Business…with thanks to Kevin Clark, who spawned this idea, I give you a look at Jason Taylor’s care package to Shawne Merriman.
Today would have been Martin Luther King’s 78th birthday. One interesting thing about King’s birthday, as the years stack up, is that we’re no longer at a point where there’s anything to be gained from considering how things would have been like if King were still alive. It’s less and less likely every year that he would have been with us now. Seems a better question is what are we doing now that he would have been too old to lean on, anyway.
The answer? I’m honestly not sure.
Anyway, the vaunted Cobb tagged me with the following blog question–what’s the most racist thing to ever happen to you?
Talk about a question that’s hard to answer. I guess that’s mostly because I stopped keeping count of those things a long, long time ago. Ran out of room to remember the stuff, and it just stopped being particularly noteworthy to me. Hassled in hotels, press rooms, neighborhoods, driving, learning, teaching…pretty much anything else I can think of, I’ve encountered racism doing. And I swear, I’ve heard a lot of things.
But picking out which was the most racist is like picking out the stinkiest turd. After a while, they all just start to smell the same.
But I’ll hit you with a great story from when I was 14. I went to high school in a small town, one of those towns surrounded by a bunch of other small towns. Well, all those small towns got together every summer to have a SAT camp. The ten sophomores at each school that scored the highest on the PSAT would get together and learn strategies for the test the next year. Get some of them National Merit Scholars, yanno?
Well, I was invited. My brother–all 6’3 1/2″, 225 of him–drove me up there, and we waited in line to get checked into the dorm and all of that. Now, what we didn’t know at the time was there was also a basketball camp meeting at the same place during the same week. But no big thing, yanno?
(Note–I’m 6’4″ now, but I was a late bloomer. I think I was 5’7″ around that time, when I was heading to 11th grade.)
So me and the big brother were in the line behind a few cute lil’ white girls and some goofy looking white dudes who were there for the same reason I was. The line proceeded forward, where a gentleman would direct people to the table that applied to them–scholars or basketball.
It went like this until I got to the front of the line. You’ll be able to tell when it was me.
“Scholars?”
“yes.”
“Scholars?”
“Yes.”
“Scholars?”
“Yes.”
“Basketball?”
“No, scholars.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Sure he was sorry. He knew why he assumed I was there for the basketball camp. But no big thing. I’d heard far worse.
So we’re in the scholars line for a while when some well-meaning parent came over and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Ummm, the basketball camp line is over there.”
It was then that my brother dropped the classic.
“Well, the next one’s gonna win the contest.”
I asked him what contest that was.
“Next person to come up to us with that bullshit is gonna win the honor of being the next person to get cussed out in front of all these people.”
No one else signed up, luckily.
But that’s just a story. There are far worse, but I ain’t got the time to index ’em. That would be a Top 25 list of its own.
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An old white guy once told me he would not talk to a colored reporter.
Made for a lovely Madden 02′ discussion back at the apartment with my college room mates.
Bo’ , I’ve got two stories that immediately come to mind. Once, when I was a teen, back in the mid-eighties, this lil’ old white lady at the bus stop asked me a question. After I gave her the answer, she said “You don’t talk like the rest of them, I understood every word you said”. Granted, the woman was about 80, but I felt like knocking her block off.
The second situation was when I was in college. I worked evenings at a mortgage company filing loan paperwork and usually all the daytime employees were long gone when I got there. One evening, I went to the bathroom and one of the white executives says to me, “Wow! You are tall, you probably play a lot of basketball huh?” I remember thinking to myself how I needed that damned job so I kept my mouth shut.
I don’t understand how saying “wow, you are tall, you probably play a lot of basketball huh?” is racist.
It seems like he said that because you are tall – people say that to white people all the time, but it’s not based on race, rather on height.
Scholastic Aptitude Test camp?
Come on, now.
Well Bo, it was nice knowin’ ya. You gotta figure now that you’re with ESPN and are visiting the studios every now and again, you’ll have to run into Shawne Merriman at some point.
Let’s just hope his ‘roid rage is in recession.
(funny article!)
This isn’t something that was done to me be was asked of me. I was in my sophomore year at the University of Maryland and I worked at the desk of my dorm. It about 2am and there was a freshman white girl who I knew through some friends who came in from a night out. So we’re talking and she said i was a really cool guy and that she should hang out. And she starts talking about how she used to hang out with her black friends in NYC all the time. This of course sets of off warning bells because any time a white person starts talking about how many black friends they have you know you should be on guard for something. Then 20 seconds laters she asks the immortal question, “So what religion are black people?” I couldn’t even speak for a while after hearing it. It astounds me to this day.
it begs the question, is “racism” a synonym for “stupidity”?
Yes, Farmdog. It is.
I sometimes miss the overt racism days; cause then you knew who was who and where you stood. I had a conversation with a friend recently and the jist of it was this: it’s great they no longer put the dogs or the water hose on us. Lynchings are out of favor and we aren’t hanging from trees. That is good. Still; life is much more complicated, and I still find situations that remind me that I am not a full-fledged American. I am a Nigger first. I’m still a 2nd class-citizen; right above Latinos (but they have a purpose, so the’re rising!). I still have to swallow my pride, I still have to explain away other’s stupidity, and I still am pegged as something specific the minute I walk into a room. My efforts, my deeds, my actions do not speak for themselves. To some, I’m no different than my father, or his father, or his father who in his lifetime was a slave. And because this is not seen on CNN or 60 Min.; to average White Americans it doesn’t happen. Black people are on TV, on the radio, in Congress, on corporate boards, and everywhere in between. But in every one of those places, the decision-makers; the important ones; to them we are still NIGGERS.