Jason Whitlock, the freedom to speak one's mind, racial issues, and pop culture

Jason Whitlock, a colmunist for The Kansas City Star who has written for ESPN, now writes for AOL Sports, and has appeared in guest spots on several ESPN programs, was fired from his freelance position with ESPN recently. My acquaintance with him was two-fold--I had seen him guest host Pardon the Interruption (PTI) and he was fine there, and I'd read a couple columns in which I thought he was articulating absolutely stupid ideas in prognosticating this NFL season. But hey, that's what columnists do.
He was fired from ESPN for making comments critical of other sports journalists working for the company, and I'm torn on this. On the one hand, it would be great if ESPN was self-confident enough to take criticism, but really, I can't fault them for firing an employee who, in their opinion, publicly blasted them on several occasions. They don't have to pay a guy who, in their opinion, is working against them. I think they might be misguided, but whatever.
This whole affair has actually given me a lot more respect for Jason Whitlock. In his own column in The Kansas City Star, he didn't protest the decision or complain about it, he just laid out his side of the story--the when it came down to it, he found it more important to tell the truth as he sees it than to keep his job.
I also read the blog interview for which he was fired (though, to be fair to ESPN, it seems pretty clear that it wasn't just one incident). I found this portion, which starts off as a criticism of ESPN reporter Scoop Jackson, particularly interesting:

Scoop is a clown. And the publishing of his fake ghetto posturing is an insult to black intelligence, and it interferes with intelligent discussion of important racial issues. Scoop showed up on the scene and all of a sudden I’m getting e-mails from readers connecting what I write to Scoop. And his stuff is being presented like grown folks should take it seriously. Please. I guess I’ll go Bill Cosby on you, but it’s about time we as black people quit letting Flavor Flav and the rest of these clowns bojangle for dollars. There’s going to be a new civil-rights movement among black people and the people bojangling for dollars are going to be put in check.

Q: A Civil Rights movement? In 2006?

Dude, it’s in the air. Black people are tired of letting idiots define who we are. It’s dangerous. I grew up loving hip hop music. But the [bleep] is way out of hand now. Flavor Flav went from fighting the power with Chuck D to a minstrel show on VH1. You have all of these young rap idiots putting out negative images about black men and black women, and it’s on us to stop it and say enough is a enough. It’s not on white people. And it’s not on old black people like Cosby and Oprah. We have to police our own. W.E.B. Dubois talked about the talented 10 percent leading the black masses. We’re letting the Ignorant 5 lead us straight to hell. The Ignorant 5 are telling white folks, “Yeah, this is how we really is. Let me bojangle for ya, boss. You say step and I’ll show ya I can fetch.” And what’s even more dangerous, the Ignorant 5 are telling black kids, “It’s cool to be locked up. It makes a man out of you. And don’t embrace education. Dealing dope and playing basketball are better career choices.” The Ignorant 5 is the new KKK and twice as deadly. That’s why you don’t hear ‘bout the KKK anymore. The Klan is just sitting back letting 50 Cent and all the other bojanglers do all the heavy lifting.

Or this:

Q: People say you play the race card far too frequently. Your response?

Black people think I’m too hard on black people. They write me and tell me I’m a sellout. White people say I play the race card too much when I question the timing of Charlie Weis’ contract extension. But those same white people write me love letters when I blast off into the way the media and a prosecutor tried to crucify the Duke lacrosse players on the word of a couple of black criminal escorts. I’m going to write about race because race is an issue in America and my life experience has put me in a position to have something insightful and intelligent to say about race. I don’t have an agenda when it comes to racial issues. There’s enough stupidity on both sides of America’s black-white dilemma to keep me typing for years. I don’t have a guilty conscience about race. The people in my life know that I choose my friends solely on the content of their character. And I don’t choose sides in my column based on the color of anyone’s skin.

Good call. This happened several weeks ago now, and I didn't really know where I wanted to go with this. Yesterday, though, when I was looking for Sekou Sundiata, I found a review of one of his albums of poetry to be an interesting juxtaposition to Whitlock's comments:

Before there was Run-D.M.C., before Grandmaster Flash, before Afrika Bambaataa, rap's true infancy exosted with a few black radicals like the Watts Prophets and Gil Scott Heron. For artists such as these, flow, beats, or danceability didn't matter as much as the message. They were political poets who were more effective witha  musical background. Sekou Sundiata picks up this torch and carries it on, years after rap has gone the way of MTV, dance clubs, and innocuous million sellers.

It's an echo of Whitlock's criticism about which elements in African-American culture are the dominant. Not surprisingly, of course, they are the most marketable ones. "The revolution will not be televised," we were told once upon a time, but if a corporation can turn it into a t-shirt or hit single and find a way to market it , they will. As Sundiata is quoted in the review, "People be droppin' 'revolution' like it was a pick up line / You wouldn't use that word if you knew what it meant." Shallow slogans and trendiness dominate our popular culture because that's what sells big numbers. In the process, it dumbs things down. Oh, there will still be intelligent people out there, but it's the people in the middle of the spectrum who are dragged down, and we all lose out in the process. It's not, in that sense, a race issue, but a cultural one. The way that it becomes a race issue is because minorities are perceived more narrowly, as though there is a monolithic "black culture" and the loudest voices represent it, whcih is something Whitlock sort of points out, perhaps without fully realizing it.

tags: jason whitlock  race relations  pop culture  consumerism  

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