The former NFL player believes uncomfortable conversations are a way of bridging the racial divide. So he wrote a book about them
What’s in a name? Power, says Emmanuel Acho. Before he was a standout football player turned TV commentator, he was the Nigerian kid with the biblical name that had all the kids fumbling for something else to call him. At his predominately white private suburban high school, he was “Manny.” To a mostly black gridiron cohort at the University of Texas, where he’d distinguish himself at linebacker on a college football powerhouse, he became “Acho” to differentiate him from his older brother, who had the privilege of being called by his first name, Sam – and who, like him, would go on to have a career in the NFL.
In time, Acho found inside those locker room walls the kind of open and meaningful discussions about race and culture that most on the outside would rather not have. “The locker room is what our society needs to look like,” says Acho. “You have people of different races, different religions. But because you have a common goal of beating the opponent, you don’t care about everyone’s differences. What we haven’t yet realized [as a society] is our opponent is oppression. The opponent is hatred, systemic injustice.”
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