Politics & Power Quote by Bob Cousy

Cousy reaches for biblical scale to make a brutally simple point: racism isn’t a modern glitch, it’s an old human reflex with a reliable body count. The Adam and Eve reference is doing rhetorical work less as theology than as shorthand for “as far back as we can imagine.” It’s an athlete’s move - broad, legible, meant to land with fans who might tune out a more technical argument.

Then he narrows the lens: “but in this country...” That pivot matters. It’s a refusal of the convenient escape hatch that says, “everyone’s been bad, everywhere, forever,” which can flatten accountability into a shrug. Cousy uses the universal claim as a setup, then redirects toward a specifically American history where anti-Black racism isn’t incidental but structural - the primary target around which laws, neighborhoods, labor markets, and policing practices were built and defended.

The subtext is also about permission: a white sports icon from an earlier era asserting, plainly, that the central racial story of the United States is the treatment of African Americans. Coming from someone whose career predates the Civil Rights Act, it carries an implied rebuke to nostalgia. If you miss “the good old days,” he’s reminding you what those days cost and who paid.

It’s not a nuanced taxonomy of prejudice; it’s an insistence on hierarchy and focus. Cousy isn’t asking for abstract empathy. He’s asking for historical specificity.