Auburn University’s basketball coach is not a fan of Kamala Harris

OPINION: Bruce Pearl shared some thoughts about Kamala Harris’ “socialist, woke progressive beliefs.” We all know what he meant.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.  

Fanatic (n.) — a person exhibiting excessive enthusiasm and intense uncritical devotion toward some controversial matter (as in religion or politics). 

From Latin fanaticus “mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,” also “furious, mad,” originally, “pertaining to a temple,” from fanum “temple, shrine, consecrated place

I am not a fan of America. 

I don’t hate my country. But, as a Black man who knows this country’s history and has felt its wrath, I am genetically incapable of accessing the excessive enthusiasm and intense uncritical devotion toward this country that patriotic fanaticism demands. To be fair, I never quite know what hating or loving America means. Does loving America mean I shouldn’t accept this country’s flaws and cherish the inhumane acts of terrorism this nation committed against people who look like me? If I hate America, does that mean I despise every single American, including George Washington, my mother and the person who checks my receipt when I exit Walmart? What if someone loves their country so much that they criticize the Democratic president’s flaws and protest GOP policies? Should I hate critics who want to improve the country I love? So, no, I am not a fan of America.

I am an American. 

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I am not a fan of Auburn University. 

I don’t hate my alma mater. But, as a Black man who graduated from Auburn and understands its racial history, I am genetically incapable of showing “uncritical devotion” to Alabama’s largest, predominately white land-grant institution. Besides the buildings named after slaveowners, confederate soldiers and a governor who also served as the Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, Auburn is funded by a taxpayer base that is 27% Black and 69% white, yet the student body is 4.5% Black and 81% white. According to the Biden administration, since 1983, the school has received more than $527 million that legally belongs to Alabama A&M, the state’s historically Black land-grant university whose alums were demonized as a “rough crowd” and “different” after the two schools played on Saturday.

By the way, I was at that game. The “rough crowd” at the rare in-state PWI vs HBCU matchup was composed of Black alums from both schools wearing their fraternity and sorority colors. I have never attended an Auburn game where I didn’t smell the scent of marijuana. But because I know that white college students, 18-25-year-old white kids and white people in general are more likely to use marijuana, I don’t complain.

While I appreciate the housing, education and, most importantly, the opportunity to create a better life that Auburn provided, I earned that stuff. Alabama’s Black taxpayers built the classrooms and libraries that excluded Black students for a century. I cheer for the football team and yell “War Eagle” to strangers in airports, knowing that Black athletes provided most of the $195 million in sports revenue the school made in 2023. Even though the university recently closed its Office of Inclusion and Diversity and informed Black student and alumni organizations, as well as individual donors that endowed scholarships can no longer be race-specific, I still attend alumni functions and contribute to scholarships. I acknowledge that my individual contributions might seem comparatively small, but my tuition, activism, hard work and my people built that place.

I am not an Auburn fan; I am an Auburn alumnus.

To be fair, in a state where college sports is a religion, you are expected to hate something. Not doing so can get a person or a politician (or a tree) excommunicated from the congregation of the living. But, unlike the obnoxious, houndstooth flip-flop wearers who worship at the Church of the Crimson Tide despite never stepping foot in a classroom at the University of Alabama (again, I do not hate those Bamas), I am not excessively devoted to Auburn. As a student, I led protests against the administration and called out the university’s bigotry in the school newspaper. As a journalist, I have publicly criticized the school. 

I love Auburn the way Black people love America.

Bruce Pearl is not a fan of Kamala Harris. 

You might not recognize Auburn University’s head men’s basketball coach when he is not running shirtless through Auburn’s stands, proudly displaying his barechested excessive enthusiasm. During his tenure, Pearl has led the Tigers to six NCAA tournaments, two regular-season conference championships, an SEC tournament championship and a Final Four appearance. But all those trophies, a happy-go-lucky reputation, a legion of fanatics and millions of dollars are not enough for Pearl. As a religious figure in the Church of College Hoops and Game Day Saints, he is legally required to hate something. 

Bruce Pearl chose Black people.  

Quoting a tweet by mass incarceration advocate, anti-history, critical racist theorist and make-believe Army Ranger Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Aug. 26, Pearl took the opportunity to condemn Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris for her “socialist, woke progressive beliefs.” 

When fans, social media users and (gasp) even a sports columnist in Alabama criticized Pearl’s statement and asked why Black players would play for him, the Tigers’ coach doubled down. “We got six guys from Atlanta in the NBA,” Pearl told podcaster Dan Dakich, explaining that 80-90% of his players were Black. “[Auburn] is a little bit leaning conservative, but if you love your God, if you love your country, if you want to love your neighbor, if you want to be great, Auburn is an amazing place to come … I’m not even critical of anyone who criticizes me. I think in this country you should have the right to make that criticism. I may not agree with it, but I’m OK with it.”

Pearl works for an institution and a state where “wokeness” has been successfully demonized as the bitter rival of the white majority. Maybe Pearl was just brown-nosing his anti-woke boss, Alabama Governor and Auburn trustee Kay Ivey. Last year, Ivey ousted Early Childhood Education Secretary Dr. Barbara Cooper over a pre-kindergarten book that included words like “structural racism” and “white privilege.” Perhaps Pearl was summoning the spirit of stupidity from former Auburn football coach-turned-politician, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. Known as the “stupidest senator” and the “most ignorant man in D.C.,” Tuberville often rails against “wokeness” and doesn’t understand what socialism means. But even the scatter-toothed Trump supporters who bought multiple camouflage Crimson Tide tees from the Tuscaloosa Walmart because they “want to look nice at church on Sunday (seriously, some of my best friends are Bamas) understand what Ivey, Tuberville and Pearl mean when they call someone “woke” or “socialist.” 

They mean Black people. 

To be clear, Bruce Pearl does not believe Kamala Harris is a socialist. Even if he didn’t know that Kamala Harris has never proposed a single policy that fits the actual definition of socialism, he could find out by walking eight minutes from his campus office to the largest library in the state of Alabama. But if he did that, he might discover that Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter was talking about the institutional racism in the state of Alabama when he coined the term “stay woke.” Even worse, if Auburn’s coach actually read books, he might discover a truth more uncomfortable than Kamala Harris and wearing shirts:

Bruce Pearl might be the biggest beneficiary of woke, progressive socialism in America.  

If Pearl hates “woke, progressive” policies that address social and economic inequality, he’d really hate the Morrill Acts, which established land-grant universities, including a school named Auburn University. Why doesn’t Pearl consider the half-billion dollars that his employee stole from Alabama A&M to pay his salary an example of socialism? Even though only 2% of Auburn students are Black men, by Pearl’s own admission, 80-90% of the players that built his success at Auburn are Black. When Bruce Pearl made his first NCAA tournament as Auburn’s head coach in 2018, the disparity between the Black men enrolled at Auburn (3%) and the athletes who played revenue-generating sports (77% Black male) was the second highest in the nation, according to the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center. 

In all fairness, using the work, talent, tax money and revenue produced by Black people to build white generational wealth is just how college sports work. While Pearl works for one of the most profitable athletics departments in America, the school’s half-billion-dollar heist is below the $816 million average that most states stole from Black institutions. But, if Pearl’s arbitrary definition of socialism exists anywhere in America, not only is Auburn the prototype, but Bruce Pearl is the fourth-highest-paid socialist in his profession.

As an employee of an institution that steals millions of tax dollars from Black people to pay his salary and fund scholarships for the Black players who made him everything that he is and ever will be, Bruce Pearl should thank his Almighty God for every single one of the “woke, progressive, socialist policies” he hates. Fred Gray, a woke, progressive, socialist attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the Montgomery bus boycott, also represented Dr. Harold Franklin, a woke progressive who forced Auburn University to admit Black students before being denied his master’s degree in history because — I wish I was making this up — a dissertation on the fight for Black equality was considered “too controversial.”  This wasn’t part of the distant past; Pearl was alive when this happened. He was coaching at Auburn University when the school finally awarded Franklin his degree. If not for woke, progressive, Black socialists like Gray, Franklin, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., Bruce Pearl wouldn’t have a job. It was woke Black activists who convinced an unwoke, non-progressive former vice president named Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, if the residents of Alabama had heard a Jewish man was bringing Black players to a school that refused to admit Black players during Pearl’s lifetime before woke, progressive socialists fixed it, the white people of Alabama would have killed him.

Ask Leadbelly. 

Of course, it is fair for Pearl to criticize Kamala Harris’ actual policies. No one would have complained if he tweeted about how Harris refused to use the death penalty as California’s attorney general and called her “the most progressive DA in California,” as other district attorneys have done. He could have even dog whistled to his fellow conservatives by pointing out that Harris supported marriage equality before it was legal and is in favor of taxing the wealthy. But as a divorcee who violated so many rules that the NCAA banned him from coaching basketball multiple times, railing about the sanctity of marriage or personal accountability would make him sound like a hypocrite. Pearl wasn’t technically qualified to coach when Auburn hired him and is often criticized for his postseason failures, so he can’t complain about “meritocracy” (Yes, Bruce Pearl is a DEI hire). Like most white-wing zealots, Pearl is not an actual Christian conservative, a family values guy or a believer in “law and order.  

Still, Pearl is right when he says that he should be free to say whatever he chooses. But Pearl’s duplicity, his politics and his political beliefs are not the problem. The real problem is much simpler. 

Bruce Pearl doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care about how his weaponization of “wokeness” belittles the history and the struggles of the Black taxpayers who will pay him $5,716,652 this year. He doesn’t care how his words further marginalize the Black students whose tuition paid for the phone and the internet service he used to tweet his thoughts. He doesn’t care about the people who risked their careers, their safety and their lives for the Black men who made him a success. He doesn’t care about their families or their communities or their ancestors or their hard work or their tax dollars that gave Bruce Pearl everything he will ever have and made him everything he will ever be.

I’m not saying Auburn’s basketball coach hates Black people. Perhaps he just loves Donald Trump. As someone who doesn’t know Trump’s history or has felt his wrath, it’s entirely possible that Pearl is genetically incapable of caring what a Trump presidency will mean for Black America.

Or maybe Bruce Pearl just feels about Kamala Harris the way Donald Trump feels about Black people. 

He’s obviously not a fan. 

Michael Harriot is an economist, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available everywhere books are sold.