Sports Blog Wars
I’m Jewish; Nazis suck. But I also recognize that had Hitler not pussied out on Operation Sea Lion and invaded the UK, we’d all be speaking German. Likewise, had he not gone south to annex Czech-ville before heading to the USSR, the German Army may well have taken Stalingrad pre-winter and we’d all be sprechen deutsch. Actually, I’d never have been born, but whatevs.
Somehow, our boy ‘Dolf came up in a b-ball column on ESPN’s website a few weeks ago. A black woman, Jemele Hill, compared rooting for my beloved Celtics as akin to rooting for Hitler. What I think she meant was that it was like rooting for Citi or GE, but her next sentence featured Gorby, so she was on a politically metaphorical level. It was a dumb statement, that’s all.
But these b-ball fans at Red’s Army ran a “Let’s Get Jemele Hill Fired” post:
For those who don’t know,Jemele Hill is a horrible sports journalist. I once watched her host Jim Rome’s show and thought to myself, “A high-school kid could do a better job.” She’s attacking the Celtics in her latest ESPN Page 2 column…but here’s a line sure to piss some people off:
“Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim. It’s like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan.”
Amazingly, that line made it past the editors at ESPN.com (Journalism 101 - Rule 1.1 - Never reference Hitler). As Deadspin so deftly points out, someone finally had the smarts to take it down. For me, that’s not good enough. Let’s email ESPN and demand Hill be fired for the simple reason that we shouldn’t be exposed to her garbage any longer.
Jemele got fired, and gave this interview:
You posted something on your personal blog saying you got e-mails calling you the N-word. How many such e-mails did you get?
A lot. But I hesitate to get into that because I’m not a victim and I don’t want it to come off like I’m saying, ‘Oh, look what happened to me.’ These are the consequences of my action. It doesn’t give anybody the right to call me that, and this is the nastiest batch of mail I’ve received, ever, in my 11-year career. But I don’t want that to be the focus.
To which Red’s Army responded:
I’m hoping… HOPING… that none of you sent that sort of email to her. If you did… I would invite you to never come back. That beyond worse than what she wrote. What she wrote was dumb. What people said in those emails was disgusting and hateful. It kills me to read things like that.
I just don’t get people sometimes.
In between these episodes (Red A’s firing campaign, her firing, the n*gger emails, and Red A’s denouncing of n*gger emails), we at Med A engaged in a battle with Red’s A over whether Boston was a racist city. Red A accused Anthony of using generalizations when describing Boston’s racism. In fact, Anthony used specifics. He along with many others at Med A have seen the Boston police single out people of color for lesser crimes than we were committing at the exact same time. We’ve seen entire black neighborhoods paved over to make way for college dorms. And so on.
Red’s A countered by saying: “Racism, obviously, still exists in EVERY city… not just Boston. Boston has gone to great lengths to combat it. But times change… and even incidents of racism in certain cities shouldn’t color the entire city as racist.”
Actually, few northern cities are as racially segregated as Boston. Fewer still have as deep a pervading mistrust of one another as Boston’s blacks and whites.
Finally, it seems Red A’s campaign against Hill led to many-a-racist emails, further proving that racism is a Boston forte. Red’s A should have listened to us when we said a crusade of protest against a young, female, black sportswriter would lead to further racism. We suggested their petition would be better directed at, say, the genocide in Darfur or crisis in Zimbabwe. Or maybe they should have just stuck to sports writing and not ventured into journalism ethics.
TAGS: attack, Boston, Celtics, ESPN, HBO, Hitler, Jemele Hill, political, Racism, spin, Sports, war
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