A Guilford puzzler
Despite the recent lessons of the Duke lacrosse case, the mad rush to judgment over alleged attacks of Palestinian students by football players still at times resembles the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona.
Some people still are making dangerous assumptions based only on the barest threads of contradictory information. Others don't want to wait for the investigation to run its course.
We have been conditioned to believe justice moves at the pace of a "Law & Order" episode, where the legal system leaps at warp speed between commercial breaks.
Meanwhile, I'm still puzzling over the forum I attended two weeks ago at Guilford College.
Don't get me wrong; it was as constructive and open a dialogue on a sensitive issue as I've seen in a long time.
But time and again people broached the issues of race, religion and ethnicity. And time and again some of them raised what could be legitimate concerns (or not; I don't know at this point) about Guilford's effectiveness over the years in addressing those issues.
But not once did anyone mention the irony that some of the alleged assailants (the count now has grown to three) are African American players.
This is not to say that this negates those other concerns. But this fact does suggest that, should the allegations be true, intolerance can be practiced by any of us.
Shouldn't a full, honest discussion about this incident acknowledge that?
Comments (4)
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According to PC math, being a football player subtracts 150 points from your virtue index, as determined by the American Association of Journalists. Since an African-American male begins with 175 DVIP (Default Virtue Index Points), that leaves those in question here with only 25--barely more than a white union worker (20) and far less than a Palestinian male (160). Indeed, when you subtract the proximity-to-whites deduction, the VIP of the African-Americans sinks to 0. Hence the invisibility of their race in the story.
On the positive side, African American men used to be lynched on such scant evidence. Now they are merely presumed guilty of a "hate crime" and verbally lashed by their fellow students.
Posted on February 8, 2007 2:36 PM
Brian:
As a black male -- though not a football player --I agree on the stigmas and stereotypes often attached to what I am rather than who I am.
But is this to say that the race of these players is irrelevant to the discussions about race, religion and ethnicity that have swirled around this case?
Posted on February 8, 2007 2:52 PM
I thought the concensus on the blog hjere was that we need to be totally silent about any of these issues, Allen. How dare you open that can of worms again. No speculation, no philosophical hypotheticals, no sociological study. Just let boys be boys, and make sure they go to school near where they live. If they play ball, be sure they pass...the ball, I mean. While we pass the buck.
Posted on February 8, 2007 11:14 PM
No, I claim that the discussions about race, religion, and ethnicity that have swirled around this case are bogus discussions, for the simple reason that we don't know that any of those things were involved in the incident. It's the knee-jerk tendency to allegorize everything into race melodrama that seems curious to me.
This reminds me of something . . . I can't quite bring it to mind. . . I'm thinking it has to do with communists. . .
But, if you want to have that discussion, then by all means complicate the allegory of good and evil that will inevitably orient it. The reason race has disappeared is that the black football players occupy an uninhabitable category of melodrama: they're good (because they're black, the usual victims of race melodrama) and bad (because they're football players, they won the fight, and are potentially racists).
My guess: two groups of mildly drunken young men who didn't like each other got into a fight. Possibly the combatants were called names. Let's leave it at that until we know enough to make informed judgments.
Posted on February 9, 2007 10:41 AM