I'm sure everybody's heard by now the clip of racist boob Don Imus making yet another inappropriate comment regarding an athlete's color by means of explaining his bad behavior. If not, here it is....
Now, I'm sure you're shaking your head and muttering, "What an idiot! You can't say stuff like that!" And you'd be right, Imus is an idiot for saying that on the air. Here are some statistics about crime and the NFL and the general population....
Of the 308 incidents(arrests of NFL players), unofficially only 29 were involving whites, including three with kicker Sebastian Janikowski. That means about 90 percent of the incidents involved black players, who make up about 70 percent of the league.
Blacks compose about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 30 percent of those arrested and more than 40 percent of those in prison, according to recent studies.
It is also a fact that NFL players get arrested for DUI at a rate that is half that of males aged 22-34 in the general population
So now, given those statistics, is Imus guilty of racism or just politically incorrect, horrible judgement? In other words, when you heard the sports guy say that Jones had been arrested 6 times in the last 3 years or so, did you have the same thought as Imus, only he stupidly spoke it? And if you did think it, does that make you a racist, or based on the statistics, was it a reasonable assumption to make that Jones is black?
Or is our perception of race/crime issues in pro sports formed by the media's coverage of it? Because as it turns out, NFL players are more well behaved than their non-NFL peers....we just see the NFL players on the news when they get busted.
Finally, is the problem with African-American NFL players and the law one specifically of race, or is it that many of these players grow up in the lawless, crime-ridden inner cities and suddenly find themselves with at lot of money, freedom, and being worshipped by fans everywhere they go. Their upbringing doesn't go away. I don't present that as an excuse for bad behavior, there is none, but as an explanation of it. Which brings us to our TRR poll question:
3 comments:
Statistics are facts that cannot be argued with. Now, saying that he isn't racist, he just hates black people, well that would probably make him a racist.
i do not think Imus hates black people. but he does make certain assumptions about race that he should not be making. i will admit that had i not known Jones was black, i would have assumed it. does that make me a racist? if i hear on the news about a serial killer who likes to have sex with the bodies of his victims, i automatically assume the guy is white. does that make me a reverse racist? we are supposed to be a colorblind society, but we are obsessed with race. that is just the way it is.
People like to automatically handicap others with race. Prominent black men are most known to do it. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are two great examples. They think that every white man looks down upon all black men, and that therefore black men are owed something by society. That makes Jesse and Al racists.
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