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So @sidlowe spoke to Carlo Ancelotti, and I was not expecting to hear Ancelotti on James Baldwin. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/19/carlo-ancelotti-everton-merseyside-derby-coronavirus-lockdown
I've been saying for a very long time that these are the types of conversations we should have always been having with sporting figures. For coaches, if understanding your players and their mental health is part of your job, then so is understanding racism.
As a coach, you can't just pop in after your player is publicly racially abused and humiliated. You have to understand the weight of those moments, and the space players live in between those moments, and that when the player puts on a brave face, the trauma often remains.
What you're seeing for example with the new MLS Black Players Coalition ( @BPCMLS) is acknowledgement of what black players have always known but many—including the league—have long ignored. To speak about discrimination is an invitation to being labeled as a distraction.
So you shut up and play unless a situation is so inflammatory, it can't be ignored. But behind those inflammatory moments is a long history conditioned silence.
So as a lot of folks are laudably applauding this new MLS Black Players Coalition, ask yourself why this coalition needs to exist in the first place, and who cultivated the workplace environments that so clearly didn't meet many of their needs.
Once again, we're at the accountability point. A lot of the people publicly cheering always could have done something about it. Instead, many around the league preferred to be racially agnostic, and as many have now learned, so-called color blindness is part of the problem.
Ok, that's all for now. Let me check these starting XIs.
