The unexpected.
Isn’t that what makes sports great? Isn’t that also what made ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit’s tear-filled soliloquy on racial injustice so stunning and touching Saturday as “College GameDay” returned for the 2020 season?
This isn’t to say his emotional proclamation, each second more uncomfortable to watch than the one before it, will dramatically alter 400 years of Black suffering in this country. It almost certainly won’t.
But there was something achingly authentic and soul-searching – for our souls, not his – regarding these words from Herbstreit: “The Black community is hurting. How do you listen to these stories and not feel pain and not want to help? You can’t relate to that if you’re white, but you can listen and you can try to help, because this is not OK.”
If this awful summer has taught us anything, not much beneath the surface has been OK regarding race relations in this otherwise great country of ours for a long, long time, if ever. Actually, the word is probably NEVER, at least from the Black perspective, which is why Black America is voicing its concerns like never before.