Gregg Popovich is paid to win NBA championships, and he's very good at it. But Pop has always brought something more to coaching. A Wall Street Journal profile in 2016 traced how he has instilled a kind of franchise-wide ethos at the San Antonio Spurs, where players are encouraged not just to master plays and get themselves in peak physical condition, but to learn history and current events and get themselves in peak condition to serve as citizens of a democratic republic. Pop is at least partly interested in that second part because, he says, if he just taught basketball, he'd get bored. But he's also keenly aware of the stakes at play, particularly at this historical moment.

The United States is on a razor's edge, and Popovich has repeatedly aired concerns that the prevailing social, cultural, and economic conditions of the present are starting to resemble the end of Rome. He has pilloried Donald Trump for treating the presidency like a "game show," where every domestic disturbance and international incident is another episode of The Apprentice. He has also called Trump a "soulless coward" and "pathological liar" who "the whole world knows" is unfit to serve. But more than that, Popovich has proved himself to be fully aware of the historical implications of this political era, and how it has forced us to once again grapple with racism, the nation's original sin. He spoke eloquently on Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests, and he rose to the occasion again Monday when asked what Black History Month should mean to his NBA and to the country.

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Spurs coach Gregg Popovich on why it's important for the NBA to promote Black History Month: "We live in a racist country… And it's always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people." pic.twitter.com/RCCs7rSJix — ABC News (@ABC) February 13, 2018

"We live in a racist country" is unfortunately something that needs to be said—particularly by white men in visible positions of power. This has, shockingly, been a good micro-period in that regard, as even Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III admitted publicly, without equivocation, that the Civil War was about slavery. Not states' rights, or tariffs, or the desire to preserve some way of life. Slavery. We will need to face the truth—loudly, clearly, and more often—if we are to patch up the fabric of our society and stave off, for a little while longer, the Roman fate that awaits all great republics and empires.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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