BEGS THE QUESTION
Why is media scared to mention racially obvious?
HOW CAN you miss what’s impossible to ignore? In my case, old family photos, several generations deep, often produce grammar school class photos that inspire unrequited wonder about what’s hard to not to see.
Who are/were those two or three black kids in the black and white shots of otherwise allwhite ranks in 1940 and even the 1950s? Where did they come from? How were they treated by teachers and classmates? Were they happy to be there? Did they feel strange?
Given that the answers don’t appear on the back — they’re not baseball cards — the wonder eventually passes.
Saturday, while watching the Celebration Bowl from Atlanta on ABC/ESPN, similar wonder surfaced.
The game, between historically black colleges Howard and Florida A&M, included one or two white players on each team. Seems most football games between mostly black colleges feature a few white players. As in those old family photos, you can’t miss them.
But who are they? How did they get there? How are they treated? Do they feel strange to be enrolled in a black school?
All, I surmise, are good questions that would carry interesting answers, the kinds that would enhance telecasts — unless I’m the only one in the audience smitten with such wonder.
Same goes for white members — again, tough not to notice — of the black schools’ marching bands.
But these are racially ridiculous days in the nervous hands of uptight media. They’re the kinds of days that can cost longtime ESPN tennis analyst Doug Adler his career and reputation for praising Venus Williams’ “guerilla” net-rushing tactics because some unstrung New York Times stringer claimed that Adler, for no known reason or context, called her “a gorilla.”
The illogical fear of addressing even benign and conspicuous racial realities — the fear of being condemned and ruined by TV execs who’d serve the screwball claims of fringe lunatics before standing up for their employees — is so embedded in the front of producers’ and broadcasters’ insecure minds that matters of audience wonder are left unexamined and unspoken.
But tuning to a ballgame — any ballgame — is to fully anticipate the ridiculous and a silence based on self-inflicted irrational fear.