Author Elias Cepeda writes a regular column for The UG Feed; you can find him on Twitter @EliasCepeda.
Mainstream discourse about racism in the United States often fails because it treats racism as a matter of interpersonal communication or personalizes it as a character flaw instead of recognizing that racism is systemic. Racism doesn’t threaten anyone’s lives because bigoted thoughts live in the head of isolated individuals.
Racism is lethal when and because taking action on those bigoted thoughts – themselves a result of ideological apparatuses utilized by the powerful to exploit cleavages in society to their benefit – against our neighbors is not only routinely permitted by legal and governmental authorities, but also outright sponsored by them.
Colby Covington is a racist, but that’s not really the point of this column. Colby Covington is a racist, and that determination isn’t at all complicated by the fact that my only personal interactions with the man have been pleasant and congenial.
Colby Covington says racist things, benefits form racist systems, and shows no outward sign of wanting to remediate any of that. So, he’s a racist.
Still, his own personal racism isn’t what this column is about. Covington once again showing his racism this past weekend leading up to and after his win over Tyron Woodley in Las Vegas is the entryway into the conversation, however.
History repeats itself, and no one seems to care
UFC president Dana White would say later Saturday night that he saw Covington’s ugly words coming a mile away. Of course he did.
So must have ESPN and the assembled beat media. Very little of the racist hate speech that he’d use in his post-fight interview with welterweight champion Kamaru Usman, and what he’d go on to say at the post-event press conference was new for Covington.
Covington had mocked Usman’s Nigerian tribal heritage before, saying that while he himself received calls from the President of the United States, Donald Trump, Usman likely only received word from mere chieftains in his homeland, using crude means. Earlier last week Covington called Tyron Woodley a terrorist sympathizer, and the civil rights activist group Black Lives Matter, terrorists, echoing the man whose hand he tried unsuccessfully to kiss the other week at a COVID-19 super spreader rally, President Trump.
So, no one had any reason to be surprised when Covington did it all again, Saturday. Who’d you get a call from? You get a call from freaking your little tribe that used smoke signals for you, he taunted Usman, who was in the ESPN studio doing broadcast work for the evening.
You’re the ugliest dude in the history of the UFC, Covington said of and to the objectively handsome Usman.
Calling Usman ugly seemed apropos of nothing in their conversation, unless you realize that for anti-Black racists like Covington and Trump, calling Black folk ugly is never random. In fact, it’s one of the oldest and most enduring Anti-Black racist tropes in the United States, in addition to some other ones that Covington would go onto use Saturday night.
Usman, sitting in the ESPN studio, wearing a sharp suit and tie, mostly stayed calm, laughing and reminding Covington what happened the last time the two fought. I broke your face…that’s what you said last time.
After Covington’s latest and expected racist on-air tirade against Usman, none of the champ’s ESPN colleagues spoke up in defense of him and against the specific bigoted nature of Colby’s rant. Then, ESPN excitedly tweeted out the hate speech and thought that a flame emoji was sufficient context for Covington’s anti-Black verbal attack.
This is the same network, of course, that proudly talks about Black lives mattering during broadcasts of other sports. The network later deleted their giddy tweet of Covington’s slurs.
Most MMA beat media outlets subsequently framed the ugliness as though the two were simply and equally engaged in drama, with both men going back and forth at one another instead of what it was – one White man with a history of saying racist things screaming racist insults at a Black man and threatening to kill him.
A bad, lazy, criminal group of people
Covington had already called Usman and his ethnicity primitive and ugly. Next, he’d turn his attention back to Woodley – who bravely exposed himself to sanction from the UFC and violated their uniform policy to highlight that Black lives should, in fact, matter a whole hell of a lot more than they do in the U.S. and the world.
Covington, having earned a hard-fought victory over his longtime rival Woodley, decided to continue to hit anti-Black racist tropes, specifically that Black people are dangerous criminals, and that Black freedom movements and organizations like Black Lives Matter are terrorist groups whose ranks are filled by criminals disturbing an otherwise peaceful country.
You know the Black Lives Matter is a complete sham. It is a joke. They are taking these people. They are complete terrorists, Covington told media members. “They are taking these people that are criminals. You know, these aren’t people that are hard-working Americans. Blue-collar Americans.
By some government estimates, about 70% of Black American workers are, in fact, blue-collar workers, with a smaller percentage of White Americans doing that type of work.
Still, Black rights activists, to Covington are bad people. They are criminals.
Lazy, listless, violent, primitive, ugly – Covington had already hit a Klansman’s dozen of anti-Black racist tropes before moving onto some more. As for Woodley himself, Covington warned, you know he is a communist.
You know, he’s a Marxist. He stands for criminals. He hates America.
Woodley, a business-owner, and longtime member of the American Top Team simply hates free-enterprise and his country, according to Covington. Still, random as it may seem to many fans, the using “Marxist” as an insult is not at all an accident.
From Nazi Germany to the United States Government of the 20th and 21st century, socialist, Marxist, so-called cultural marxist, and communist, are all go-to othered enemy labels for authoritarian governments. This goes double for Black freedom activists.
If there is a Black freedom activist or group of the 20th or 21st century of national prominence who the government hasn’t labeled a dangerous communist entity, I’m not aware of them. President Trump and his followers have picked up this favorite fascist practice recently, going so far as to say that teaching anti-racism is un-American, and dangerous.
Since ESPN and most other MMA media outlets won’t say it, years into Covington consistently using racist insults, both of the dog whistle and explicit variety, it certainly is important to say the obvious – that he’s racist. Still, if Covington weren’t joined by others and supported by larger systems, his individual racism wouldn’t matter all that much.
Colby’s wasn’t the only example of personal racism over the past couple weeks from a UFC personality. Kevin Holland, a Black American, told the media in Vegas that Khamzat Chimaev, a white European, called him the help as an insult when they encountered one another at the host hotel before their respective bouts on the same card.
He pushed me, Holland claimed.
He pushed me and said I was the ‘help.’ We did start a COVID cleaning business but, goddamn, I don’t work at the hotel. And don’t tell the people you don’t know who I am.
After both men went on to win their fights, much of the MMA mediasphere’s uncritical fawning over Chimaev and his athletic prowess continued without a great deal of analysis of the racialized nature of the encounter Holland says happened.
Just about a week prior to the UFC event the organization’s promoter Dana White, joined by several fighters including Covington, attended, and spoke at a Donald Trump rally in Nevada. During White’s brief but loud remarks, the executive parroted the President’s racist dog whistles about dirty cities needing to be cleaned up.
We need to clean up some of these cities, White shouted, eliciting cheers from the crowd.
It’s unlikely, given the context, that White was speaking of improving garbage service for marginalized urban communities, or halting the disproportionate corporate polluting in urban neighborhoods of color that the government allows. The subtext was, as it always is at Trump rallies, that cities are filthy and dangerous because of the poor Brown and Black people who inhabit and have ruined them.
This racist discursive on cities is not new, nor does it belong to just one party, of course. In his history of anti-Black racist ideas, Stamped from the beginning, Professor Ibram X. Kendi recounts the tough-on-crime era of the early 1990’s where Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, along with Republicans, ushered in what has become a new Jim Crow system and ramped up fear of so-called super predators – Brown and Black inner-city men and boys who, those racist politicians and their enablers in academia claimed, did not have the same physiological capacity for empathy and so posed a unique threat to what Covington, Trump, and White might call good Americans, as opposed to the bad people like Tyron Woodley and other Black freedom activists, and then subsequently ramped up criminal prosecution of Black boys and men disproportionate to their actual levels of criminality.
As crime trended downward, nationally, the fear of crime was fanned and metastasized, and the consequences were a few generations of poor people of color incarcerated for crimes that wealthier, whiter offenders never faced commensurate punishment for, on scale. Just as the discourse on the overblown welfare problem primarily defamed Black women, the discourse on the overblown crime problem…primarily defamed Black men, Kendi writes.
White repeated Trump’s calls to clean up cities weeks after the president’s Department of Homeland Security had begun to kidnap some citizens off their streets and held them without filing criminal charges, while killing others. White called for this purging of cities just a couple days before President Trump’s Justice Department would declare that New York City, Portland, and Seattle are now something called anarchist jurisdictions.
White called for this figurative cleansing of cities of undesirable people and activities after Trump himself called Baltimore a rodent-infested mess, disgusting, and dangerous, while attacking Black elected officials.
Trump, of course, has also used that language for immigrants and refugees. The language Covington, White, and Trump use is the language of extermination, of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and none of it is new.
The word infest has never been a benign descriptor. It’s root words themselves were hostile words, and infestation has always been used to describe threats from either literal vermin or people referred to as such in order to dehumanize and justify their eradication.
The language of infestation and extermination was used extensively by the fascistic Nazi party of Germany against Jewish people, claiming that their cities needed to be cleaned up, and that the work camps that later turned into death camps were for the welfare of the Jewish people because they needed to learn the value of hard work.
The modern attendant ethos of Law and Order that Covington, Trump, and White, all make reference to tied to that language warning of the dirt and danger of cities is an extension of the so-called President Nixon-era War on Crime. Nixon also campaigned on law and order during time of revolution from marginalized peoples sick of their subjugation, and his chief of staff H.R. Halderman later explained that Nixon himself spoke openly in the White House of the true purpose of the type of law and order Trump supporters like Covington and White call for when they say things like they have in the past week such as If you’re breaking the law…you deserve to get what you get. Law enforcement protects us all. If we don’t have law enforcement, it’d be the wild wild west, from Covington, and we need to take care of law enforcement, from White earlier this month, as well as a screaming, sarcastic mocking from him of some of the calls from Black Lives Matter activists to deal with police brutality and killings this past summer while speaking at the Republican National Convention.
Fascism scholar Jason Stanley cited Halderman’s quoting of Nixon and explained how Law an Order often works in authoritarian regimes in his book How Fascism Works. Halderman quoted Nixon explaining the Law and Order concept as such: ’You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks…The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.’
Stanley expanded, detailing how Nixon recognized that the politics of crime control could effectively conceal the racist intent behind his administration’s domestic programs. Nixon’s rhetoric of ‘law and order’ that followed this conversation was used to conceal a racist political agenda.
https://twitter.com/jasonintrator/status/1207142507777273856
Racism isn’t personal, it’s systemic
In that way the president of the UFC chose to follow in the footsteps of the criminally racist giants of the past and present, in his recent political speeches. White, of course, won’t characterize his, Trump, or Covington’s speech as racist – racists rarely call themselves racist – and told media Saturday night that though he expected Covington to speak exactly as he did to Usman and Woodley, the UFC is a bastion of free-speech so we shouldn’t expect him to infringe on Covington’s right to speak his truth.
Who’s more about free speech than we are? he exclaimed, through a laughable rhetorical question.
Of course, White faced little to no pushback on that lie from the media members in attendance. While it’s true that White has not usually done anything to stop his own bigoted speech (from calling media members sexist and homophobic slurs), or that from the likes of Covington, Conor McGregor, Chael Sonnen, Michael Bisping (who has called opponents faggot on-air without sanction or losing his lucrative broadcast positions), or Donald Cerrone (who has repeatedly used homophobic slurs, insulted trans people, and who fellow UFC fighter Bobby Green has claimed has said many racist things in small groups, including saying that Black people like to steal), it’s an absurd Big Lie for White to say that he and his promotion do not control the expression of their fighters when they include non-disparagement clauses in contracts, and issue fines on fighters and their coaches for wearing articles of clothing they don’t approve.
There was no significant follow-up Saturday night after that lie from White, or for Covington after his racist rants, from the media in attendance. The promotion’s broadcast partner ESPN was apparently embarrassed enough to take down their gross promotion of Covington’s racist slurs, but so far there’s been no announcements from them or the UFC that they are taking action against Covington for his most recent hate speech.
Colby Covington is racist. That’s not an important debate, any longer.
Much more significant is that the entire ecosystem that Colby Covington inhabits is also racist. His promotion, the UFC, the media that covers it, other fighters.
We sadly all have prejudiced thinking, but racism itself is systemic. We can choose anti-racism or racism.
There is no neutral, inactive ground to occupy. If we choose to be anti-racists, we try to recognize prejudice in ourselves as its revealed, as well as in its systemic forms in society at large and commit to fight it in both places.
Racism is a choice to not see it in ourselves and society, or to see it and choose to not actively combat it. Colby’s racist speech is annoying – the UFC and ESPN not penalizing him for it and instead using it to promote their content, makes for a hostile work environment for the hundreds of others who draw a paycheck from the promotion.
Colby wanting to attend an indoor Trump rally where racist things are said so badly that he goes to it, without wearing a mask, a week before fighting in the UFC’s supposedly COVID-free bubble is troubling. The fact that his boss Dana White also attended it before entering the UFC bubble, and what’s more was one of the speakers at it saying some of those racist things, is a whole other level of irresponsible and dangerous.
Dana White using sexist, homophobic, and racist language for years is a problem. His parent company keeping him on the job throughout, ESPN with all of its big-money sponsors not blinking an eye at it, and most of the MMA beat media doing nothing to call him on his bigotry and lies, is a whole other level of dangerous.
Racist thoughts swimming about in the cavernous, smooth minds of people like White, Covington, and Trump is always unfortunate, but could never do much harm in isolation. An entire community of complicit companies, fans, and media members, however, is what empowers this hatred.
UFC athletes are already paid less as a percentage of revenue than any other major sport, with no salaries, no pensions, no collective bargaining rights, no employment protections, or year-round healthcare, and no independent ranking or title sanctioning bodies regulating the sport. Where can an athlete go within their company if they feel racial or gender or any other type of discrimination when the head of the company is often the one most loudly shouting those slurs?
How comfortable can these athletes feel going to the media with their concerns when most reporters, editors, and outlets seem completely fine with letting White frame the discussion of every issue, and center his voice, loud, lying, and abusive though it often is, over those of athletes?
Racist speech is ugly and personally hurtful. Systems that allow racist speech to go unexamined are much more pernicious, however.
Racists like Covington, White, and Trump are certainly problems, but far more concerning are the larger systems and structures that allow bigots like that to thrive in spite and perhaps because of their racist ideas.
