Jemele Hill over at ESPN.com wrote a outrageously interesting article today on the media and their coverage of Barry Bonds as opposed to their coverage of Rick Ankiel which you can check out for your own enjoyment at http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hill/070911 . I'm sure you're all familiar with the Barry Bonds situation so I won't go into that, but Rick Ankiel has been pretty much the opposite of Bonds this year. He came into the major leagues several years ago as a pitcher, failed miserably, was out of baseball for a few years, and has returned this year as an outfielder to much fanfare and excitement as the feel good story. Then it was found out that Ankiel received 8 shipments of HGH, a substance banned in baseball, back in 2005...whoops.
The main issue that Ms. Hill addresses (and that I agree with)is the reason why Ankiel is STILL being heralded as a feel good story while Mr. Bonds is still viewed as a cheater and an insult to baseball could have a lot to do with the skin tones of the two principles. Ankiel being white and Bonds being black is not an issue that people are willing to address in this situation and I think, as does Jemele Hill, that it needs to be. I won't go into further detail about the Ankiel/Bonds comparison (Jemele Hill does a great job of that already), but I do want to discuss the underlying issue a lot further.
Let's step outside the world of baseball and into a little known place I refer to as reality. In reality, white folks hate it when black people "play the race" card. To some extent I can agree with them because race has popped up in a LOT of situations where it shouldn't have and it gets old after a while. On the other hand, sometimes the race card is a valid game piece that no one wants to recognize. As a black person in America, we live under the "guilty until proven innocent" umbrella and we're always on the defensive because of it. Sometimes being black is all the damaging evidence that is needed. It is very hard for most whites to understand how black people can rush to the defense of an O.J. Simpson or a Michael Vick (or to a lesser extent Barry Bonds) when that person seems to be guilty as charged. But for every O.J. there is a Jena 6 or an Amadou Diallo or a Sean Bell that make it hard for us not be skeptical of the charge.
Most people in this country tend to give a larger amount of credibility to their own kind than everyone else. Some people do call it down the middle regardless of ethnic, racial, or religious bias, but there aren't many who do. The comments to Jemele Hill's article are proof that people will persuade themselves to believe what they want to serve their own interests. I read many an excuse on why what Ankiel did was just fine and what Bonds did was deplorable, but the one thing that kept coming up from the Ankiel defenders was their dislike for the writer's use of the "race card" which to me kind of eludes to some layer of guilt over having played it themselves. Blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and every other race in the world plays the "race card"; black people are just more vocal about it. Sometimes (and I know this is hard for some of you to swallow) race is an issue and does represent the basis for unjust bias. You can't discredit the use of racial bias in certain situations just because you don't want to give credit to your own racial biases.
No comments:
Post a Comment