Bomani Jones and Will Cain had a spirited debate on Cain’s ESPN radio show Wednesday over comments Cain made during an appearance on First Take regarding the Bubba Wallace, NASCAR situation.
“NASCAR didn’t care about the truth. Almost everyone in the media didn’t care about the truth. Curiosity, questions, and the search for the truth were dismissed as contrarian at best, racist at worst,” Cain later added on Twitter. “Media is broken. Society is broken.”
Jones then decided to call into Cain’s show to share his own thoughts on the situation, and the result was Jones giving Cain a free lesson on his own show. Jones called out Cain’s comments while offering a perspective from someone who has actually been negatively impacted by racism and understands the nuance to the issues — something that Cain clearly does not.
“The issue is really, the impediment to racism is white people not treating black people as being of equal levels of humanity,” Jones said, as transcribed by Complex. “Like, that’s the answer for all of the time. The reason I wanted to call in, it’s very important to note this especially considering the power dynamics. Me viewing you, for example, through the lens of just being a part of a group and not an individual, doesn’t have any negative effect on your life. You viewing others the other way actually does have a negative effect on their life. It’s not the same thing. We can’t do the both sides and human beings are judged like this because there’s has been a level of subjection to people in this country that is uncommon and is not something that we can look at across all the world and… describe all this necessarily as tribalism.
“The problem I have is, when you say that what happened with Bubba Wallace is going to be an impediment to race relations. Nah, man, those people rolling on Speedway Boulevard before that race with those flags flying, those are an impediment to race relations. The person that had a flag, had a thing that said ‘defund NASCAR’ on Sunday over the track, that’s an impediment to race relations. […] Those are far bigger impediments.
Jones went on to continue cooking Cain with example after example of why Cain’s perspective was way off.
“White folks gotta live with the fact that you’re asking for a benefit of the doubt that is not supported by the historical record… The idea that someone could have placed a noose in Bubba Wallace’s stall is not close to being outside of the realm of possibility,” Jones continued. “You seem more bothered by the fact that somebody got this wrong than you were with this display of defiance that took place before the race (waving of the Confederate flag outside of Talladega Superspeedway) with the racists trying to assert that NASCAR is theirs when NASCAR was like ‘yo, will you please chill out? That’s not what we want to do no more.'”
You can listen to the full lesson Jones gave Cain below:
