Quick commentary: Whitlock shlock

Jason Whitlock has another intentionally-ignorant, ugly column up for ESPN.  As usual, it blames black people. This time, for protesting for civil rights in Ferguson outside a Cardinals game, an act which led to a confrontation with racist Cardinals fans.  It features gems like this:

There is no excusing the bigoted, "go back to Africa" and "get a job" responses of the white Cardinals fans. But to ignore the obvious inappropriate/trolling behavior of the black protesters is a form of hipster-approved white supremacy that is equally dangerous. The not-so-subtle message is that we expect only one group to act appropriately.

Translation: White racists are only wrong because they are racist.  Black protesters are more wrong because they are not acting "proper."  To call agitation uncivil is effectively to demonize all protest.

And this is not just stupid rhetoric, it is dangerous.  This is exactly what bigots said last night when protesters in Ferguson expressed their indignation by burning an American flag--and whites across the nation threatened them with the removal of their patronizing support, dehumanized them with insults, and proceeded to make death threats.

It is what leads to people saying the "problem" in Ferguson is not a corrupt police culture but a corrupt black culture, and the use of force not against the corrupt but against a population who is precisely protesting the unjust use of force.  Also, in case you were wondering, any person saying otherwise is a "hipster," which I guess is a morally suspect category now to righteous zealot hacks who formed their moral tempers in the the 80s and 90s like Whitlock and Glenn Beck.

Also, there was this piece of brilliance:

Dr. King was the Michael Jordan of promoting racial equality and advancing the cause of African-Americans. He killed bigots with kindness, intellect and love. His dignified, nonviolent approach to civil disobedience is primarily responsible for the freedoms many African-Americans take for granted today. You could argue he wrote the Dummies Guide for Dealing with Bigots.

This is glorious.  I really didn't think it was possible to do a disservice to MLK and Jordan in one sentence, but Whitlock found the most economical way to pull it off.

Calling someone "the Michael Jordan of X" is not a phrase that invites comparison to anything like the grace and athleticism of Jordan himself.  It has become a cliche stand-in for saying merely they someone is the best and greatest at what they do.

But King is not "the best" at "promoting" racial equality, like it was some brand of goddamn sneaker or underwear.  And calling King the author of a book from the "Dummies" series, that's just insulting to one's audience (like the series itself--which was popular, last time I checked, in 1997).

And what really is the problem with the protesters?  They avow concepts "disconnected from faith," Whitlock says.  Faith!  Ah, yes, perhaps this is the same faith that women lack when they don't shut up and stop asking for raises! ("It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along!"  Oh!  It was that easy all the time!)

Can we please stop misappropriating the faith of MLK?  Can we please stop saying that it is a cure-all for some rampant "cynicism" out there, which seems only to be possessed by the people who are calling for such a faith?  Can we stop equating MLK's faith with complacency and "proper behavior?"  As if MLK's supreme accomplishment was to show black men and women how to dress?  (It was Malcolm X who showed them that, or sought to--a fact Whitlock may not like)

King Jr.'s was a radical faith--as Cornel West's new collection of MLK's writings shows--a faith that was combative against injustice, and was precisely unable to accept the bigoted nature of his fellow men.  To equate it with a mere positive-thinking about the eventual effectiveness of good intentions is merely to worst of the loyalty-tests meant to shame into conformity those with the slightest doubts about the status quo.

And that is what Whitlock is essentially saying in this piece: get in line, black folks, or I'll put you in line.

His most telling attempt to do this, to strong-arm those who are actually making a difference, is to put the stress—again not on any of the slurs and horrible insults the bigots yelled at the protesters, but on one phrase that the protesters chanted: “No justice, no peace.”

Whitlock gestures back to the history of the phrase (he derided it earlier as a “slogan”) in its context only insofar as to slander an entire “movement” led by what he sportingly calls the “formerly tracksuit-wearing, unrefined” Al Sharpton, of which these protesters are, apparently, just the latest outgrowth.

The unrefined Al Sharpton popularized the phrase after the 1986 murder of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach.  As Sharpton has repeatedly explained, it has been taken out of context ever since: “Many at the time, and even to this day, wrongly equate the slogan to mean that we are somehow promoting violence,” he wrote just this January for the Guardian:

Nothing could be further from the truth. "No justice, no peace" means that, until we see fairness and accountability, we will not remain silent. Those who never want to see progress or change would love it if we remained quiet – that's exactly why we don't. As a preacher and a civil rights activist for my entire life, my conscience will not allow me to ignore brutality that afflicts the voiceless. And neither do all good people on the side of equality.

Taking the thing out of context, however, is just what Whitlock does:

"No justice, no peace" is an unsubtle threat covered with the fig leaf of righteous indignation. It is the perversion of a thought uttered by a man who sacrificed his life based on his "We Shall Overcome" faith.

In January 1968, Dr. King visited folk singer and anti-Vietnam War activist Joan Baez inside Santa Rita Prison. In his short speech outside the jail, Dr. King said: "There can be no justice without peace and there can be no peace without justice."

He eloquently and succinctly expressed the essentialness of and his commitment to peace and justice. All of us, but especially the well-intentioned folks in Ferguson and St. Louis, would be wise to affirm our faith in our fellow man and disavow a cynicism that impedes progress.

Whitlock is right that “No justice, no peace,” as a phrase can carry a threat.  But so can what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says.  This is not what the latter means, of course.  (Though neither does he mean simply the meaningless chant “Peace and justice!”  Whitlock reads in the phrase, and which seems to him the epitome of “commitment.”) But nor is it what the protesters mean: in fact, the phrase they chant can mean the exact same thing that King Jr. says, only condensed. 

But instead of considering their similarities, what Whitlock does is read a clear threat in one set of words, and see only positivity and good intentions in the other. With that sort of interpretive freedom, we could just as well say that by “well intentioned people in St. Louis and Ferguson,” Whitlock meant the bigots yelling at and shooting at blacks, and not the protesters.

What matters, as always, is the nature of your intentions.  And Whitlock of course has the power to discern who has good and who has bad intentions.  And if you act, if you do something, you’re probably bad.  Be pure inside, black people, be proper, be righteous, don’t do anything, don’t disrupt the status quo, and everything you do will in turn be good.  But act—and Whitlock will remind you to stay silent.  Because the one thing we have too much of in this country is dissension, debate, and people speaking out and speaking their minds.

I don’t suggest reading the piece—it just gives Whitlock clicks.  Deadspin has an excellent history not only of dealing with Whitlock like the bully and hack he is, but also of analyzing him with nuance and deconstructing the perverse nature of his occasional appeal and influence.  I say just wait for them to flay the thing.  That’s pretty much all it deserves.

UPDATE: And here is the initial flaying.  I hope they do more.

Quick commentary: The life and the purity of a sport

With the NFL immersed in controversy concerning its handling of Ray Rice's beating of his wife and Adrian Peterson's beating of his kids, we become rightfully anxious about the nature of the sport we're watching.  The same thing goes for the situations in the NBA where Donald Sterling and, more recently, Bruce Levenson spoke inflammatory and racist rhetoric.  But in each of these situations, those concerned about the life of the league go on to make claims that the media is too interested in such negative news. This goes much too far, and becomes quite quickly an attempt to protect some mystical purity of the sport.

William C. Rhoden of the New York Times went to MetLife Stadium last Sunday to check out the Giants game and see what people thought of Ray Rice and Adrian Petersen.  One fan who made it all the way up from Florida for the game “said she was able to separate Rice’s action from the league and from her enjoyment of the game,” as Rhoden put it:

Rice’s actions were “upsetting and disconcerting,” she said, “but you can’t look at it like he’s representing the whole N.F.L. because there are so many wonderful players who are doing amazing things out there.”

This has been a refrain of many NFL fans over the last week.  Steelers defensive end Brett Keisel himself reassured people through ESPN that “It is defensive, but that doesn’t make it necessarily wrong.

Seeing Ray Rice brutalize his wife makes us curious about the connection between violent behavior and football’s feats of athleticism themselves, and this has the effect of pricking at the soft vulnerable parts at the center of the sport—any sport, for that matter.  We approach such an issue from a heated sense of outrage, but it is in truth a cold analytic gaze we direct there, devoid of passion.  It is a natural connection to make, but in doing so, such critics are given to overlook the fact that the one is simple brutishness while the other is more like an art, or at the very least least a form of skilled work.

And this interest is questionable, concerning its motives.  Because if you go that deep into the heart of a sport and try and call it mere violence, it does imply, at least in part, what Rhoden’s interlocutor accuses football’s critics of saying: namely, that everyone in the NFL is pretty much a bad person, that everyone interested in football is a bit perverse.

I’m more skeptical that this is what the media want to convince us of, with its sometimes too fascinated interest in all the gory details in the course of its delivering us some route to reality. This is the thought that often lurks behind the initial worry here about criticizing the nature of football.  It is what Keisel goes on to say directly: “Negative news sells. It's the world we live in.”  And is indeed implied by Rhoden’s interlocutor and picked up more explicitly in what she next claims.  As Rhoden reports it:

She continued: “Why put all our focus on this guy? Don’t give him the publicity he’s getting. It’s disgusting. And it’s pretty sad that she stands by him like that. It’s setting an example for little girls that it’s O.K. to go back to him.”

Now, besides the last bit, which pretty much blames and shames the victim in this situation, there is a troubling thread that runs through this comment.  This is namely, the cynicism.  Reporting bad news—so goes the thought—ultimately begins to give its perpetrators publicity, which they can use to their own advantage.  Looking at the reality of violence too closely, inspecting too carefully incidents where it seems a consequence of athleticism—this not only implies people who enjoy football are screwy, but it actually helps out the perpetrators of this violence.  "Don't give him the publicity he's getting."  If you report on evil, you partake of it.  What he does is disgusting, so we shouldn’t look at it.

It seems to me this is pretty twisted logic, obsessed not with defending the nature of football, but seeking to convince us it is sacred, pure, that we need not worry our little heads about it.  It uses cynicism about the nature of how publicity sometimes works to make it seem as if it is a worldly argument: and yet it ultimately concerns itself with roping off a certain area of this world for otherworldly enjoyment, preventing even curiosity about it.  It is as if the only response one could actually have to football when such incidents occur was an ecstatic joy in the fact that there are "so many wonderful players who are doing amazing things out there!"  That it is a sin to be disappointed when what we enjoy also sometimes produces problems.

It ultimately seeks, in the face of an inquiry into the image of football that we have, to erect another, purer image; it destroys this image for us, saying that no, football isn’t as pure as we think it is, because it is covered by the media—only to say that media members can’t see the “real” football, which lies somewhere outside this beatific region where so much more enjoyment is going on.  It blames us for not taking part in the party, it guilts us for not sharing in an irrational pleasure, it seeks to make us worry whether we are spoilsports.

And as more and more people invoke this argument that negative news sells—both in the NFL’s current situation and in discussions of the inflammatory speech of Bruce Levenson, the former owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, where (as Albert Burneko has pointed out) it has also come up—it becomes more and more essential we discern the tipping point where one argument in defense of a sport becomes another, more insidious argument.  It becomes more and more crucial to notice where a concern for the life of the sport becomes a piece of missionary work to convert us to worshiping a sport that no one really can see.

Quick commentary: Was it a good thing Damian Lillard didn't make Team USA?

In the future, we'll be writing small, more speculative 300-500 word commentary pieces, instead of our larger more exhaustive ones, to keep the flow of content steadier here.  Enjoy the first:

With the FIBA tournament over, Blazers fans may rightly be speculating about what would have happened had Damian Lillard been included on the roster.

Well, not much, really, if one is to believe Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski.  Being free from the clutches of Duke basketball which hangs over the Team, which Wojnarowski complains about at length in his column yesterday, may have been a good thing for Portland’s rising star.

Many dismissed the column as mere Duke-bashing, but there were some very important points made as Wojnarowski articulated his case.

The most important charge Wojnarowski delivers against Coach K centers around the clear conflict of interest between his role as Duke’s coach and the freedom he gains from also being coach of Team USA.

The biggest and most egregious problem with this is that being coach of Team USA allows Coach Mike Krzyzewski to sell the Duke brand of basketball to potential high school recruits on the Under-19 team, where, for other coaches not affiliated with USA Basketball, the NCAA clearly prohibits any such contact from coaches or anyone else working for with college basketball programs from that matter. 

Wojnarowski frankly can’t believe what Coach K gets away with: “Krzyzewski never violated an NCAA rule,” Wojnarowski says incredulously, “when he climbed aboard a flight, flew cross-country and addressed the 2013 under-19 USA Basketball national team at its Colorado Springs training camp.” 

And yet, Wojnarowski alleges, this type of networking is crucial for the success of the Duke program: “Without the access of USA Basketball, there's a strong belief within the basketball community that Krzyzewski would've never landed Jabari Parker. Only, he had it, used it and signed him.”

But the wider problem has to do with the way the team gets reshaped each year around another set of Duke success stories.   Keeping Mason Plumlee on the roster at all rankles Wojnarowski, as it should.  With such controversial and questionable roster decisions being made, and being made relatively unquestioned, we have to ask ourselves, Wojnarowski says, whether the team represents, not the nation, but Duke basketball.

The larger difficulty however is not just material, on the basketball court.  It also has to do with the general rhetoric surrounding Coach K, and the wide influence it has.  The image of “teacher of success” which Coach K projects so well can alter powerfully the career narratives of the players he chooses for his team.  As Wojnarowski says, just “wait until the Duke coach is credited for DeMarcus Cousins' maturity with the Sacramento Kings this season.”

This is incredibly plausible, not just because in general people are waiting for a turnaround in Cousins’ behavior (which much of it will come naturally), but because of how much credit we do indeed give Coach K or his mentoring job.  There is a lot of hot air there, you have to admit.  And if you admit that, it leads Portland fans to wonder: couldn’t the same thing have happened to Lillard that is going to happen to Cousins?

Could a young, enterprising player, with clearly no maturity issues like Cousins, be similarly reduced to a Coach-K promotional tool?

Perhaps.  And that alone is enough to make Blazers fans happy he escaped the debacle—besides it significantly lessening the risk that Lillard would be injured before the season started.

Nevertheless, it would have been nice to see Lillard shine in international play the way he does in Portland, especially in a summer where his exposure as a cultural figure is growing—with his new ad campaign for Adidas with Derrick Rose (and the shoe to go with it), his appearance on the cover of NBA Live, his thoroughly random appearance in the Madden commercial.

But it is questionable how much exposure anyone got from doing FIBA in the first place.  In the meantime Lillard got to avoid any of the side-effects of having to work under such a brilliant, but such a formidible coach, in risky working conditions.