“Did you hear what Whitlock said……”
Sadly, I get this a lot, you can just replace the name with Sage, Stephen A., Barkley and others black sports media members who seem to be hell-bent on trying to convince the people that either racism doesn’t exist or black people are the real racists.
They do it for various reasons.
Stephen A. Smith and Jason Whitlock for example do it for ratings and to stir the pot. Charles Barkley and Sage Steele do it because they are simply ignorant to racial issues.
Often times when these “takes” happen it is trap to lure you in to make you watch their shows, so the best way to combat that is just not to watch or listen. They are free to say what they want, but you are also free not to engage and give them what they want which is your attention.
Unfortunately, when the takes are SO EXTREME, it is important others in black media speak out about it, so the narrative isn’t that black people in media don’t care about other black people.
Here is what Whitlock had to say about LeBron.
Full video of Jason Whitlock talking about LeBron James pic.twitter.com/IO5ouv0xt0
— Loni Love (@LoniLove) June 1, 2017
I’ve talk to Jason Whitlock a couple of times and had him on my podcast. I can safely say he is a very intelligent guy who knows exactly what he is doing and what he is saying. He also believes a lot of the stuff he is saying, which makes him a combination of ignorance and doing it for ratings.
The thing about racism is that is isn’t about money or how famous you are, it is about superiority.
I can be standing side by side with a white person in a store. I have a college degree, my own business, fairly well-known in my industry and make a decent amount of money.
The white person next to me could have a GED, work at Taco Bell and been arrested 5 times.
In the eyes of many in America we wouldn’t see equally, he would be seen as better and safer. That is the reality of the situation.
If Kyle Korver plays badly, people say he is trash.
If LeBron plays badly you can be sure someone is calling him a nigger or monkey somewhere. Even though LeBron is a far superior player.
Sage for example is totally engulf into white superiority and she has never sugarcoated it. Praise the white people, look down on the black people. She said it as clear as day in her Facebook post.
My mother is a perfect example. Raised by an Irish father and an Italian mother in a small Massachusetts town, she went against her parents’ wishes and married the black man she fell in love with. What she dealt with fresh off of the tumultuous civil rights era was horrific in so many ways — which is one of many reasons why she is the strongest, bravest woman I know. So, instead of rolling your eyes at my black father for “selling out”, shouldn’t you be praising my white mother for following her color-blind heart and not succumbing to the pressures of American society back then? Apparently not. How about now, more than 4 decades later? Instead of giving me those all-knowing looks of disgust and calling me a sell-out when you see pictures of me with my white husband, or see me with my very light-skinned bi-racial children, shouldn’t you be praising that “white boy” from Indiana who followed his color-blind heart and married into a bi-racial culture completely different from his own, to help create a beautiful, color-blind family?
You can’t be color blind when so many people look down on your color. Black people aren’t the ones who need to be color blind, we just want a fair shake, why are we being asked to make concessions even though all the wrongdoing has been done to us?
The dangerous part of this is the white people or I should white supremacists latch on to this type of rhetoric and use it to continue to look down on black people as inferior or the real racists in this country, which is ridiculous.
White people who don’t want to admit racism exists use this type of rhetoric to continue to bury their head in the sand.
I am currently covering the NBA Finals and it is one of the more diverse events I attent, but when you are watching those press conferences tell me what you see.
It is still 90% white males.
While there are outstanding black sports journalists who understand that they have a platform that is much bigger than sports and use it wisely, it is disheartening that some black journalists have used their platform to try to assimilate themselves into what they believe their white audience wants to hear.
Because their voices are so big or in some cases loud, it drowns out the black journalists who should be given these platforms to talk about social issues and race.
TNT gave Charles Barkley a show about race where he gave a white supremacist a platform to spew hate, that show should have been given to Kenny Smith who does outstanding work in the community.
Jason Whitlock essentially said I am rich, so why should I care about racism, but as Jay Z said, money can’t buy you class.