Gruden’s racist remark woven into US history
“Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of Michellin tires,” Jon Gruden, the now resigned coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, wrote in a 2011 email to the former team president of Washington, D.C.’S football team.
Frustrated due to the NFL’S player lockout during labor negotiations, Gruden’s racial invective was directed toward NFL Players Association Executive Director Demaurice Smith, a Black man.
Gruden resigned Monday night as reports swirled that he used homophobic and misogynistic language repeatedly in a series of emails over a period of seven years.
His remark about Smith was disappointing, but not surprising.
The use of racial tropes by whites has a long and ignominious history in this country. Caricatures of Blacks with disfigured lips and exaggerated body parts are woven into America’s soiled fabric.
And while such images may not be as commonplace as they were during the era of Jim Crow, they have apparently left a lasting impression on some, even those who would have been too young to encounter them in real-time.
Despite the fact that Gruden was raised as a northerner in Ohio, not a southerner, and is two years short of a Generation X membership, he seems to be fully aware of the kind of racially construed characterizations of earlier periods that were intended to denigrate Blacks and shape whites’ thinking of them.
This speaks to the staying power of films such as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of A Nation” and David Selznick’s 1939 “Gone with the Wind.”
No, Gruden doesn’t get to pull the ole, “there was no racial intent meant” any more than former Los Mayor Alamitos Dean Grose, who in 2009 sent out an email that depicted the White House lawn planted with watermelons.
In one sentence, Gruden managed to perpetuate two tired racial tropes by insulting the intelligence of the highly credentialed former trial lawyer as well as his physical appearance.
And besides, who is Gruden, aka “Chucky,” to speak pejoratively about anyone’s facial features?
Since Gruden’s decade-old comment has come to light, he has done what any sensible person would do, issue an apology.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he is trying to convince those around him that his off-color remark represented a lapse in judgment that should not be viewed as an accurate reflection of his character.
He’s probably said to some, “that’s not who I am.” How many times have we heard someone say that? Who can forget when Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer on “Seinfeld” tried to explain away his 2006 racist tirade at The Laugh Factory in West Hollywood by saying that his remarks did not represent who he is, that he just lost his cool or something to that effect?
It’s time we placed under closer scrutiny Richard Attias’ idea that “sport is a great equalizer that can build bridges, transcend borders and cultures, and render even the fiercest conflicts temporarily irrelevant.”
To be sure, sport has the potential to do all of those things, but in the words of novelist Margaret E. Atwood, “potential has a shelf life.”
The fact of the matter is, sport is a microcosm of society, where the well-educated power brokers and decision makers of this century are seemingly no less susceptible to bigoted thinking and racist behavior than those who came before them.
I believe it was Maya Angelou who said, “when people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Judson L. Jeffries is professor of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University.