Pop for President!
By 
Gregg Popovich is living proof that you can be an incredibly rich, old white guy and be a really great human being who critiques his own privilege. Basically, Popovich is the opposite of Donald Trump and doesn’t care if people don’t like it.
The 68-year-old Popovich, a graduate of the Air Force Academy who served five years in the military, ripped Trump’s decision to rescind an invitation to the Golden State Warriors to visit the White House, calling it “disgusting” and “comical it was rescinded because they weren’t going anyway.”
“Our country is an embarrassment in the world,” Popovich said. “This is an individual that when people held arms during games, [he thought] that they were doing it to honor the flag. That’s delusional. But it’s what we have to live with. You’ve got a choice: We can continue to bounce our heads off the walls with his conduct, or we can decide the institutions of our country are more important, people are more important, [the] decent America we all have and want is more important — get down to business at the grassroots level and do what we have to do.”
“I’m an individual. I live in this country. I have a right to say and do what I want. It has nothing to do with my position,” Popovich said. “Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that unless it is talked about constantly, it is not going to get better. People get bored, ‘Oh, is it that again? They are pulling the race card.’ Because it’s uncomfortable, there has be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change. Whether it is LGBT, women’s suffrage, race, [it] doesn’t matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable; especially white people. We still have no clue what being born white means.
“If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it’s true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can’t look at it. [It] can’t be something on their plate on a daily basis. People want their status quo. People don’t want to give it up. Until it’s given up, it’s not going to be fixed.”
I love this guy. Including for his delightful gruffness at sideline reporters and his legendary not-really-a-feud with Craig Sager and his questions that led to this when Sager came back from his first bout with cancer.