San Antonio Spurs basketball coach Gregg Popovich claimed in an interview that white people are privileged and should be made to feel “uncomfortable.”
Popovich made the comments during an appearance on ESPN2’s The Paul Finebaum Show, where he bashed President Trump’s criticism of NFL players who chose to protest the National Anthem and then began to talk about race and social justice movements.
“Well, because it’s uncomfortable, and there has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change. Whether it’s the LGBT movement, women’s suffrage, race, it doesn’t matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people because we’re comfortable. We still have no clue of what being born white means,” Popovich said.
After naming every social justice movement in existence, he suggested that being white is a made-up social construct.
“If you read some of the recent literature, you’ll realize there really is no such thing as whiteness, but we kind of made that up. That’s not my original thought, but it’s true,” Popovich said.
“Because you were born white, you have advantages that are systemically, culturally, psychologically there. And they have been built up and cemented for hundreds of years. But many people can’t look at it. It’s too difficult,” he added.
Popovich has been an outspoken critic of Trump before. He criticized Trump in May before Game 1 of the Western Conference finals matchup against the Golden State Warriors.