Celizic: Dogfighting is all about "keeping it real".

Nobody can ever accuse MSNBC.com writer Mike Celizic of being knowledgeable or insightful. In January, he penned a piece that blamed the shooting death of Broncos CB Darrent Williams on the hip hop generation, even though he had no information on the circumstances surrounding the shooting.

Today, he blames the downfall of Atlanta Falcons QB Michael Vick on “keeping it real” and street cred.

The NBA was the first league to not just tolerate but embrace the newest social norm to hit the court. And it took a long time for the white-bread administrators to realize that what they were actively encouraging and celebrating in their ads wasn?t just funky music and the latest edition of street talk, but a culture of gangs and guns and violence and misogyny; a culture of keeping it real. … So don?t ask where Michael Vick came from. He?s only the product of his times and culture, a culture that was celebrated by the sponsors, welcomed by the leagues, encouraged by the agents and enabled by the posses.

Clearly, Celizic, the amateur sociologist he is, knows enough about hip-hop culture (or the culture of “keeping it real”, as it was) to understand that dogfighting is all but exclusive to wannabe rappers who wear their pants too low. In fact, after a hard day of gang violence and demeaning women, all young men of the hip-hop generation want to do is come home, smoke copious amounts of marijuana, and shoot off guns while beating the hell out of their dogs.

Hip-hop culture: a bastion of hating women, shooting guns, doing drugs, fighting dogs — and did we mention the ties to Al-Qaeda?

But can dogfighting really be blamed on hip hop culture? More specifically, can dogfighting, like violence, misogyny and Don Imus‘ comments, be blamed on black people? ESPN Radio head Doug Gottlieb certainly thinks so, intimating that African Americans should be embarrassed by Vick’s actions. FOX Sports pundit Jason Whitlock wrote that the Vick case “repulses me because I believe Vick got involved with breeding vicious pit bulls because rap-music culture made it the cool thing to do” and Vick “threw it all away because he bought into the self-destructive, immature, hip-hop model of ‘keeping it real.‘”

If one were to believe Whitlock, dogfighting was conceived by rappers in between gun-battles. However, while there is an ‘urban’ subculture for whom dogfighting is a pastime, dogfighting did indeed exist before hip-hop and continues to exist beyond hip-hop. A 1998 study found that dogfighting is more connected to a primarily Southern, working-class lust for masculinity, as opposed to the hedonistic wants of a gluttonous hip-hop subculture.

Dogfighting is centered in the South, a region whose inhabitants are well-known for their love of sports and “…any event that [promises] the excitement of deciding the inequalities of prowess among men, or among men and beasts” … these activities mean much more than a chance to turn a profit; they provide for the distribution of honor and status to participants, while nonparticipation signifies cowardice. …

Today, a subculture exists (predominantly among the Southern, white, working class) which is dedicated to the continued survival of the sport of dogfighting.

Other studies lump dogfighting with cockfighting as “pit sports … traditionally popular with the working class“.

Despite the overwhelming sanctions against them, these sports have thrived among a rural subculture of farmers, ranchers and migrant workers, but they also have an urban working-class following. Contests are held in such diverse spots as barnyards, abandoned sawmills, forest clearings and abandoned buildings — wherever a pit can be constructed.

Barnyards and abandoned sawmills do not quite seem to be the places where one would find the stereotypical hip-hop gangster. So why is dogfighting almost exclusively being associated with a culture that makes up only part of the demographic? Quoting Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, in a Baltimore Sun article by Kevin Van Valkenburg:

The word ‘culture’ is secret-agent talk for race in this country. … It allows people to mythologize poor people, black people, brown people without being labeled a racist. There’s not a culture of animal abuse in black America or Latino America. Mike Vick’s actions certainly don’t have anything to do with hip-hop culture. And in reality, hip-hop doesn’t show images of dogfighting that much. Even when DMX does, I still don’t think young people walk away after listening to his music and think about dogfighting. … But the reality of race relations in America is, one black person’s bad acts are paid for by the whole community, at least within the realm of the media.

While there are elements of the hip hop culture that do glamorize dogfighting, it is ignorant to an extreme degree to categorize the ‘sport’ as being tied exclusively — or even to a significant extent — to that culture. Dogfighting “cuts across all socio-economic boundaries. It simply is a sport that appeals to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons.” [1] One does not need to be a rapper to be cruel to animals; consider the 70 year old Utah man who is described as “one of the biggest animal offenders” Salt Lake County Animal Services “has had in the past 20 years.” Perhaps one could consider another 70 year old, Floyd Boudreaux (pictured), who was “so revered in dogfighting circles that his namesake bloodline of pit bulls is coveted worldwide” [2]. Consider the 66 people who were arrested on a farm in rural Georgia in 2003; the case there “highlighted the popularity of dogfighting in rural Georgia, where it has been a macabre tradition for generations.” [1] Dogfighting is not simply an inner city phenomenon; there are underground pockets in a myriad places, from Omaha [3] to Ontario [4] to even London [5] as recently as 1986.

The Michael Vick case is unfortunate for many reasons. It will be even more unfortunate if the lasting legacy is that of lazy writing pinning the culture of dogfighting on the easiest and most attacked target — hip hop culture.

1. Judd, Alan. “DOGFIGHTING IN GEORGIA: A BLOOD SPORT; Raid focuses spotlight on dark, gory tradition” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 7D. 1999, Dec. 19.
2. Moore, Melissa. “One booked with dogfighting” The Advocate, 16A. 1997, Sep. 19.
3. Shaw, Tom. “Dogfighting Is ‘Big in Omaha’ Video, Paraphernalia Lead to 3 Citations” Omaha World Herald, 15. 2001, Feb. 2.
4. “Dogfighting suspected at farm; two arrested, pit bulls seized”, The Toronto Globe and Mail. 1999, Apr. 21.
5. “Dogfighting ‘sport’ is moving across Britain leaving a cruel trail”, The Times (London). 1986, Jun. 7.