Passed along without further comment, from Jeff. Read his commentary, and then click through to read the comment in question.
Losing a child is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. My heart goes out to those who have had to live with that.
By now, even the most sports averse of readers probably know that history was made Sunday and will be made again two Sundays from now. Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy became, within hours of each other, the first two African Americans to coach a team to the Super Bowl. On February 4th, one of them (hopefully Lovie. Go Bears!) will become the first African American head coach to win a Super Bowl.
Think of that. February’s game will be the forty-first Super Bowl. Almost all of them have taken place after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It has taken until now for an African American coach to even reach the Super Bowl, much less win one. Those facts say several things about our country, not all of them good. However you measure it, though, I would think that it would be obvious that Dungy and Smith have achieved something worthy of note.
Joe Theismann didn’t seem to think so Monday. I don;t have a transcript for the show in front of me, but I listened to his segment on the way to work. Theismann said that he wished people would stop talking about the fact that Dungy and Smith were African American. He seemed to feel that mentioning that took away from their achievements and that they were head coached, full stop. Theismann couldn’t be more wrong. The fact that Dungy and Smith are African Americans means that their achievements are even more impressive.
Even putting aside the slow rate of progress in the NFL itself (which, to its credit, has done well in the last five years to correct the situation) we do not live in a post-racism society. Smith and Dungy started at a time when they would have had to work harder than their peers in order to impress certain people. They had the handicap of not belonging to the same race as the owners and GM and others who made hiring decisions, and thus not being a “comfortable fit” for those people. At every level, they would have to overcome the fact that some people expected the worst for them and some others would not even recognize their best as any good.
I know this because it is still perfectly acceptable to be a racist and suffer hardly any consequences for it. I know that because Rush Limbaugh has made a career out of it, with his latest broadside just a few days ago:
Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.
How many stations did Rush lose with this blatantly racist comment? As far as I can tell: one. So while I understand Theismann’s desire for the world to see Smith and Dungy for just their professional achievements, the fact remains that too much of the country will never accept their achievements as real. That’s why their race is relevant, and that’s why their race makes their achievements more impressive, not less.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
