Just so it is clear, I don’t like the picture. I think that is taking it too far. We aren’t idiots if you want to write an article about what is Michael Vick was a white quarterback that is fine, but we don’t need the photoshop. It is insulting to be honest.
I am sure they wouldn’t have put Tom Brady in black face if they were doing an article on how it would feel if he was a black quarterback. Then again black is bad and white is good, so that article would never happen.
Sometimes you have to think before you just throw something out on the web.
I have serious problem with the article starting with this paragraph.
The problem with the “switch the subject’s race to determine if it’s racism” test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone’s race changes his entire existence. In making Vick white, you have him born to different parents. That alone sets his life trajectory in an entirely different direction. Thus when this hypothetical white Michael Vick … wait, I can’t even continue that sentence in good faith. I mean, who would this white Vick be? That person is unknowable. When you alter his race, it’s like those Back to the Future movies where someone goes back in time, inadvertently changes one small thing about his parents’ dating history and then the person starts to disappear. If Vick had been born to white parents, you wouldn’t even be reading this right now. That Vick would have had radically different options in life compared with the Vick who grew up in the projects of Newport News, Va., where many young black men see sports as the only way out.
In general what that is saying if you are born white, everything would be better. It also implies being born black leads to criminal behavior.
Both are asinine assumptions. I was born black, I grew up in the projects, my dad wasn’t always around and I have a Masters degree, if I was born to white parents would things have been different, no one knows but don’t automatically assume it would be better.
The problem with articles like this is that it gives young black kids an excuse to fail. I am black, I am from the hood, so I can’t be a successful unless I throw football, sell drugs or shoot a jumper. Those type of negative thoughts have held black people back for centuries. It has been branded in us that black is bad. The bad guy wears the black hat, Devil’s food cake is my skin complexion, white women are put on a pedestal while black women with their ghetto bootys and full lips are frowned on and I could go on.
More from the ESPN article.
Here’s another question: If Vick grew up with the paternal support that white kids are more likely to have (72 percent percent of black children are born to unwed mothers compared with 29 percent of white children), would he have been involved in dogfighting? I ask this not to look for an excuse but to explore the roots of his behavior. Vick’s stunningly stupid moral breakdown with respect to dogs is certainly related to the culture of the world he grew up in, which he says fully embraced dogfighting. But it’s also related to the household he grew up in.
I grew up around dogfighting, when I became an adult, I understood right from wrong. Vick wasn’t dogfighting because he was he didn’t grow up in a white family, he was dogfighting because he had a $100+ million contract from the Falcons and thought he couldn’t be touched.
If anything if Vick was POOR and still in the hood as an adult he probably would be trying to survive and not thinking about dogfighting. It was because he was RICH and PRIVILEGE he thought he could get away with it. It is also the only reason the Feds even cared about it.
These are dumb articles.
Don’t take sympathy on me because I am black, both parents weren’t around or I grew up on the hood. Don’t make excuses for criminal behavior. Furthermore don’t attempt to have black people dreaming to be white, because that isn’t reality. Reality is to love yourself whatever race you are.
Mike Vick made bad choices not because he is black or didn’t grow up white, but because he was dumb.
Being a dummy has NO COLOR. Just remember that.
