I wouldn’t consider this mundane but the UA football team put out (to me) a powerful message:
There’s probably nobody more influential in Alabama than Saban and maybe this moves the needle a tiny bit. Hopefully this isn’t a one-time statement from him.
It is a powerful statement.
There is a small but not-insignificant discussion going on at the moment about whether black students who excel at sports (and particularly football) should go to big schools which can offer them lots of money and exposure but which will effectively treat them as cash cows for the university, or whether they should go to HBCUs which at the moment don’t necessarily have top-tier football teams but might if enough of those coveted students opted to attend there instead, and where they would (theoretically) be more welcome as actual people. Unsurprisingly, Alabama is likely to be seen as one of the “cash cow” institutions likely to lose out if this idea gets any traction, and they will want to get ahead of it. I doubt the attempt to divert sports stars to HBCU will get far (money is a powerful draw) but at least Alabama are on message.
(I mean, it’s also likely that they mean it. But there’s always an angle.)
Would it be too much to ask to actually post the text of “powerful message” you’re going on about? Since it apparently was released on twitter, it can’t be very big.
I second LSLGuy’s motion.
It’s a link to a video so it’s not that short.
It’s the football team and coach basically saying that they’re a team, black and white working together, etc etc, ending with “All lives don’t matter until black lives matter”.
Thank you. And what a repeatable viral spreadable sound bite that is.
As well as being pretty much a moral imperative for all thinking Americans.
Sorry, you’re right, I should have given a better hint. I was concerned about stealing the emotion from the video by spoiling it.
What I really like about it is that it’s an intelligent response to “all lives matter”. All lives matter when black lives matter.