Black History Month
This post seems fitting as February is Black History Month.Today I read an article on ESPN.com that spoke to the ignorant remarks recently made by Bryant Gumbel on HBO's Real Sports. Apparently Mr. Gumbel hates the Winter Olympics with a passion. I have no problem with that. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I hate NASCAR with a passion. The next comment he made was the one that I found to be asinine.
"So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention."
Excuse me, Mr. Gumbel, if the number of black athletes participating in the Winter Olympics is too few for you to stomach. Should we boycott the games all together? Should we fly black males over to Austria, Sweden and Norway so that they can procreate and create the next Tayshaun Meier? Should we apologize for the fact that most of Europe never had slaves? Unfortunately that is what this boils down to. Historically the Olympic Winter Games have been dominated by European countries that have long cold winters and a demographic that is made up of caucasian men and women. Can't we just embrace that fact? Why do we need to bring race into every conversation? Why couldn't OJ Simpson just be a murderer? Why did he need to be a black man?
The ESPN.com article brought up a great argument to counteract Mr. Gumbel's ignorance. How should we deal with the NBA All Star Game which for the fifth time in eight years featured not a single white athlete? (I find this hard to believe, however, as Dirk most definitely would have been on the team. Kevin please follow up on this.) Should we ignore the NBA, because its ratio of black to white is 100 to 1? (I actually don't think that is a bad idea, not because of the low ratio, but because of the fact that the NBA bores me to pieces.) Irregardless, if a white broadcaster/columnist had made similar remarks that person would have been burnt at the stake and their resignation would have been called for. Why does this double standard exist? Why is it that if a white person makes a joke about watermelon they are a racist, but if a black person calls you a cracker they are just opressed?
posted by Craig Geiger @ 3:40 PM
2 Comments:
Paterno was talking about women.
But Gumbel's not watching the snow-and-ice edition of the Olympics because there aren't enough blacks is like me saying I'm going to boycott the NBA All-Star Game because there aren't any white-American players (the fifth time in the last eight years, according to Michael Wilbon's research). It's a cheap argument, filled with more holes than Johnny Weir's fishnet costume.
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