Skip Bayless Made My 88-Year-Old Mom Say The F-Word
We have to stop the old and young yellers from drowning the rest of us out.
We’re trying something new around here! I recorded an audio version of this week’s essay. I know these pieces are getting thicc! This is for you folks who don’t wanna do all that reading. So give it a listen with your ears. Or keep reading with your eyes. And let me know in the comments how it goes. Or do none of that and do what you want. (Just maybe don’t do weird racist stuff like Skip Bayless does.)
“Fuck him!” – Janet Cheatham Bell, my mom
I have certainly heard my mom swear before. When I was growing up we never really had a don’t swear rule in our house. I was still surprised and (honestly) amused at her use of profanity. Mostly because of how forcefully she said it. She didn’t throw the F-bomb away, the way you might hear a person say it who is trying to communicate their absolute disregard for someone. My mom said it with her whole chest. My mom said it like it was an incantation to banish her target to the nether realm. She said it like she knew that the object of her scorn was guaranteed to physically feel it when it left her mouth. Like her target would be sitting somewhere in his own home and suddenly feel a stabbing pain in his side. He would then cry out in agony, touch the painful area, feel wetness, and wonder aloud, “Why am I bleeding?”
The target of her incantation was Skip Bayless. I am guessing that many of you may not know who that is so let me explain, in brief. In super brief.
Skip Bayless is more than the host of a sports talk show. Skip is a professional sports yeller. You know the job even if you don’t like sports. Any time you see two people on TV talking about sports but you can’t hear them because they are both screaming over each other, you are watching professional sports yellers. ESPN even had a slogan for those types of shows. It was "Embrace Debate.” The word “debate” was doing a lot of work in that slogan. Debate implies rules of engagement and choosing a position and sticking to it. It also implies decorum. None of that is at play on the “Embrace Debate” shows. I say that as someone who watches those shows.
In the early 2010s, Skip Bayless was one of the top two professional sports yellers in media. It was a position he had attained after years in sports “journalism.” I’m putting the word journalism in quotes, because the first time Skip came to national prominence it was in the ‘90s, when, in his book Hell-Bent, Skip spread a rumor that Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman was gay and in the closet. As of this writing in 2025, Aikman has never revealed himself to be either, hence “journalism.”
The other top professional sports yeller was Skip’s cohost, a man you are more likely to know than Skip. His name is Stephen A. Smith. Back in the early 2010s, Stephen A. Smith was number two to Skip’s number one. Skip had handpicked Stephen A. Smith to be his cohost on ESPN’s number one sports yelling show, First Take. They spent four loud years yelling at and over each other until Skip left the show for a different sports-yelling opportunity in 2016. Stephen A. Smith has since taken over First Take and has become the country’s leading sports yeller. (Stephen A. has become so big in sports that he has designs on something way bigger. More on that later.)
In 2016 Skip started a new TV show, Undisputed, at the always-in-second-place sports network, Fox Sports 1. Skip again was allowed to pick his own cohost. Skip needed to replicate the secret sauce that had made him and Stephen A. Smith so successful. He needed a Black sports yeller. Skip needed a Black guy because Skip is white. Like super white. Like born-and-raised-in-Oklahoma white. Skip chose NFL-hall-of-famer-turned-broadcaster Shannon Sharpe. But Shannon had something else that Skip liked. Stephen A. Smith was a highly experienced TV presence by the time he teamed up with Skip. Stephen A. also had an extensive background in sports journalism. Shannon, however, was still relatively new to his career as a sports yeller. I’m sure that the experience gap made Skip feel like Shannon would be the perfect foil/fool to consistently fool/foil with.
After seven successful years of sports yelling, Shannon eventually got tired of Skip treating him like he was only there to make Skip look good. The moment it was clear that Shannon was heading out the door was one of the biggest moments in the history of sports yelling. It combined many of sports’ greatest/most regular topics to yell about: nitpicking of stats, arguments about G.O.A.T.s, and racism.
You don’t have to know anything about sports to know that Skip is “sonning” Shannon. (a.k.a. treating Shannon like Shannon is beneath him) “Put your glasses back on.” has become a meme. It is a fast way to say, “I don’t respect you at all. Not one bit.”
Irony of ironies, Shannon went to Skip’s former home, ESPN, and he teamed up with Skip’s former co-host, Stephen A. Smith. Together they reached a new level of success… until recently when Shannon was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman he dated. Now Shannon is on YouTube.
In the wake of Shannon’s departure, Undisputed fell apart. Skip was let go from Fox Sports 1 about a year later. And now Skip is on YouTube competing with Shannon for eyeballs and clicks. Despite the accusations, Shannon is doing well on YouTube with two successful podcasts. Skip, however, is fumfering. He records his podcast alone in his house. Without having someone to bounce off of, Skip is now living another meme: “Old Man Yells At Cloud”.
At this point I should also mention that Skip is 73 years old.
The key to YouTube success is quite simple but hard to master:
You have to post on a regular schedule.
You have to figure out what the algorithm wants from you, and then you have to feed it that same thing over and over even if you get bored of doing it.
It always helps if you can be topical.
Now that you know all of this, we can return to my mom's four letter curse word curse.
In an effort to strike YouTube gold, Skip, a legacy media sports yeller, decided that sports takes weren’t enough. He needed to spice things up for the almighty algorithm. So the noted sports yeller decided to review Ryan Coogler’s game-changing, Jim Crow era, Vampire horror film Sinners. Sigh.
But, Skip didn’t post his review when the film came out back in April. He didn’t even post it in the several weeks that followed when the SInners discourse was really discoursing. Skip’s Sinners review came out a few days after Sinners arrived on streaming platforms. He specifically released his review on July 4th. (Yet another reason we all couldn't celebrate this year.) It is so late to the Sinners party that it reminds me of this classic Jim Gaffigan joke.
Even if Skip had loved Sinners, his review would feel like your grandpa asking if you had seen this new show Seinfeld. It would be cute but meaningless. But Skip took another route. In the first half of the video, Skip “praises” Ryan Coogler and the film as a whole. I put “praises” in scare quotes because you can feel him slowly and disingenuously lifting the other shoe and getting ready to drop it. Skip’is praise feels like a means to an end. It is a means to be mean. He says, “I loved it, because when Ryan Coogler applies his genius to a film, I just won't have any choice but to love it. He is that gifted.”
So Skip, you are saying that Ryan Coogler is good at making movies? Hold on. Lemme stop the presses. While this may read like a perfectly anodyne compliment, trust me when I say that it doesn’t come off that way. It is dripping with condescension and white privilege. Did you know that some white people used to think (hopefully, this is past tense) that rubbing a Black boy's head was “good luck.” Yup. My mom tells a story of a white man reaching over to rub my head and her stopping him. This was in Indiana, because of course it was. Skip’s “compliment” feels like he is trying to rub Ryan Coogler’s head. I can’t explain it in writing, and I’m not even going to try. Either you’ve been there yourself, or you just have to trust me.
After Skip goes through all the “I love it so much,” he finally gets to the shit part of the compliment sandwich.
Skip said:
“I must admit when Sinners ended I felt battered, bludgeoned, and battered by white guilt. Look, Sinners has no use for white people, nor should it. The prevailing metaphor, of course, is that evil, devious white people tricked Black people and sucked their blood and turned them into something they weren't meant to be.”
The funny part about this feedback is that if it wasn’t for Skip’s heavy dollop of elderly white man spread all over it, I wouldn’t have a problem with what he was saying. Let’s break it down:
“I must admit when Sinners ended I felt battered, bludgeoned, and battered by white guilt.”
Skip, that sounds like a YOU issue. Why is your white guilt so easily inflamed? Get that checked out. There must be a pill for that.
The film never promised to be about all white people. It sounds like you are more drawn to films where characters who look like you are the heroes. It seems like it's not enough for you that Hollywood spent more than 100 years making white people the heroes and Black people the villains, the servants, the foils (sound familiar?), and the objects of scorn or wanton desire. Can I interest you in literally any Tom Cruise film? Or maybe this one – D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation? It’s a classic film where white people save the day. The white actors in it are so good in fact that they even let them play the Black parts.
“Look, Sinners has no use for white people, nor should it.”
What’s happening in this sentence, here, Skip? It seems like you realized that the first half of your sentence–to use a sports metaphor–went too hard in the paint, so you backed off of it with “nor should it.” But if you truly felt like it was fine that Sinners had “no use for white people” THEN WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE WITH ALL THESE WORDS YOU ARE WASTING? WE ONLY HAVE SO MUCH TIME LEFT ON THE PLANET, SKIP!“The prevailing metaphor, of course, is that evil, devious white people tricked Black people and sucked their blood and turned them into something they weren't meant to be.”
Umm… I’m really struggling here, Skip. Do you realize that all you really did here in this quote was tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade? Yet, you are acting like “evil, devious white people” tricking “Black people” and turning “them into something they weren’t meant to be” is a plot that's somehow out of bounds for film? Forget Sinners. The transatlantic slave trade is America's first horror film. Have you seen Roots? Have you seen any of the versions of Roots? While slaveowners didn’t make it a practice of literally sucking our blood, they certainly bled us and stole our blood–through forced breeding–for their gain.Skip is late to the content game and he's clearly searching for the algorithm's love. It's also clear that he has spent his whole life searching for love. I’m not being flowery in my language. In this so-called review of Sinners, Skip tells a completely unnecessary story to prove that he has every right to not like Sinners. I was watching my mom while she watched Skip’s Sinners review. This story is where I saw my mom clearly load "Fuck him" in the chamber.
Now, you aren’t ready for this part of Skip’s review. Trust me. Skip immediately jumped in the deep end of the white privilege pool.
“If you followed my career at all, you probably know I've fought with all my might against racial injustice in this country.”
Yuh oh! In the game of poker, which is occasionally covered by sports yellers, this is what is referred to as a “tell.” A “tell” is when one player has picked up a way to know the kind of cards that the other player is holding without even seeing them. Like you notice the person you are playing against scratches their nose when they have a good hand. When I hear Skip–an old white man– open with the whole I’ve never, ever been racist, I know as sure as I’m Black that I’m about to hear some racism from his mouth. And because I have already seen him be a racist live on TV, I know it is gonna be some top shelf, dusty bottle racism.
“I've told this story before so I'll be brief here.”
I immediately knew the story. I’ve heard him tell it before, because this isn’t the first time he has had to use it as his get-out-of-racism-free card. Skip goes straight Miss Daisy on us.
“I was so blessed to have been mostly raised by a black woman who was far more of a mother and a teacher to me than my mother was.”
YIKES! Skip is forever searching for the love he never had from his own mom in his life. Now he is looking for that love on YouTube, a loveless land. Skip continues:
“Everything I know about right and wrong, I learned from Katie Bell Henderson, who worked for my grandmother, who traveled for her work. And I'm sure some Black people say ‘Oh it's [the film about Black servants and a nice white lady during the Jim Crow era] The Help.’"
Skip, it is The Help. It absolutely is. And you know it is! I would legally place a sports bet on the fact that Skip has tried to sell this story to Hollywood, and that he has used The Help as his comp.
I can totally imagine Skip in a big Hollywood meeting telling the story of his Black nanny:
“It’s like The Help meets Driving Miss Daisy meets Green Book meets Bagger Vance.”
“But trust me, there was no plantation mentality operating at my grandmother's.”
I don’t trust you, Skip. 100% there was a plantation mentality. You actually tell us there was in the next sentence.
“Katie Bell ran that household with an iron fist… unquestioned iron fist.”
Why do you think she did that, Skip? Is it possible that Ms. Henderson was afraid if she did not run it to your grandmother’s exacting specifications that she might get into trouble with your grandmother? Let’s remember that Ms. Henderson was probably only one generation removed from slavery. As was your grandmother, probably. Although, your grandmother would have been more likely on the ownership side.
“Katie Bell grew up in rural Alabama though, like Michael B.'s characters, she had spent many years working in Chicago where her son and grandkids lived.”
Skip, do you think that all things being even that Ms. Henderson wanted to live so far away from her family? Or do you think America’s racist hiring practices forced her to get any job that she could even if it was thousands of miles away from her loved ones?
“My soul aches when I have to watch what white people did to black people in the deep south in the 1930s and any other form of that.”
Can we cash your “soul ache” in for affordable housing or better schools? If not, who cares. Also, I believe that you are lying, Skip. You know how I can tell? Look at your hands when you said, “and any other form of that.”
Skip, it looks like you are trying to wave away your white guilt.
“I know all about it. I don't know how to fix it, obviously. I can't fix it, and after a while it's just hard to watch for me.”
Oh no, Skip! Is it hard for you to sit and watch America’s systemic and institutional racism that has been set up to destroy, maul, manipulate, oppress, and imprison Black, Indigenous, AAPI, Latino, Latina, and Latinx folks? I’m guessing Ms. Henderson tried to raise you better than that. You have let her down.
“I didn't participate in it. I didn't contribute to it, yet I still feel so deeply guilty about it, because of the color of my skin.”
You are a white man in America. You have participated in America’s racism. You have certainly contributed to it. And worst of all, you have benefited from it. I don’t give a damn how “deeply guilty” you feel. Either you help dig us out of this hole or get out of the way.
Skip ends this section with, “Sinners just ultimately beat me over the head with that guilt.”
To paraphrase my mom, fuck you, Skip Bayless. AND PUT YOUR GLASSES BACK ON!
Part of the reason why my mom was so filled with anger is that when she was a teenager, she spent some time working as a domestic. Her aunt got her the job. And make no mistake, this was The Help. My mom resented every moment she worked for that white family. She resented every moment that she had to wait until the white family was finished eating before she was allowed to. She hated the fact that her aunt thought the white family were a nice white family while my mom only felt the not-that-far-off legacy of slavery in every interaction. My mom’s time with that family is a big part of how she got the battery in her back that powered her to push herself through college. Of course, my mom was the first generation in her family to go to college. She knows too well the kind of white man Skip Bayless is. Again, my mom is from Indiana. Indiana has all the racism of the south with way fewer Black people, so the white people can (and have) get away with more racism.
The thing that makes me the most upset is this isn’t Skip’s lane. The only place where Skip should feel empowered to share his opinions on Sinners is at dinner with his wife. He is a sports yeller. He's not a film critic. Roger Ebert was one of the country’s preeminent film critics in his day. Ebert also lived in Chicago, during Michael Jordan’s championship-winning heyday. When you Google “Roger Ebert Michael Jordan” the only things that come up are Ebert’s reviews of Michael Jordan’s (thankfully) limited filmography. Ebert didn’t weigh in on MJ’s flu game. He only weighed in on MJ’s performance in Space Jam.
We live at a time when, if you talk for a living you can end up talking about all sorts of things that have ZERO to do with what you set yourself up to talk about in the first place. This is Joe Rogan, mixed martial arts expert and conspiracy theorist, weighing in on who should be the president and (most painfully) why. It is Skip’s old partner, Stephen A. Smith, showing up regularly on Fox News to talk politics even though he clearly knows nothing about politics. But of course, since we live in the worst timeline, Stephen A. Smith is thinking about running for president in 2028. He already has his first endorsement.
It is time to shout these people back into their corners of the internet. We are where we are as a country because we have too many free range stupids yammering on about subjects they couldn’t define or even spell. One of my greatest traits, since you asked, is my interest in pointing my audience to the experts. I never pretend to know everything. I’m happy to be the person who is learning in front of you. I did it that way on United Shades of America. I did it on my podcast Politically Reactive. I do it everyday on social media. I do it here on Substack. Let’s all pledge to elevate the true experts and shame the professional yellers.
Who’s with me?
And Skip, I TOLD YOU TO PUT YOUR GLASSES BACK ON!
TOMORROW NIGHT, I’M IN DURHAM!
Tomorrow night, Saturday, July 12 I’m bringing my WHO’S WITH ME? stand-up tour to the Carolina Theater of Durham. And I’m bringing a very special surprise guest in addition to my friend and opening comic, Dwayne Kennedy. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the show in Charleston, SC. If you were planning to come to that one maybe take a weekend trip to Durham because I’m not sure when I’ll be back in the area. I love Charleston. We did one of our best episodes of United Shades of America there, but Charleston must have had a lot of things to do that, because buying tickets to my show was not on their agenda. 😁
This is my last show of the summer before I take a break and spend my time trying to defeat fascism. But I have more shows coming up in the fall in Carmel, CA; Tulsa, OK; Oklahoma City, OK; and Louisville, KY.
Tickets at wkamaubell.com
I'm in a new documentary about Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road.
My career keeps surprising me. This is the trailer for Kerouac's Road: The Beat of A Nation, a new feature documentary. It includes never-before-seen material from Jack Kerouac’s personal archive. And it includes an interview with me! I’m no Kerouac expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I had some thoughts that the director Ebs Burnough thought were worth including. It is a wide-ranging and daring approach to exploring the legacy of Kerouac’s iconic novel On The Road and its continued resonance in today’s America.
Along with me, there are interviews featuring singer/songwriter Natalie Merchant, and actors Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon. The film also shows a diverse line-up of people who are taking their own trips on the American road.
Look at me LIVE on Subtack.
I did three Substack Lives this week. This first one was this past Tuesday as I waited for my lunch. The second one was completely spontaneous, moments after I finished my solo Substack. Wajahat Ali was interviewing Parker Malloy and invited me on. The third one was with Ben Meiselas from Meidas Touch. For some reason I can’t find that one. 😬
When an 88-year-old Black woman turns an F-bomb into sacred liturgy, you better believe the spirit is moving. Skip didn't just get roasted. He got exorcised. Some yells liberate. Some yells colonize. The old heads know the difference. Let the holy cusswords fly.
Very well done! Personally, I’ve watched USofA and listened to you so often, that I hear the inflections and sarcasm in your written words! Either approach is good for me. Just keep being your authentic self and I celebrate your mom for her perseverance and standing tall for a better America!