It’s time to drop ‘Rebels’ nickname
So the Southeastern Conference has thrown down the gauntlet in the direction of Mississippi, whose state flag is an embarrassing relic that stubbornly honors American traitors who do not deserve it.
It’s no secret that administrators and coaches associated with the SEC’s two Mississippi schools have wanted the flag gone for a long time. Its nod to the Confederacy is outdated, its symbolism is a disgrace and the fact it hasn’t been changed is an endless frustration to the people whose business is attracting Black students and athletes to those institutions.
And so Greg Sankey, a true bureaucrat of an SEC commissioner whose tenure has been light on notable accomplishment and heavy on keeping the league’s cash registers ringing, has made his move at this moment of national reckoning. He’s threatened that the league could ban SEC championship events from being held in Mississippi unless its flag is changed, applying the kind of pressure that a college sportscrazed state can’t ignore.
“Our students deserve an opportunity to learn and compete in environments that are inclusive and welcoming to all,” Sankey said.
But if this is where the SEC is going to draw its line in the sand, if this is the moment when the league is going to wade into a gnarly, emotional political mess that is intertwined with a neverending love for Confederate nostalgia, how can it not address the fact that one of its very own members is called the Ole Miss Rebels?
It’s time to have that conversation. It’s time for a progressive, forwardthinking university that has desperately tried to strip away all connotations to the Confederacy while leaving the actual nickname intact do the right thing for the Black players who have brought so much acclaim and wealth to its athletic program.
It’s time for fans to stop playing footsie with the school’s often terrible past and start thinking about how Black athletes will view that branding of “Rebels” in 15 years, in 30 years once this country finally and uniformly treats the losers of the Civil War as losers. It’s time for the conference that distributed $45 million to Ole Miss last year to tell the school its athletic branding is not – in its words – “inclusive and welcoming to all.”
Much to its credit, the University of Mississippi has taken significant steps in the last 25 years to bring its athletic department out of the dark ages of American history. The school banned the Confederate flag in the late 1990s. It dumped Colonel Reb, a caricature of a gentlemanly Southern plantation owner that used to roam the sidelines as its mascot. It banned playing any variation of “Dixie.”
And at every step along the way, it endured complaints from fans who saw the school as dumping on tradition for the sake of political correctness.
But even with all of that, Ole Miss remains on the wrong side of history because all of those accoutrements were born from the original sin of being named the Rebels, the meaning of which we should no longer go out of our way to sanitize.
The truth about Ole Miss is that it is a great school, located in a beautiful college town, filled with good people.
Yet it is not the state flag of Mississippi that has, time and again, drawn racists to Oxford to use the school’s platform as a way to demonstrate their evil. This isn’t ancient history.
It’s obvious what draws them. Why is that worth preserving? Why is it important to fans of a football or basketball team to let the racists glom onto their athletic brand as a platform to spew their hate.
It is impossible for the SEC to claim that student-athletes are threatened by a flag but not a nickname that is worn across their chest every single day.
It is impossible for a school to strip away all of the symbols and say they’ve done the hard work for racial reconciliation except for clearing the hurdle they still broadcast to the world.
It is impossible for the Ole Miss Rebels to be moving in the same direction as American culture and the righteous arc of American history as long as they are the Ole Miss Rebels.