Identity Crisis

Recently in class we talked about the idea of identity, about how we and others perceive ourselves. Recently, Alcorn State, a school in the SWAC made news by potentially changing theirs. The SWAC is a conference made up of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), whose student bodies and administration are made up almost entirely of African Americans. Normally, a football hire at a school in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) is not national news. That is until Jay Hopson was hired this May at Alcorn. Jay Hopson is white, like almost all football coaches in the collegiate ranks, but he is the first white football coach in SWAC history.

Unsurprisingly, there has been backlash from proud alumni who feel that hiring a white football coach tarnishes the legacy and fundamentally alters the identity of the university. As we have seen all too recently at Penn State, football coaches can transcend the university itself and bring a culture of their own to a university. It does seem strange in this respect for a historically black institution to hire a white coach. As Alcorn State president M. Christopher Brown II noted:

“There were alumni who said, very plainly, they personally felt that it was an insult to hire a white coach. They had been discriminated against in their coaching careers. They had been denied coaching jobs because of the black color of their skin.”

There is certainly truth in the concerns voiced by the alumni. Black coaches have been overwhelmingly underrepresented, especially considering African Americans outnumber whites in Division 1 football. The Rooney Rule requires NFL teams to interview a minority candidate for head coaching positions, but the NCAA has no such policy. HCBUs have therefore provided a breeding ground for African American coaches.

Oakland Chapel, a historical building on Alcorn's
Mississippi Campus (fr.wikipedia.org)

Regardless, this leads to the question, where do legacy, tradition, and preserving identity end? Should hiring a black coach be paramount to hiring a winning coach? And perhaps most importantly, is this a double standard? Certainly the system is broken, considering how few black coaches are currently employed, but does that necessarily justify the current system of the SWAC? Is the proper fix for one broken system another one? Frankly, I don't think I can put it better than President Hill:

"[Hopson] has the qualifications to do the work, and so, he forces us -- in this context -- to continue to rethink our own racial bias that we bring to the workplace. If the table was reversed and Ole Miss or LSU had the same thing, and the black guy who'd applied for head coach was an Alcorn alum, he'd worked in the SEC, he did Division I, he had the record, he had the references, and then LSU interviews him and says, 'Oh, well, you know, some of our alumni won't like having a black coach,' my people would go crazy. We'd call them racists. We have to practice what we preach."

In my eyes, Dr. Hill hit the nail on the head. Are the practices of HBCU racist? At worst, they are, and at best a guilt-induced double standard exists. Now is the time to move forward instead of using tradition as justification for arcane hiring practices. Dr. Hill noted that Havard was once a school only for white, protestant males, but their identity has changed, and now it's the worlds premiere learning institution. He insists that the identity of Alcorn has now changed. "Alcorn used to be a great black school,” he said, “now it's just a great university."