college football.

It’s also good that this happens in the SEC. Wrongly, the South today is still portrayed as the region of racial discrimination in America based on its embarrassing history of slavery and Jim Crow, as if the rest of the country has a history of nothing but egalitarianism and toleration. When racial injustice happens in the South, the entire country can rally around the notion that it’s wrong and demand change. There’s a reason that the Civil Rights Movement caused change by protesting in the South, not the North or the West. You’ll notice no one is condemning Syracuse for passing on Gill for an unproven coach, but Auburn is a racist institution for making the exact same move.

There is currently 1, 1!, non-white head coach in the BCS. Washington, Mississippi State, and Tennessee all hired new white head coaches without even considering s single minority candidate. Auburn is simply reflective of a larger national issue.

This could be great for the future of college football. Auburn passing on Gill might force the NCAA to actually enforce some policy like the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which would give qualified black and Hispanic coaches the chance to interview for premium football coaching jobs. It is the chance to see a terrible injustice rectified by tearing down one last structure of racism in the country: employment discrimination.

Sorry for the seriousness of this column. It’s an issue that strikes a nerve with me, and one that I feel needs to be made: we’ve made tremendous strides in a very short amount of time, but we only made these strides because when a mirror was held up to society, people demanded change. Turner Gill shows that we have not fully achieved the goal of an equal society, but we have the chance to continue moving toward that goal. I promise I’ll be back with more light hearted and directly football related issues tomorrow, but welcome comments in the mean time.

Another interesting take on why it's good Gill didn't get the job here.