Category Archives: race

blog, diversity, news, race, sports

Demonizing Tiger: Woods’ villification has racial overtones

People talk about Nike using Earl Woods’ voice out of context in an ad prior to the Masters. But is anyone grousing about the full-page family values ads now appearing in the major dailies featuring Phil Mickelson and his cancer-suffering  wife Amy? 

Talk about exploitation. Even better that Mickelson is white, the better to offset and polarize the whole situation in a way America can understand. i.e., Mickelson good, Tiger bad.

Bad Tiger! This is your punishment from the culture at large for being a selfish, amoral, pleasure seeking human being.

If you had been a bank, you could have received a bailout. But now it’s everyone’s turn to dis and dish.

This is one bandwagon I’m not hopping on.

Now they’re even commenting on how Tiger swears on the golf course (no secret).  Suddently golf and sport has gotten all puritanical and proper.  Does anyone get on baseball players for spitting? Howabout how basketball players handle their mouthguards, then high five each other. How unsanitary. Oh, and about that vigorous ass patting…

All of that is nothing compared to jumping on Tiger, the devil himself.

I hope Tiger recovers soon.

Consider the sexual proclivities of other public figures and how they’ve bounced back. After Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton is a revered world crisis solver. After biting women in secret hotel trysts, Marv Albert is back doing the NBA playoffs. (“YES!!”). After dumping his longtime wife in favor of a scandalous affair with a younger woman, newly divorced golf anchor Jim Nantz was there at the Masters with the call. 

Even David Letterman gets a light lashing after his intern trysts. Always good to have an extortionist come in and trump your bad hand. 

So comebacks do happen. But is there extra joy in dumping Tiger because Woods happens to be of mixed race?

He is at once the greatest black and Asian American golfer to ever play. He may be the greatest golfer period.  When he was good he was treated like royalty. But his indiscretions find him being treated with a whole let less compassion. He’s not a pariah yet. His golf game is too good. But the culture seems to be turning against him more so now that Mickelson can be the public face for the new Victorian era of golf.

Never mind Mickelson’s gambling habits. That’s an allowable vice, I guess.

But just ask yourself if Tiger would  be treated differently if he were white? 

   

blog, diversity, news, race

The Skip Gates arrest: Is this the national conversation on race we were meant to have?

I still think the Skip Gates incident is an example of the kind of racism we have now in America. If Gates wasn’t black, the officer in question would have been a lot more courteous to a man such as Gates. But Gates doesn’t look like a distinguished professor. Take away his Harvard ID and would he look like a crackhead looking to lift a TV in some expensive home?

That’s how far we have come on race in America.

I do want to be fair to the cop. So let’s take color out of the equation.

Then what do you have?

A pure battle of egos. The police officer and the distinguished professor, each of whom was pulling a little one-upmanship on the other.

A prominent black scholar gets asked to come out of his house by an officer. He knows the history of race in America and gets irritated as hell. He calls the chief of police on his cell phone.

Meanwhile, the officer at the scene reacts to said prominent professor pulling rank with the only thing he can do to show his authority and preserve his alpha maleness.  He makes a meaningless arrest, and thus documents his abuse of power.

At the core, it’s all ego, more than race, though race was there for sure, like tossing gasoline in a field of straw.

Get rid of race, and you still have an ego problem. And isn’t that the center of all our problems, especially when it comes to power and the exertion of power in unfair ways over those with less power (who more often than not are people of color)?

So  now that the Senate isn’t going to pass health care by August, maybe we’ve just been given something to chew on as a nation on vacation.

When Eric Holder called for honest frank discussions on race during Black History month, all he needed was something like the Gates arrest to kick things off. It’s actually quite fitting for those summer discussions at the beach house.  Over mojitos or a few brews, go ahead ask your friends who they think was right: Gates? The cop?

Hot enough for you?

blog, diversity, everything else, journalism, news, politics, race, sports

The Media and Michael Jackson: Welcome to the Jackson School of Law, Public Health and Race

I had to stop watching. The orgy over Michael Jackson was deserved to a point, and then with 24-hour cable channels pumping out to a “Thriller” beat, it just got embarrassing with the media practically pandering to the mass audience the story is attracting.

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to put things in perspective. Wednesday’s front page featured above the fold horizontal photos of Uighurs and Hans!  (The Uighars? Did they sing a cover of “I Want You Back”? )  Where was Jackson in the new hip Journal? MJ was in a small box, a photo of his coffin and a caption  on the left under the masthead.

A triumph of journalistic restraint!

The story now unfolds like any other emotion-filled  mega-story before it , i.e., the O.J. trial. that’s when the news became our de facto public school of law.  O.J  was our criminal law class.   MJ is our our  family law and probate class.

As we learn of the details of Jackson’s life,  you’ll be asking yourself if you have a will or an estate plan. You can count on that. You wouldn’t want to end up in the mess the courts are about to untangle.

So the news will become part law school, part business school case study , and potentially a seminar in the Jackson  school of public health; that is,  if we ever during the course of the next few months discover what killed Jackson, what tormented  him, and what he was running away to or from.

We have lots to look forward to!

Notice I have avoided taking the contrary approach like  one blogger on Alternet which called Jackson an icon of mediocrity who wasn’t a good dancer, singer, musician. Like what’s the fuss?  That’s an elitist approach, to which I’ll confess to using it in the past.  But save that tack for denigrating mass love shown for Donny Osmond. Or at the passing of one of the Monkees.

Jackson was far too complex and gifted.  And troubled.

His most complicated role that’s worth examining may well be the psychological toll race had on his psyche.

Jackson wanted to transcend race as if he were music and the dance, the universal forms that made him the King of Pop.

He couldn’t do that as a person, no matter how he tried. Jackson didn’t survive his fight against race and identity, no matter how he tried to transform himself.

But his music triumphed and that shall live forever.

blog, everything else, journalism, movies, news, race

State of play: My analog weekend with Russell Crowe, Asparagus and the Tubes

Russell Crowe in his new movie “State of Play” is as pitch perfect as it gets in his depiction of the good old-fashioned journalist.

It was both nostalgic and sentimental for this old reporter. Like an old cowboy looking at a Western.

As Cal McAffrey, ink-stained wretch, Crowe uses the back seat of his aging Saab as a combination trash-can/file cabinet. He drives while listening to loud Irish music, so he has a touch of the ethnic journalist in him. He likes his car so much, his apartment décor resembles his car. Outward appearances be damned, McCaffrey considers fashion an affront to the truth, which of course, is all he cares about, no matter how painful it is.

The movie centers around a basic dilemma for journalists: Who’s a friend? Who’s a source? Who can you sleep with?

And the truth is found the old fashioned way. No guns.(Only the bad guys have those).  No superhuman powers. McAffrey Crowe just asks questions; of editors, sources, colleagues, himself.  In the end, what’s left are just the facts. No opinion. No blogs. Continue reading State of play: My analog weekend with Russell Crowe, Asparagus and the Tubes →