Jemele Hill knocks Joe Rogan for Josh Hokit interview and Dana White’s ‘weak-a**’ response
As is often the case following a buzzy UFC event, great fights at the Freedom 250 card were immediately overshadowed by bad headlines for the promotion on Monday after heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit used his post-match interview to push forward a racist, baseless conspiracy that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a man.
The comments drew pushback far and wide, including from UFC president Dana White himself, who called Hokit’s stunt “nonsense” in a statement to Time.
In a response on a Monday edition of her Spolitics live show on YouTube, Jemele Hill ripped White for what she called a “cowardly” and “weak-a**” response while also criticizing Joe Rogan for keeping silent while interviewing Hokit, and even the journalists at White’s after-hours press conference for not asking about the incident.
“Joe Rogan stood there and said absolutely nothing,” Hill said. “At the very least, what you should have said is, ‘We don’t do that here,’ and you can move on. The broadcasters, they acted like nothing happened. They just went back to glazing Donald Trump like they had been doing pretty much the whole broadcast.”
Later, Hill argued that White could not have “hated” Hokit’s comments as much as he claimed to Time, considering he did not apologize to Obama or the audience. The former SportsCenter host said White and the president should publicly apologize for Hokit’s remarks, especially given that the event was supposed to be a celebration of American history.
“Dana White has it well within his power to address this in a way that is meaningful and serious,” Hill said. “And he won’t do it because his head is too far up Trump’s a**.”
“And if he ever wants UFC to be known as something more than just a meathead sport that a very select group of people enjoy … he needs to address sh*t like this. Because as a sports fan, I am completely turned off. There is no reason to want to watch something like this.”
While Hill also admonished the Trump administration for what she argued was its role in selecting fighters who were pro-Trump and perhaps more provocative, she reserved some criticism for the reporters who covered the event as well, saying it was “surprising” that none of them asked White for a live response.
As Hill’s reaction shows, there is plenty of blame to go around when a star athlete makes a racist claim about a public figure that goes completely unchecked. It may be somewhat par for the course in the UFC, but if the culture around the sport and what its business partners allow are ever going to change for the better, as White claims he wants, incidents like these cannot be overlooked.
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