
2018 Celebration Bowl is back on ABC, featuring MEAC and SWAC champs
Game will kick off football bowl season
2:07 PMThe Celebration Bowl, featuring football champions from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) and Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), will kick off the 2018 bowl season at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Dec. 15.
“We are proud that once again the Celebration Bowl will kick off the college football bowl season on ABC in Atlanta, Georgia,” said Celebration Bowl executive director John Grant. “Each of the past three years we have presented exciting games that went down to the wire in determining who would claim the coveted Celebration Bowl trophy.”
It’s the fourth consecutive year that the conference champions will play. The MEAC leads the series 2-1, with both wins coming from North Carolina A&T, whose last-minute 21-14 win over Grambling State in 2017 capped the first unbeaten season in MEAC history. Grambling won the SWAC’s first title in 2016 with a 10-9 victory over North Carolina Central.
“I would like to thank ESPN for their vision and dedication to establishing the Celebration Bowl as one of the top collegiate bowl games,” said interim SWAC commissioner Edgar Gantt. “We are excited and look forward to participating in this year’s bowl. Our student-athletes, coaches and fans have enjoyed this first-class event.”
“The exposure for our conference and institutions on a national level is tremendous for our branding,” said MEAC commissioner Dennis E. Thomas. To start the 2018 bowl season is an excellent opportunity for our student-athletes, coaches and institutions as they play on a national platform.”
ESPN Events, a division of ESPN, also manages the season-opening MEAC/SWAC Challenge on Labor Day weekend, another game that showcases these two conferences. The 2018 Challenge will be in Atlanta for the first time, featuring Prairie View A&M University from the SWAC and North Carolina Central University from the MEAC. The game is Sept. 2, at Georgia State Stadium, and will be televised on ESPN2 at noon Eastern.
ESPN will televise 35 bowl games, including all 14 of ESPN Events’ owned and operated contests, over 17 days, beginning Dec. 15 and concluding on New Year’s Day. The games will set the table for the college football national championship, which will conclude the season on Jan. 7, 2019, from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

Clark Atlanta University chooses a new men’s hoops coach, and it’s another ex-NBA player
George Lynch, who played at North Carolina and with five NBA teams, has his first head coaching job
9:49 AMWhen your last former-NBA player-turned coach wins 45 games in two years, it makes sense for you to go out and hire someone with a similar résumé.
The oft-used proverb “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was obviously at play as Clark Atlanta University introduced former Philadelphia 76er George Lynch as its new head men’s basketball coach Monday. The hiring comes roughly a month after the departure of former New York Knicks player Darrell Walker, who left for the University of Arkansas, Little Rock in late March.
Lynch was a journeyman, playing for five NBA teams, including stints with the then-New Orleans Hornets and the Los Angeles Lakers. Before taking the job with Panthers, the former small forward was coaching with a Detroit Pistons G League affiliate, the Grand Rapids Drive.
The 12-year NBA veteran’s crowning moment, however, was as a North Carolina Tar Heel. Remember Chris Webber’s ill-advised timeout that cost the Fab Five the 1992-93 NCAA championship? Lynch helped force it.
20 years ago today Chris Webber called a timeout that he did not have, sealing a national championship for North Carolina. from CollegeBasketball
Look at that ball pressure! Wolverine fans have Lynch to blame for one of the biggest folds in basketball history. A senior at the time, the four-year player also took home All-Tournament and East Regional MVP honors that year as well as being drafted in the first round of the ’93 draft by the Los Angeles Lakers.
Having spent four years under the legendary Dean Smith, there’s no doubt the Panthers are hoping this translates to wins as soon as possible in Lynch’s first head coaching gig. Lynch, however, will have big shoes to fill after Walker’s short yet successful stint in Atlanta.
“It was an honor to take this interview and follow up coach Darrell Walker,” Lynch said at the news conference announcing his hiring. “He’s done a great job at leading the young men and the university. I’d like to continue their success in seeing these young men graduate and follow their dreams. That’s my goal.”
According to AJC.com, Lynch played under Walker for two seasons when he was an assistant coach with the Hornets. He turned to him about the Clark Atlanta job, which had more than 60 applicants.

How do you solve a problem like hoteps?
Complaints about a passage in Issa Rae’s 3-year-old book are part of a larger problem of misogynoir
3:11 PMFor some reason, a passage from The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, the memoir that Insecure creator Issa Rae published in 2015, began trending on Twitter recently.
It’s a funny, honest, fairly anodyne work. But it turns out that some Twitter users took offense to a passage in which Rae recommended that black women and Asian men start dating each other more. In 2014, OkCupid released a study that found that those two groups were, by quantitative standards, the least desirable groups using the service. Rae wrote a chapter riffing on this data, and three years later, someone on the internet decided this meant that Rae hates black men, and here we are.

At first glance, this is the sort of thing that merits an eye roll and little else. Classic hotep, Ashy Twitter nonsense.
Except for one small problem: Internet misogyny has a way of spilling into real life, something that writers such as Amanda Marcotte, Amanda Hess and Lindy West have been writing about for years. We have plenty of examples of men who commit deadly acts of violence in real life, motivated by hateful ideology they ingested and espoused online. There’s Elliot Rodger, the man who killed six people and then himself in 2014, because women wouldn’t have sex with him. George Sodini targeted an all-female aerobics class in 2009 for the same reason. There’s the man who threatened to bomb Utah State University because feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a speech there. The latest example is Alek Minnasian, a self-described “incel” (involuntary celibate) who allegedly recently drove a van into a crowd in Toronto and killed 10 people, and who thought of Rodger as a hero.
OK, you say. But all of these guys were white. What does that have to do with hoteps? There are various strains of internet misogynists: incels, GamerGaters, pickup artists, white supremacists obsessed with the 14 Words, etc. Hoteps are just a little more specialized — they tend to be black men who hate black women, and especially mouthy black feminists. They traffic in what many online black feminists call “misogynoir.” Most hoteps can be found on Twitter because that’s where the majority of black public discourse on the internet takes place.
While they may be small in number, they are loud. You know the type: They’re the ones who say that there’s a conspiracy to lock up Bill Cosby because he was going to buy NBC.
- They blame all of Kanye West’s inchoate, misogynist, faux-deep nattering (“I had to take 30 showers” after being with Amber Rose) on the death of his mother, Donda.
- They cheer when accused rapist Kobe Bryant wins an Oscar in the midst of the century’s most high-profile movement against sexual harassment and assault.
- They blame R. Kelly’s victims when they come forward to tell reporters the singer held them in a “sex cult.”
- They’re the reason black feminists are constantly explaining that racial liberation is not “black men get to behave with impunity like white men who exhibit unethical and abusive behavior.”
Even in the absence of a mass killing in the vein of Rodgers or Sodini, black women still experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence of any racial group. When we normalize rhetoric based in gendered resentment toward black women, it’s a piece of a larger puzzle that contributes to their victimization. That’s why it’s up to all of us to push back against misogynoiristic vitriol. Just because the physical results of such rhetoric have yet to make nationally televised news doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Cosby’s conviction proves a misogynist in a bow tie is still a misogynist
He used class as a shield and projected his worst qualities onto poor black people
12:30 PMBill Cosby’s self-righteous moralizing finally did him in.
In 2009, some five years after he’d delivered his now-notorious “Pound Cake Speech,” Cosby released a rap album: Bill Cosby Presents the Cosnarati: State of Emergency. The purpose of the album was, in Cosby’s words, to “tackle such social issues as self-respect, peer pressure, abuse and education … that doesn’t rely on profanity, misogyny, materialism or ego exercise.” “Pound Cake” with a backbeat, if you will.
Well looky here: Kendrick Lamar has a Pulitzer Prize and Bill Cosby will soon have a prison sentence. At this point (Drake beef notwithstanding), Meek Mill is more of a hero in Philadelphia than Cosby is.
Cosby, who was convicted Thursday of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, had long been guilty of shaming black people. Especially poor black people, and especially those darn hip-hoppers, with their cursing and their insistence on using the N-word and their baggy pants and their drug-dealing and their hatred of women. To Cosby, this culture was the real problem with black people, not mass incarceration, or racist policing, or discrimination in housing and education, or racist discrepancies in prison sentencing, or the drug war.
No, it was black people not taking enough personal responsibility.
“Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola,” Cosby said in 2004. “People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ Not ‘You’re going to get your butt kicked.’ No. ‘You’re going to embarrass your family.’ ”
Slipping Quaaludes into women’s drinks is totes better than slinging crack on the corner, right?
His conviction came in part because, in 2015, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno unsealed a 2005 deposition from the civil suit Constand filed against Cosby. The judge’s reasoning? Cosby “has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, child rearing, family life, education and crime. To the extent that defendant has freely entered the public square and ‘thrust himself into the vortex of [these public issues],’ he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.”
Or, in the far less legalistic words of comedian Hannibal Buress: “Bill Cosby has the f—ing smuggest old black man persona that I hate. He gets on TV: ‘Pull your pants up, black people! I was on TV in the ’80s! I can talk down to you ’cause I had a successful sitcom!’ ”
The conviction came after approximately 60 women had publicly accused Cosby of sexual abuse that spanned decades. It was Constand whose case could be heard, though, because it was one of the few that remained within the statute of limitations. And so this case was not just about her.
It was clear from the way he refused to entertain the questions about the sexual assault allegations against him from an Associated Press reporter in 2014: “No, no. We don’t answer that,” he said, as though the reporter’s question was some gross violation of politesse. Cosby thought he’d ascended to the point that he could rely on the shield of aristocracy: that outward dignity and gentility was — and, perhaps more significantly, should be — enough to deflect attention from internal ugliness. After all, it worked for the Kennedys — just ask Mary Jo Kopechne. Oh wait, we can’t.
At some point, we must acknowledge that the ideas that informed Cosby’s black conservatism and attendant hypocrisy are what uphold a culture of silence around rape and sexual assault on historically black college and university (HBCU) campuses such as Morehouse and Spelman (where Cosby donated so much money he funded a professorship and put his wife’s name on a building). Cosby condescended to poor black people and advanced the idea that higher education — and the education in class and decorum that presumably accompanied it, especially at HBCUs — was the answer to black people’s problems. He never understood that a misogynist in a bow tie is still a misogynist.
When we debated whether it was appropriate for the Smithsonian Institution to display Cosby’s art collection in the National Museum of African Art, what we were really debating was whether it was ethical for an institution to be complicit in upholding this aristocratic contract. That’s why it was significant when colleges and universities began rescinding their honorary degrees and removing Cosby’s name from their edifices. This wasn’t about erasing a man or a legacy. It was about clawing back the cloak of legitimacy he’d used not only to denigrate poor black people but also to win the trust of so many of his victims. After all, Constand met Cosby when she was director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University and Cosby was one of its favored sons.
Cosby is hardly the only self-styled race man with a woman problem. See also: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and pre-MAGA Kanye West (yes, that would be the same Kanye who tweeted, “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” in 2016.)
This week, a different sort of survivor came forward. In an interview with Hollywood Unlocked, singer Kelis alleged that her former husband, Nas, the same man who wrote “I Can,” had been physically and emotionally abusive. For decades, Cosby has been trying, with varying degrees of success, to suggest that misogyny is a problem of less educated, less well-mannered black people. Well guess what, Bill, now you’re in the same boat as R. Kelly and a host of other abusers you’d prefer to sniff at. Happy paddling.
Cosby’s conviction offers some measure of vindication for the five dozen women who have accused him of drugging and/or sexually assaulting them. Finally, a woman got to tell her story to a jury. And finally, she was believed.
But I’m hoping that this week delivers another lesson too. True justice and equality do not mean that wealthy men of color get to behave with the same cavalier disregard for women as their wealthy white counterparts do. True equality is when all abusers, regardless of race, are held to account for their actions and they’re no longer allowed to use class as a shield.