![]() ![]() Culley was brought in this season to calmly oversee an absolute disaster of a franchise, and his fate after a 4-13 record remains to be seen. Now, after the somewhat surprising firing of former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores on Monday (the former Patriots linebackers coach and de facto defensive coordinator was hired by Miami in 2019), there are exactly two Black head coaches in the NFL - Tomlin, and David Culley of the Texans. Lynn was fired in January, 2021 and replaced by former Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley - another white candidate. That bloodletting left two Black head coaches in the NFL - Mike Tomlin with the Steelers, and Anthony Lynn with the Chargers. All five of those coaches were replaced by white candidates - Gregg Williams (interim) and Freddie Kitchens for the Browns, Zac Taylor for the Bengals, Kliff Kingsbury for the Cardinals, Adam Gase (ouch) for the Jets, and Vic Fangio for the Broncos. There was Hue Jackson of the Browns, Marvin Lewis of the Bengals, Steve Wilks of the Cardinals, Todd Bowles of the Jets, and Vance Joseph of the Broncos. Once, Oster said, a White mother approached her to complain about the inclusion of the book on a summer reading list, but concluded she trusted Oster to teach it the right way.During and right after the 2018 regular season, five NFL teams fired their Black head coaches. That included Toni Morrison’s acclaimed “Song of Solomon," which details a young Black man’s quest for cultural identity. ![]() ĭuring her 30-year career in the classroom, Oster said, she assigned Sullivan County students books she thought would challenge them. ![]() ![]() His classes began focusing more on race during the Trump years, especially after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and Floyd’s murder three years later.Īt the same time, though, the tolerance for those kinds of discussions was shrinking in Kingsport, said Gloria Oster, 68, who taught high school English to Hawn and thousands of other students in the town before retiring in 2005. He always presented White privilege as an incontestable truth, although he said he urged students to do their own research and challenge him if they disagreed. Hawn discovered the concept of White privilege during President Barack Obama’s tenure, he said, and began mentioning it in class. “It made me think, from that point on, that I can change my mind on issues,” said Thomas, who is majoring in history at East Tennessee State University because Hawn’s class inspired a love for the subject.īefore meeting Hawn, Thomas said, “I don’t know if I could have been the type of guy to listen to other people’s arguments, or see from their point of view.” He realized he did not actually agree with what he was saying. Midway through arguing against the idea, Thomas stopped talking. Robinette, still a fervent Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, said that was the first time he considered there might be drawbacks to Tennessee’s disdain for an income tax.Īnd Thomas, who also remains conservative although he dislikes Trump, said he will never forget a debate with Hawn over whether the United States should welcome Syrian refugees. Robinette remembers a similar moment during an argument about fiscal policy, when Hawn explained that Tennessee’s high sales tax led some in his family to do their grocery shopping just over the border in Virginia, where groceries are taxed less because the state also taxes income. Sullivan Central’s small number of progressive teens often chose Hawn’s classes, as did students who identified as LGBTQ, partly because Hawn kept a blue-and-yellow equality sticker pasted to the filing cabinet by his desk. “I would seek him out,” Robinette said, “just because I knew he’d disagree.” When Hawn bested him, as Robinette said the teacher often did, the teen headed home to his deeply conservative father and uncle to ask for more arguments to throw at Hawn the next day.īy then, Hawn was used to this sort of thing. Then Robinette would demand: What do you say to that? But he began searching for Hawn between classes, during lunch or after school so he could deliver the latest conservative talking points about the income tax, or which bathrooms transgender people should use. He had been told his whole life that the South had been unfairly demonized for its role in the Civil War, that voting Republican was the right thing to do and that the other side was “all nonsense and Communism." He knew Hawn did not see it that way.Ī third pal, Drew Robinette, now 23, did not enroll in the course. One of his closest friends, Christian Thomas, now 23, signed up for the class too. ![]()
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