I went to Clemson. Dabo Swinney coaches football players at Clemson. Dabo Swinney had an opinion, and it was unfortunate. The national media machine has put Swinney through the ringer, rightly. Bomani Jones pointed out the hypocrisy of Dabo Swinney suggesting that Colin Kaepernick shouldn’t use his platform or team to push his agenda while Dabo Swinney literally used the Clemson football practice field as a place to hold baptisms of his players. Shannon Sharpe pointed out that while Dabo Swinney told Kaepernick that “press conferences” were the best way to deal with systemic injustice, Swinney himself has never hosted a press conference on that point. Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika excoriated Swinney for turning the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into a docile singer of children’s songs about love and togetherness rather than the disruptive revolutionary King was.
And Shaun King’s opinion was the most pointed. He took on Swinney at the heart of the matter—Swinney’s “it’s a sin problem, not a skin problem” hot take.
The good coach did what the good coach was always going to do. If you know Dabo, you know he’ll ground every perspective in his particular view of Christianity. And that’s fine, except when it excludes all other interpretations of Christianity. What was most offensive about Dabo’s rantings was the unspoken assumption that what Colin Kaepernick and other protesters are doing is not based in Christianity.
Swinney said: “I think the answer to our problems, is[sic] exactly what they were for Martin Luther King when he changed the world. Love, peace, education, tolerance of others, Jesus.”
He said that sentence shortly before he suggested that people need to move to another country if they don’t like it here, a line that got one awkward clap from a Confederate journalist who forgot he was covering a press conference and not attending a Donald Trump rally. Dabo then proceeded to ramble off all the things that were “just a dream” for Martin Luther King, including unpaid black people playing quarterback to earn money for Dabo at Clemson and Dabo being able to go to a nominally interracial church.
At the crux of Swinney’s argument is that Kaepernick and others are “wrong” for being divisive, and what would be “right” would be another helping or two of Swinney’s version of Jesus. It’s old the sin problem/skin problem chestnut that’s been proffered by everyone from Bill O’Reilly to Mike Huckabeee.
But Dabo’s Christianity is limiting and exclusive. It’s indicative of the greater problems with platitude-rich Christianity in the modern American age. And it ignores the history of the differences between the black church and white church in America on the issue of race.
The Black Church has its roots in liberation. Nat Turner was a preacher. His movement encouraged slaves to view themselves like the Israelities in the throes of Egyptian captivity. In 1831, it was that Christian faith that gave rise to Turner’s violent uprising. Peter Durrett and his wife founded the first Black African Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky just before 1800. Though they were free, they saw in Christianity the ability to rise beyond their stunted social station. On plantations, slaves engaged in underground church movements. Out in the cotton fields, they sang songs that would later be co-opted by their white captors. Songs about redemption and struggle and perseverance.
It’s why many of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were pastors. And it’s why the Black Church has remained an incubator for progress into the 21st century.
Baked deep into the fabric of black Christianity is a belief in the power of collective salvation. It’s an ATM for Jesus, where individuals go every week to get their personal affirmation. Going back to its very founding, the Black Church has resonated as the heartbeat of Jesus’s calls for radical justice.
That Swinney fails to see in the current protest movement the fundamentals of radical Christian change reflects more on him than it does the protesters. Swinney’s calls for more “Jesus” may seem strange in this context, considering that Jesus was, himself, a radical outsider arrested for perpetual protest of the existing political and social structure. Jesus was murdered—much like Dr. King—for his unrepentant boldness in the face of the sorts of ingrained power structures that Swinney’s version of Jesus now apparently stands for.
That Jesus stood for love is without question. But love to Jesus was more than banal platitudes spouted a couple times per week in a megachurch designed to capture more of Swinney’s money. It was about action and bold sacrifice. It was about doing the hard thing, the uncomfortable thing, in the face of legitimate costs. It wasn’t a wait and see doctrine, a kick the can down the road in search of a more convenient method doctrine. Jesus’s commands to seek radical restoration for all the world were direct commands to challenge the status quo.
What Swinney wants for us to do, and for Kaepernick to do, is to adopt a more palatable and comfortable version of Jesus. And doesn’t think make sense? Swinney himself boiled down Martin Luther King into little more than a few words and a handful of dreams that King himself never mentioned. Swinney didn’t grapple with the Letter from Birmingham Jail, in which King wrote:
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Instead, Swinney said with an extreme lack of irony that he thought the current protests were sowing more division. Swinney was apparently unaware of King’s next words in that Birmingham letter, which read:
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
So it should come as no surprise that Swinney seeks to reduce the God and Christianity that led the Hebrews out of bondage and led the slaves to emancipation to little more than soundbytes. His Christianity has long worked for people like him—wealthy, white, in power—in protecting the status quo. It’s a version that says the word love a lot and wraps every destructive opinion in the name of Jesus to protect the opinion from scrutiny. But it’s apparently not the Christianity in favor of radical justice than Jesus demanded and in fact commanded.
That Swinney erases from black athletes the soulful source of their righteous rage by suggesting that the only Christian approach is to sing and hold hands is an indictment of the limiting Christianity that Swinney’s been sold and has been selling.