In an article on his Edge of Sports website, Dave Zirin takes on and takes down the sports world’s version of Uncle Ruckus — Jason Whitlock.
“I didn’t speak out when you called the great Scoop Jackson a “bojangling fake ghetto posturing clown.” I didn’t say anything when you wrote that there needed to be a “new civil rights movement” directed at “black idiots.” I didn’t type a word as week after week you provided African American cover for white sportswriters to rip Pro Basketball for being too “gangsta,” too “violent,” and too “hip hop” with all the subtlety of Strom Thurmond. Shame on me.
But your recent work on the NBA’s All Star weekend in Vegas is just beyond the pale. When you have the unholy arrogance to compare your crusade against “ghetto acting” black people to the actions of Rosa Parks, when you call young African American kids “the Black KKK”, and when you liken walking the Vegas strip to being in “the yard at a maximum security prison”, it’s simply time to say, “enough.”
In your own words, “Instead of wearing white robes and white hoods, the new KKK has now taken to wearing white Ts and calling themselves gangsta rappers, gangbangers and posse members. Just like the White KKK of the 1940s and ’50s, we fear them, keep our eyes lowered, shut our mouths and pray they don’t bother us.”
Please, please, please take a moment to listen to yourself. The Klan at its peak had 4.5 million members. They organized campaigns of lynching and terror to keep people of color from voting, holding jobs, or even existing in peace. To compare an NBA player’s entourage with this bloody nightmare makes you sound scared, small, and simple.
But we’re all aware you are anything but simple. You know there are far more fights in hockey and football than basketball with nowhere near the hysteria. You know there are more brawls at NASCAR events than at Madison Square Garden. You must realize that there is zero proof the friends and family of NBA players are any more violent than anyone else. But you bleat redundantly for “a new civil rights movement” to drive them out.”
Zirin continues in several more paragraphs to rip Whitlock mercilessly. Much can be said about Whitlock, a man who embodies racial self-hatred, and Zirin does an admirable job of putting the man in his place.
(Link found via Can’t Stop the Bleeding)
