Bomani Babatunde Jones was born in Atlanta to an economist mother and a political scientist father. Bomani means “warrior,” and his first two names are a reflection of his father’s radical pan-Africanist politics. Even as a child he was precocious, with a flair for language. Recently he unearthed a notebook from his childhood—he estimates he couldn't have been more than five at the time—in which he had been tasked by a teacher with writing out the life story of Martin Luther King Jr. “I don't remember what I said at all at the beginning, but I do remember the last line,” Jones recalls.

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“It was ‘And then the capitalists shot him.’”

When I meet the ESPN host at Amy Ruth’s in Harlem in November, he is waiting for me in front of the restaurant with his hands shoved in the pockets of a Tribe Called Quest hoodie, attempting to look inconspicuous and, at six-foot-four, failing. We grab a seat in the corner so that his back is to the rest of the room, and I tell him that the last time I was here, I saw the rapper A$AP Rocky, who made a restaurant employee delete a photo he stealthily took on his phone. This leads to a conversation about how Jones feels about potentially being recognized in public, and he explains to me his theory that there are two types of people on television. First, there are the people on the local news with perfect teeth and hair just so, living in the glow of a dream come true. These are the people who, as children, saw the local nightly news anchor and thought to themselves, that could be me.

Then there’s the other kind, the people who just sort of end up on TV, whether through luck or happenstance or some combination of the two. An aberration, if anything. As if to erase any doubt, Jones adds, “I’m the second kind.”

This year, ESPN is about to get a whole lot more of the second kind—a TV show Bomani Jones will co-host with Pablo Torre called High Noon (9 a.m. Pacific), which premieres June 4. Even if you don’t watch ESPN regularly, you might recognize Jones as the guy who went on Mike and Mike one morning, unzipped a hoodie, and immediately made white people across America flip out. (Sample headline: “Bomani Jones Wore a ‘Caucasians’ Shirt on ESPN and White People Flipped Out.”) Jones was wearing a T-shirt that featured an instantly recognizable sendup of the Indians’ absurd Chief Wahoo mascot. His hair is blond instead of black; a dollar sign hangs over his head rather than a single feather; and instead of the Cleveland logo, it says “Caucasians” in the Indians script. The ridiculous sideways look and the garish—even gruesome—grin are the same.

Jones claims he didn’t mean to be provocative, and that his intentions were perfectly innocent. Accidental or not, the Caucasians shirt recast a spotlight on a man who was already one of the country’s smartest and most outspoken commentators when it comes to difficult discussions about race and the athletic-industrial complex—a man often derided by right-wing bloggers as a “race huckster.”

In the context of ESPN, being loud and certain isn’t exactly an uncommon contribution unto itself. But compared to, say, Pardon the Interruption (a show I fondly refer to as I Truly Wish They Would Stop Yelling for Just Like Two Seconds This Is Really Stressing Me Out) or the walking, talking YouTube comments section that is Stephen A. Smith, Jones offers something different: a nuanced look at sports, backed up by rigorous evidence and a refreshing willingness to admit mistakes. As the Caucasians shirt made clear, the fact that Jones riles up the “stick to sports” segment of ESPN’s viewership isn’t a coincidence. Many viewers still think that these opinions have no place on a sports network, especially when they come from a black man. And especially one who, at most points in American history, would have been labeled an uppity Negro when he’s just trying to have a good ol’ time.

The arena of professional sports is a place where the black body, which white America has been trained for centuries to fear and loathe, is cast as a symbol of power and agency—even as the real human beings behind that symbolism are stripped of those things in real life. Bomani Jones likes working in sports media for this reason: ESPN gives him a platform to talk about race and racism with a lot of people, people who would probably never otherwise listen to him. On an optimistic day, we might even see his presence on the network as a sign toward some kind of progress or possibility.

When he’s talking about the NCAA or the Dallas Cowboys, Jones is really having a conversation about white supremacy, about white America’s struggle to reconcile its love of sports institutions with its hatred of black people. The controversy over the NFL protests, like most sports controversies involving black athletes making demands that white spectators deem unreasonable, boils down to a basic discordant tension inherent in the culture. Sports are seen as an important force in our efforts at societal cohesion; they’re supposed to be aspirational, supposed to make you feel good, like we’re all in it together.

When you add the presence of black athletes who insist on reminding Americans of the country’s sins—well, that’s just uncomfortable. I asked Bomani…

Do you feel like it's possible to have an American sports institution that is not racist or is it fundamentally just going to always be that way?

“Well let's extend it. How many American institutions—period—are not racist, right? We can take it to sports, certainly, but just generally, how many of them are not racist? It's hard to separate sports from the nation... Part of our difficulty in reconciling gender and sports is the way the sports have been used to promote masculinity as much as anything else. And notions of teamwork, the goal, the achievements and everything else.”

Unity, “we're all together...”

“Right! Sports are here to reinforce what we believe to be the goodness in us. Can a sporting institution truly sell itself with the notion that black people are representative of the goodness within it?… Can blackness be the representation of what is good?”

Or of heroism.

“Right. Or of being in charge. Being the brains behind the operation, of all of these things…I feel like all the stuff about race and sports is absolutely mirrored by race everywhere else. The only thing that's different between this and most major institutions is that talent is the rarest commodity. In sports and music to a lesser degree. But sports? It's really the one place that black people have an advantage at what is the hardest thing to do. And that makes everything really tricky because then you need them. And then what do you do if you need them?”

The thorniness of the relationship between black athletes and the institutions that employ them—of need, of value, of power, of capitalist exchange, of bodies being laid on the line for the right price—is what’s generally missing from popular analyses, the ones that see their visibility as sufficient evidence that black people have Made It, and should therefore shut up. And that includes the visibility of people like Jones, who understands his own role as a commodity in the sports entertainment economy but resists the idea that it represents some sort of altruism on the part of a white media system. For that reason, the politics of representation—the idea that simply being present, being in the room, is somehow radical or transformative—seems insufficient.

“I don't know how much credit I want to give to people for being willing to take talented people and make money off of them,” says Jones. He takes a sip of coffee.

The city of Zaria in Nigeria is situated near a number of automobile manufacturing plants that, just a few short decades ago, used to produce Peugeots and Volkswagen Beetles. In any given parking lot there was a sea of identical cars. All beige, all small and round.

On a phone call, Bomani Jones’ mother, Barbara Ann Posey Jones, told me a story from his childhood. On a walk one day, three-year-old Bomani pointed to a car in a parking lot, seemingly indistinguishable from the others. He recognized it as one of their neighbors. “That’s Mr. Latif’s car,” he said. She asked him how he knew. He pointed to the license plate number, and his mother laughed. “I didn't even know what our license tag number was,” she said.

“We had all these photos of all the kids in dashikis,” Jones remembers. His childhood home had “the motherland painted on the wall.” After Zaria, Jones’ family relocated to Atlanta. While his academic parents encouraged critical thinking and dissent as a child, it took Jones a while for him to come into his own racial politics. Amidst the optimistic multicultural fervor of the nineties, Jones’s experiences at school were “overwhelmingly positive” and he had a lot of white friends.

“I've been in these trailer houses,” he told me over chicken and waffles. “I've been down these dirt roads. I've partied with these folks. They ain’t livin’ that much different than other people are.” Jones and the white kids bonded over speaker boxes, The Chronic, and Doggystyle, and posted up in parking lots against F-150s blasting the same hip-hop that was entrancing young people on corners and in malls across the country.

In his formative years, this all lent Jones an overarching sense of optimism, one that sometimes left him at odds with his activist father, who was once kicked out of his university for participating in sit-ins and was unimpressed by white kids who loved Snoop. The younger Jones was frustrated with his father’s cynicism. Our generation, he thought, is gonna fix this thing.

Following in his mother’s footsteps, after college he earned a master’s degree in politics, economics, and business from Claremont Graduate University, and a master’s in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In college, Jones was interested in everything and switched majors accordingly, moving from chemistry to almost-history to economics to almost-English before finally landing back in the econ department. Everything felt easy, everything came naturally, and it was all a matter of where he felt like grounding his time and curiosity.

Just before Jones’ 25th birthday, Hurricane Katrina happened. Like the rest of the country, he was glued to the television, watching black families being shot at and abandoned on the roofs of their homes, or crowded into the Super Dome. Jones was horrified. “I had gotten this totally wrong.” Any narrative he might have believed about the root of American injustice being grounded in anything other than deep, fundamental racism evaporated. “It was the most stark thing in the world to just kind of see what really happens when the people are black. And how suddenly it's like, all the notions of ‘really it's about class, and exposure, and people just haven't been around each other,’ da-da-da,” he says. He was especially shocked by the way the media talked about the victims, criminalizing them or blaming them for their own despair.

“Katrina came around and it was just like no, this is fucking mental,” he said. “This is deeper than I ever could have imagined and more depraved than I ever thought it could possibly be.”

In the span of five years, his best friend passed away, he moved across the country twice, enrolled in graduate school, left graduate school, and somewhere along the way decided that he might like to try to be a writer. Eventually he landed in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a job hosting a radio show, The Morning Jones, which covered everything—sports, music, pop culture. The job suited him. It allowed him to talk for a long time, uninterrupted, to a diverse array of listeners.

“That show spoke to a wide variety of people,” says Aden Darity, a close friend from Jones’s North Carolina days. “And I think that can be attributed to the fact that his on-air persona is your smart homie. He’s smart, but he isn’t talking down to you unless you need it. It’s characteristic of all of us who were hanging out then. We were educated, but we communicated with colloquialisms and slang, and we rode around terrorizing people by playing 8Ball & MJG at maximum volume.”

To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered."

Jones’ comfort with navigating white spaces worked in tandem with his own awakening toward racism in America to make him an ideal radio host: someone unafraid of provocation, but who was also patient when engaging people with different politics. He used the radio show to create his own little strange, hodgepodge community. He cultivated a set of regular callers, informal friends of the show—people like Mike Giddens, better known as “DJ Mike Hitman,” a DJ from Chicago’s West Side, who would poke fun at conventional radio norms by, say, sharing his phone number with callers on air, telling them to hit him up if they’re ever in town. Jones brought the fullness of himself to the show—his humor, his varied interests, his questions about the world, his fundamental beliefs. For many of Jones’s white listeners in those days, this was a transformative image of what blackness could be; not a flattened personality, but three-dimensional and human, with space for complication.

To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered.” Jones was smart, he was funny, and he made people feel like they were part of a community. And so it was only a matter of time before he would become one of those second types of people—the kind that accidentally end up on TV.

Last October, after a win against the Detroit Lions, sportswriter Jourdan Rodrigue asked Panthers quarterback Cam Newton a question. “Devin Funchess has seemed to really embrace the physicality of his routes,” she said. “Getting those extra yards. Does that give you a little bit of an enjoyment to see him kind of truck-sticking people out there?”

A smirk appeared on Newton’s face before the question was over. “It’s funny… to hear a female talk about routes. Like…” He looked down at the podium and then made that weird grimace-grinning emoji face, baring all his teeth. The awkward pause after the “like” was just long enough to make you hope that he might somehow, some way, salvage this comment, and then it flatlined. “It’s funny,” he repeated blandly. After the incident Dannon dropped him as a sponsor (nobody likes sexist yogurt) and Newton apologized for what he called his “sarcasm trying to give someone a compliment.”

Enter Bomani Jones, who used the incident as an instructional point. He’s an economist at heart, writing proofs in his head, and he argues like one. “[Newton] laughed at a woman who was questioning the team, asking him about route running,” said Jones on The Right Time. “And he says he thinks it’s funny, the idea of a woman asking about running routes.” He then pointed out the logical fallacy that revealed its inherent sexism: many male sportswriters, including Jones himself, don’t have the technical knowledge to talk about routes. Thus, there was no way to interpret the comment as anything other than a sexist slight, despite Newton’s insistence to the contrary.

Or take the NFL protests: “If the issue is the anthem, why are you booing guys who are kneeling before the anthem? If you never paid attention [to the anthem] before, why are you doing these things? Why is the league dressing this stuff up in this way? Why do all of these things happen? What are the differences?”

Jones is constantly testing a series of if this, then that propositions, writing proofs in his head, trying to find the most elegant answer at the bottom of a series of self-contradictory explanations. “I view things pretty coldly and rationally,” says Jones. “Everything I hear is a cost-benefit analysis to a degree.”

There was one college course that changed everything for him. It was a theoretical math course, and it was designed to help incoming students let go of their high school notions of math: “plug and chug,” memorizing and executing steps without really understanding the concepts beneath them. He became fascinated with the art of simplicity, and the elegance and efficacy of reducing things to their simplest form.

“A lot of this stuff, once we get to talking about it… before you get started on everything else, you gotta get the nonsense out the way. When you whittle the noise away, and you are able to figure out what doesn’t hold up, that’s the big thing. And once you figure out what doesn’t hold up, you wind up with some pretty basic stuff at the bottom.” As he moves through the world, he’s testing hypotheses, checking them for hypocrisy, thinking like a code-breaker. He searches for the cracks in the logic.

I guess when I talk about him this way, it would make it easy for you to believe that Jones is some sort of cold robot, a Data-esque figure whose commitment to rationality makes him unconcerned with the messiness of human hearts and fuzzy feelings. But it doesn’t quite work that way. It means that where many of us are perfectly content to see either the forest or the trees, Jones is wandering the woods like a botanist, trying to figure out the bark and the roots and the patterns of the falling leaves. It’s not that Jones thinks he knows everything. But he is relentless in trying to figure out what he deems to be true. And he is patient with other people trying to do the same.

“To a degree it informs a sense of empathy, in that everybody’s got a different utility function,” he says. “But we all come up with this in different ways. Like my daddy always says, everybody doing the best they can, by and large. And so they might make things that look like errors along the way in doing it, but everybody in one way or another is trying to figure out this function that has no form. They just tryna get the best answers they can.”

Soon after critics lambasted Newton for his sexism, others came forward to remind the world that Rodrigue had tweeted some things that her editor called “regrettable,” about how her father was “super racist” on a drive through Navajo land, and was “the best” at telling “racist jokes the whole ride home.” Jokes like that—haha, you’re a woman working in sports! haha, you’re Native!—rely on some body being out of line. Being out of your place. And sometimes it seems like the secret to living in America, if you have one of those troublesome, perpetually out-of-line bodies, is to flip the joke on its head. Jay-Z says something along those lines in Decoded: “You realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke’s on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting.”

“I think there are people who believe that I wake up every day looking for the angle of race,” Jones tells me. “I don't feel like explaining people's misery every day. I'm in this for fun. I'm in this as much as anything, for the jokes.”

In a 2015 interview, Jones was asked by the New York Times if he ever worried that his outspoken nature would ever get him in trouble with ESPN. “I don’t think anybody at ESPN is going to get in trouble for saying something that is factually undeniable,” he said at the time.

"I thought the shirt was funny. [I] never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial."

I asked Jones if he still believed that to be true today, in a conversation that took place two weeks after ESPN had suspended Jemele Hill for what they called two violations of their social media guidelines—first, when she stated that Donald Trump “is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy,” and then when she said that fans who disagreed with Jerry Jones about the national anthem protests should “boycott his advertisers.”

Jones worded his response carefully, looking past me for a moment at the mirror behind my head. “I think where things have changed from what I said [in 2015] to what I'm looking now at, is I never imagined that something factually true could prove to be as inflammatory as things that are factually true have proven to be.” As for his own ability to strike a balance between speaking his mind and keeping his job, Jones is unfazed. “Perhaps it’s because I have the arrogance to believe that I can figure this out.” He acknowledges that the response to Hill is “absolutely colored by the fact that she is a woman…and a black woman, at that.”

Jones’s cohost Pablo Torre has also commented publicly about sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia in sports, and the ways that gender discrimination interact with racism. Last May, Breitbart wrote about Jones and Torre’s forthcoming collaboration with the headline “No Social Justice Warrior Left Behind.” But Torre, himself one of a very few Asian-American personalities in the world of high-profile sports media, doesn’t believe that these conversations are going away any time soon. “It became very clear that sports is so much more than sports,” says Torre. “And if that were not the case then the president wouldn't be seeking to use sports as this political cudgel.”

Torre sees Jones as a singular voice amidst the noise when it comes to debates about race, and in the world of sports broadcasting more generally. “It’s very obvious that there’s no one else like him.” Torre describes his first experience on Around the Horn and meeting Bomani. “I'll be honest, I approached our first episodes of Around the Horn like, that was the dude that I was intimidated by. That was the guy whose intellect and personality and unpredictability, all of those things made me want to step my game up even that much more.”

Once Torre got to know Jones better, he realized how kind Bomani Jones could be. Jones offered advice and chill time, and at one point baked Torre a batch of chocolate chip cookies. (For the record, Torre says they were delicious.) “This dude is not only completely unpredictable in terms of where he's going to go next in conversation, but he is so much warmer and nicer than I think people give him credit for.”

Still, some aspects of Jones’s way of doing things still left him in awe. “I consider myself a bright dude,” says Torre, who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. “But his brain is just unique. How it works, what it is able to do simultaneously is staggering and unlike any other that I know.”

The first time Torre visited him in the studio to join him live on the radio, he had a chance to watch Jones in action after previously having called in remotely. The first thing that struck him was that Jones did a three-hour radio show, essentially a series of monologues, with no notes. But he saw that Jones was scribbling something on paper as he spoke into the microphone.

Upon looking closely, Torre realized what it was: Jones was completing a crossword puzzle, while live on air.

He had worn the “Caucasians” shirt in public before, and even posted about it on Twitter. “I thought the shirt was funny,” says Jones. It’s why he “never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial.”

He decided to wear the unzipped hoodie that morning because he thinks he looks skinny on television and wanted to layer up. After the first segment, no one said anything. When the show went to commercial, someone informed him that everyone on Twitter was talking about the shirt. Soon, someone else swooped in to request that Jones zip the hoodie up. Their argument in the moment, as Jones saw it, was “perfectly fair.”

“It was, ‘It is distracting from everything you say. Nobody is thinking about what you guys are talking about.’ Boom, fair point, that's a television production issue. Gotcha. But I tell them, ‘I don't know if this is the best play because it's going to look like you're censoring me and then it's going to look worse for you.’ But I don't have to agree with you, I just need the point to make sense. And the point made sense.”

Jones zipped up the hoodie, finished the show, and flew to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to see a concert. On the plane, a woman sitting next to him was reading an email chain. “Bomani Jones” was the subject line, but she was so engrossed in it that she didn’t notice him sitting next to her. He said nothing.

When he arrived in Atlanta and walked through the airport, people hailed him as he passed—yo man, nice shirt! In the next 24 hours, the website producing the shirts would crash after its owner got thousands of new orders.

But aside from being a funny story about a provocateur inadvertently thumbing his nose at a white media establishment, Jones sees the story as signifying something more notable—something about hypocrisy, and about whose dissenting voices matter when push comes to shove.

“I knew that I had the intellectual and moral high ground here. If you have a problem with this, then you cannot run any of this other stuff,” he adds, referring to the Cleveland Indians logo. “Simple as that.”

If this, then that. The shirt was a litmus test, a proof of concept. It laid bare the uncomfortable rules about where the balance of power lies in media representation and who gets to be the butt of a joke. And that, of course, is why it made people so angry. Here again was Bomani Jones, distilling things down to their simplest form, parsing the argument for cracks and inconsistencies. “There was no argument that anybody could make that I was doing something wrong because the rules of the game had already been established. Except the rules of the game are, ‘white people get to make fun of Native Americans; nobody gets to make fun of white people.’”

Here’s the funny part, though. A few months later, Jones was watching the Mike and Mike guys covering the World Series. Mike Golic, who hails from Cleveland, was wearing an Indians jersey with the grinning Chief Wahoo.

That’s the joke. Get it?

Eve L. Ewing is a writer and sociologist from Chicago. Her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side is out this October.

Styled by Danielle Wright, FreeByrd