Bucs Coach Todd Bowles To Woke Whites: Stop Yapping About Race Every Chance You Get

Separated by almost two decades, Tampa Bay Buccaneers Head Coach Todd Bowles and award-winning actor Morgan Freeman have issued a plea that woke whites refuse to heed even when issued by the blacks they wish to be perceived as caring about: Please stop dragging race into every public space. It’s not necessary, it’s often out of place, and it’s not helping.  

Bowles’ Bucs were set to face the Pittsburg Steelers led by their black coach Mike Tomlin this past weekend, and Steve Wilks, also black, was just named interim head coach of the Charlotte Panthers. So, unsurprisingly, a reporter asked Bowles on Wednesday ahead of the game, “You and Mike Tomlin are the few black head coaches in the league. I wonder what your relationship is like with him and your thoughts on Steve Wilks joining that [group]?”

No doubt the reporter fully expected to draw from Bowles some race-speak role play such as, “I am so proud that blacks are finally gaining these opportunities in the National Football League. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

Instead, Bowles responded:

We don’t look at what color we are when we coach against each other. … I have a lot of very good white friends that coach in this league as well, and I don’t think it’s a big deal as far as us coaching against each other. I think it’s normal. … We coach ball, we don’t look at color.

Bowles’ response so discombobulated ESPN’s Jenna Laine, who is white, that she decided to school Bowles on how she thought he should handle race-speak questions posed to him: Did Bowles, Laine wanted to know, “understand that [racial] representation matters” across the league? “You have aspiring coaches and football players, they see you guys — they see someone that looks like them, maybe grew up like them. … That has to mean something.”

Unfazed and unbowed, the soft-spoken Bowles explained, “Well, when you say, ‘They see you guys,’ and ‘look like them and grew up like them,’ it means that we’re oddballs to begin with. … I think the minute you guys stop making a big deal about it, everybody else will as well.”

In Laine’s mind, standard race-speak liberates blacks and advances social justice. But Bowles thinks Laine’s ideas caricature, demean, and infantilize black people. But Bowles’ general complaint, and the one sure to go unheeded by those in the elite chattering classes, is that the news conference participants and their television audience would be better served if race were not mentioned at all.

Morgan Freeman delivered the same message during his 2005 interview with Mike Wallace during Black History Month. Wallace’s reputation as the cool, courageous, and unflappable questioner of the highest-profile interviewees on the planet is well-earned. But Wallace looked lost when Freeman said bluntly that he thinks Black History Month is “ridiculous.”

Black history is “American history,” Freeman said. He asked if Wallace wants a

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases