Monday, February 1, 2016
Head of The Undefeated, Kevin Merida, whose race had nothing to do with his hiring, and how dare you even ask such a question?
"The Undefeated" website finally debuted this in January, ESPN's foray into issues of sports and race.
John Skipper, the president of ESPN, gave an interview with The Wall Street Journal that contained this fascinating quote:
"At the Undefeated, the play is about content. If you do a time-lapse of the last two or three years in sports, you'd see more stories pop to the top about race and sports than anything. It is an important area to explore. There is a business reason: among our most important consumers are African-Americans. There is not right now a go-to site for black fans, other than just ESPN sites. [The Undefeated] will be a black-run and black-staffed site"
Excuse me if I'm being dense, but wouldn't maintaining a "black-run and black-staffed site" require discriminating against qualified white applicants? Isn't that illegal? Why are black writers especially qualified to write about race in sports? This isn't the Supremes or the Harlem Globetrotters, after all, it's a website. From whence comes the presumption that blacks are more qualified to write about the topic than whites? This sounds like racism to me. What about diversity, that marvelous, uplifting, just condition that justifies ignoring merit and objectivity in order to reach statistical parity with demographic distributions? Of does diversity only matter if non-white citizens don't win awards, get admitted or get hired?
Okay, I'm not really confused. The hiring policy articulated by ESPN's chief is discriminatory, racist, and is such a double standard that it belongs in the dictionary under "double standard" Note also that the Wall Street Journal interviewer didn't so much as blink at this admission.
I'd love to hear Spike Lee's defense of Skipper's statement, as well as that of the campus leaders in the various diversity uprisings, and of course, Bernie and Hillary. I'm sure they would be able to clear everything up.
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Pointer: Future of Capitalism