Michael Irvin's "racist" comments

[tamu33]

Just like Tom Jackson said to Irvin in week 5....... Are you retarded?

[StrykerFSU]

Comments by George Solomon, ombudsman for ESPN

Michael Irvin's comments about the ancestry of Dallas quarterback Tony Romo, made during an interview on Dan Patrick's ESPN radio show Nov. 20, carried the same racial overtones that ended the television career of the late Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder nearly 20 years ago.

In a discussion of Romo's athletic ability, Irvin, a former Cowboys wide receiver and a regular on ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown, said the quarterback's skills would have had to come from African-American heritage. Romo is white.

Irvin told Michael McCarthy of USA Today he was "joking" when suggesting that Romo's distant grandmother "must have pulled a brother out the barn and got down to business" to produce an athlete of Romo's ability.

Irvin reflecting -- even in jest -- on Romo's family history was reminiscent of Snyder pontificating to a Washington TV news reporter about the inherited physical advantages of African-American professional football players. Minutes after that interview, Snyder was told by colleagues and friends he'd crossed the line.

He was fired by CBS the following day.

I'm not recommending a specific penalty for Irvin. That's not my role. What I would like to see, however, is ESPN take some action publicly as a result of remarks made by one of its most visible commentators. Irvin's apology on the Patrick show Monday, and ESPN's responses, don't seem sufficient.

"Anytime you generalize on racial matters, it can be damaging, dangerous and inappropriate," said Norby Williamson, ESPN's executive vice president for production. "You learn from such mistakes and move on."

Williamson said the network tried to cover the Irvin situation as a news story "as we would with any other public figure."

But the network walks a fine line regarding what it can and can't tell the public regarding internal personnel matters. In this case, however, Irvin, by his own words, has surrendered whatever confidentiality normally accorded his colleagues.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=solomon_george&id=2681869

[LaxRef]

Power+Prejudice=Racism

I never bought this definition, and apparently neither does the dictionary.

Some people posit this definition and then say it's impossible for blacks to be racist since they don't have the power. But if a black man is in charge of a company and hates whites, and he uses that power to srew over the whites working there or applying there, he would be racist under that definition.

BTW, there's nothing in the world wrong with prejudice. We couldn't do the simplest things without some amount of prejudging. For example, when you wake up in the morning and look around, you assume you're in your house because it looks like your house. But you could have been drugged in your sleep and moved to an undisclosed location made to look just like your house. If we had to deabte this things all the time, we'd be paralyzed.

Racial prejudice, on the other hand, is a bad thing: just because some people of a certain race are one way or because they did something doesn't mean all people of that race are the same way.

To me, racism takes prejudice a step farther: not only do you think people of a certain race are a certain way, but you hate people of that race because of it.