Colored by color-blindness
ESPN.com's Pat Forde has a new column remarking on the phenomenon that the consensus two best players in men's college basketball this season happen to be white.
Maybr, as Forde claims, it's newsworthy since such a scenario hasn't been around in 30 years or more, a testament to the great strides blacks have made it finding opportunities and succeeding in the college game.
This occurs at a time when today's college kids seem encouragingly unburdened by The Race Thing. There appears to be less obsessing over race, less distrust between races in today's youth, more melding of black and white music and dress and vernacular. That's societal progress.
Of course Forde unwittingly calls that "societal progress" into question by drawing attention to the fact that, oh yeah, the two best players are white -- in the very next paragraph:
Still, anyone who says they haven't noticed that Redick and Morrison are white hasn't been paying attention. And anyone who shrugs it off as nothing unusual hasn't checked the history books.
The way Forde proceeds to laud the accomplishments of white hoopsters seems almost quaintly reminiscent of how the African American press in earlier years heralded the achievements of blacks who did good. Of course, the black press and community needed to latch onto anything and everything they could when it came to black achievements, since racism and discrimination were rampant in American society, and remain so to a somewhat lesser extent. White achievements in, well, anything aren't noteworthy in the same sense, since last time I checked whites had few institutional and societal barriers to success (see the top management of Fortune 500 companies, which in 2000 was 97 percent white male). Poor widdle whites.
Of course, Forde's column has other, more chilling echoes. Were he to have substituted for "white" the term "Aryan," the piece would've read like some sort of perverse Social Darwinian or National Socialist tract.
All of which, again, is to underscore the point that in the way in which Forde writes of this phenomenon as a harbinger of social progress actually reveals how little road has been traveled in the quest for a real transformation of attitudes on race and equality.
Maybr, as Forde claims, it's newsworthy since such a scenario hasn't been around in 30 years or more, a testament to the great strides blacks have made it finding opportunities and succeeding in the college game.
This occurs at a time when today's college kids seem encouragingly unburdened by The Race Thing. There appears to be less obsessing over race, less distrust between races in today's youth, more melding of black and white music and dress and vernacular. That's societal progress.
Of course Forde unwittingly calls that "societal progress" into question by drawing attention to the fact that, oh yeah, the two best players are white -- in the very next paragraph:
Still, anyone who says they haven't noticed that Redick and Morrison are white hasn't been paying attention. And anyone who shrugs it off as nothing unusual hasn't checked the history books.
The way Forde proceeds to laud the accomplishments of white hoopsters seems almost quaintly reminiscent of how the African American press in earlier years heralded the achievements of blacks who did good. Of course, the black press and community needed to latch onto anything and everything they could when it came to black achievements, since racism and discrimination were rampant in American society, and remain so to a somewhat lesser extent. White achievements in, well, anything aren't noteworthy in the same sense, since last time I checked whites had few institutional and societal barriers to success (see the top management of Fortune 500 companies, which in 2000 was 97 percent white male). Poor widdle whites.
Of course, Forde's column has other, more chilling echoes. Were he to have substituted for "white" the term "Aryan," the piece would've read like some sort of perverse Social Darwinian or National Socialist tract.
All of which, again, is to underscore the point that in the way in which Forde writes of this phenomenon as a harbinger of social progress actually reveals how little road has been traveled in the quest for a real transformation of attitudes on race and equality.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 12:47
1 Comments:
Really, what they should be noting is that JJ Redick is hot, hot, HOT. and that hasn't been true of the best player in the NCAA since...oh yeah, Emeka Okafor two yaers ago. Clearly, ESPN has it's aesthetic priorities out of wack.
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