This morning, former Gator offensive lineman Shannon Snell took a break from cooking up some relationship ribs to speak about a wide variety of issues on our podcast, the In All Kinds Of Weather Forecast. By “a wide variety of issues,” I mean everything from the passing of his former teammate Reche Caldwell, to his thoughts on Dan Mullen, to how he became the de facto chef of the Gator football team. It was a 100 minute conversation that neither my co-host Casey Hampton and I are likely to ever forget.
By far the heaviest portion of the conversation, however, was when the topic turned to the racial divide that is currently wreaking havoc on our country. After sharing his thoughts on that, I asked Snell directly about his personal experiences with racism.
Shannon proceeded to detail not one, not two, but three separate occasions where he’d been the victim of racial profiling by various forms of authority, including mall security guards to the police. One of these occasions, he admitted, left him literally in tears. And though he says he’s moved past them and has to live his life without that holding him back, he cannot allow himself to forget them, either.
That clip is embedded below. You can listen to the entire one hour and forty minute episode in its entirety in any of the following places:
Anchor (host) | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts
Our heartfelt thanks to Shannon Snell for opening up about an issue that’s extremely difficult to talk about. But as he mentions in the podcast, sometimes we need to have these difficult conversations in order to get anywhere.
And it’s the hope of both Casey and myself that we as a nation open ourselves up to have these difficult conversations, so that we can get our country to a place where we can live together in peace.
