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Steve Kerr Gregg Popovich Pete Carroll

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Many Black folks have white friends but not all of those white “friends” are willing to lend their voices and deeds loudly and proudly to the movement to free their Black friends from oppression and police brutality.

Head coaches Steve Kerr, Gregg Popovich, and Pete Carroll don’t seem to suffer from that aloof affliction as they all are willing to say what we all know is the truth. The truth is that Black Lives Matter and the NFL did Colin Kaepernick dirtier than the handle on an NYC subway car.

The three white men sat down on The Ringer’s Flying Coach podcast recently to talk about everything that has transpired in Amerikkka over the past week including George Floyd’s murder to how it relates to the message that Colin Kaepernick was trying to peacefully get across to the nation.

“I think that there was a moment in time that a young man captured. He took a stand on something, figuratively took a knee, but he stood up for something he believed in — and what an extraordinary moment it was that he was willing to take,”…

…And the whole mission of what the statement was, such a beautiful … it’s still the statement that we’re making right today. We’re not protecting our people. We’re not looking after one another. We’re not making the right choices. We’re not following the right process to bring people to justice when actions are taken. So I think it was a big sacrifice in the sense that a young man makes, but those are the courageous moments that some guys take.

And we owe a tremendous amount to him for sure.”

Steve Kerr made it real plain to the white folks who might be listening…

“To me, it’s really hard to look at what’s going on right now with all the violence and the protests and not look back to four years ago and say, ‘Look, this guy [Kaepernick] was trying to peacefully protest and nothing came of it,” Kerr said. “The killings went on and nothing changed and he was actually ridiculed so it’s a real tough one to think about.”

Coach Popovich recalled a moment when he had to check himself about how he could explain George Floyd’s murder to his 8-year-old granddaughter when she walked in on him watching the graphic video on the news and asked why the police officer was hurting him:

“And I was dumbfounded, I turned [the TV] off. And then I thought, ‘Should I have left it on and explained it to her? Or how do I explain it to her now that I have turned it off?’ I made some feeble attempt but I didn’t know how far to go, how deep to go. What age is it? Is she ready or not ready?

Then I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a problem for me.’ And then I thought, ‘What about a black family?’ You think they have a problem talking to their kids and figuring out what’s going on here? So it’s so convoluted and complicated that … everything sort of fades away if we don’t have that initial admission, that sorrowful recognition of what went on in the past and what has continued.”

White people, please talk to other white people about these issues and how to fix them.

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