I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Red Auerbach. But it seems that even more important than his legacy as a winning coach is his legacy as a progressive one. From the New York Times obituary:
Auerbach coached the Celtics to nine N.B.A. championships, eight of them consecutively from 1959 to 1966. He built another six championship teams as the Celtics’ general manager and oversaw a final one, in 1986, as the team’s president, a position he held at the time of his death.
[. . .]
Auerbach was also a pioneer in race relations. In 1950, his first season coaching the Celtics, he chose Chuck Cooper of Duquesne University as the first black player selected in an N.B.A. draft. In the 1963-64 season, the Celtics became the first N.B.A. team to start a game with an all-black lineup: Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders and Willie Naulls.
When Auerbach named Russell as his coaching successor, it was the first time a black had become coach of a major American pro sports team.
“If our President were black, we would not be at war right now. Not because a black person wouldn’t have done something like that — just because America wouldn’t let a black person do something like that without asking them a million questions.”
Two stories from the past week highlight the dangers (and idiocy) that attend the use of racial profiling, at least in its bastardized, populist form. In both cases, unreasonable security actions were taken more in the interest of mollifying the stoked-up fears of crowds than of truly protecting airline passengers from harm.
“People here in the U.S. don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”
That’s what a Jordan-born man says he was told by airport security personnel when they asked him to remove his T-shirt before boarding a flight to California at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The man, whose name is Raed, says he was told “People are feeling offended because of your T-shirt.” Raed was wearing a shirt that said in both Arabic and English, We Will Not Be Silent. He was asked to put on another shirt instead, but all of his other shirts were in his checked baggage.
“Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” was Raed’s question, to which one of the security people replied, “”People here in the U.S. don’t understand these things about constitutional rights” Raed’s answer: “I live in the U.S., and I understand it is my right to wear this T-shirt.”
“You can’t wear a T-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I am a robber’ and going to a bank,” was the security man’s rejoinder.
Rash, unreasonable, and unconstitutional action based wholly on ignorance, that violates the rights of American citizens — this is George W. Bush’s version of “The Great Society.” Feel safer yet?
And here’s another story from the past week, told by The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.
The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.
Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.
Writing on Orcinus, Sara Robinson notes the direction in which we, and our British allies, are moving:
Let’s see. A frightened mob selects a couple victims, accuses them of being would-be criminals without any evidence whatsoever, forcibly robs them of the cost of transcontinental airfare, and threatens anyone (pilots and airline personnel) that questions either their verdict or their right to exact “justice.”
There’s only one word for this. It’s vigilantism, pure and simple. It’s no different than any other kind of lynch mob. And it is beneath the dignity of a civilized society.
The reasons for and righteousness of the anger on display here are under furious discussion on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. (See The Mahablog and Glenn Greenwald for two useful perspectives.)
But there’s far more at stake here than meets the eye. If these vigilante mobs are allowed to get their way on airplanes, what’s to stop them from taking their show on the road? Are we going to see subway mobs assaulting brown people on train platforms to “prevent” subway bombings? Are restauranteurs going to find themselves under pressure from upset diners not to hire — or seat — certain “frightening” classes of people? Will neighborhood groups press realtors to stop selling local homes to specific ethnic groups, for fear property values will drop? Or will they, perhaps, subject “undesirable” neighbors to harassment campaigns until they’re forced to move on?
This all sounds far-fetched — until you realize that we’re hardly forty years past an era when most of this was standard operating procedure in much of America. Vigilante justice, racial segregation in public accommodations, real estate redlining, and sundown towns are part of a past that we’ve worked hard to leave behind. It will be a disgrace to all of us if we allow a few irrational bullies on airplanes put us on the road to bringing it all back.
King Kaufman, Salon’s sports columnist, is dependably excellent, especially when he writes about the third rail of professional sports in America: race. When I interviewed him last year for this blog, I asked him why the issue of race resonated so strongly with him. He responded:
I’m a white guy who makes his living writing about athletes, many or most of whom (depending on the sport) are black. And they make their living performing for crowds that are mostly white, and are covered by a media dominated by white people, such as me. Just that set of circumstances alone is tangled and fraught enough to take a lifetime to figure out. Add in that sports have traditionally been both at the vanguard of minority advancement and lagging far behind the mainstream. Think of the black jockeys and boxers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, etc., and also of the still painfully slow integration of front offices and coaching ranks in some sports, or the whole native American nickname and mascot thing.
In today’s column (click through the ads to see it), King addresses another aspect of that slow process of integration when he highlights the fact that Warren Moon is about to become the first black quarterback inducted into the Football Hall of Fame. King finds that some sportswriters are minimizing this fact, because it highlights the racial struggles Moon went through during his career:
He had to listen to racist taunts from the stands as a high school and college player. He had to go to junior college because college coaches didn’t think blacks could play quarterback. He had to go to the Canadian Football League because NFL coaches didn’t think blacks could play quarterback.
What I can’t get over is that Warren Moon is only six years older than I am, and we grew up in the same city, and it wasn’t in the South.
He led the University of Washington to the Rose Bowl in 1978, before the Huskies became Pasadena regulars. He dominated the CFL with the Edmonton Eskimos. And then, as a 27-year-old rookie — about five months younger than Jackie Robinson was when he made his long-delayed major league debut — Moon started an NFL career that lasted 17 seasons.
You couldn’t watch Moon, athletic and strong-armed, play quarterback at Washington and not think he at least had a chance in the NFL. He went undrafted not because teams didn’t think he could play in the league, but because he’d made it clear he only wanted to play quarterback. His longtime agent, Leigh Steinberg, has said Moon probably would have been a third- or fourth-round pick if he’d agreed to play some other position.
This isn’t how the NFL, always ready to bend history to suit its purposes, seems to remember it.
In his column on NFL.com, Gil Brandt, the longtime director of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys, writes, “Moon, at just under 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, was an athletic blend of fast legs and a strong right arm. It just took the arm a little longer to get there. And that’s what made Moon so difficult to scout as a college player … and probably why he had to go to a J.C. and to Canada to prove his talents to those at the next level.” (Ellipsis his.)
Yeah, Gil, sure. That’s probably why.
That a forty-nine year-old man has just become the first black quarterback in the Hall of Fame is a measure of how far we have to go. As King notes, the first step towards getting there involves an honest look back at Moon’s career.
Update: This post reminded me of an earlier one about an Asian college player trying to make it into the league: Racism in the NFL.
Timmy Chang, the subject of that piece, was picked up by the Eagles last year, but sent off to play a season in Europe. He may get his chance this year as a third-string backup to Donovan and Jeff Garcia. He’s currently on the roster.
I was arrested on December 1st, 1955 for refusing to stand up on the order of the bus driver, after the white seats had been occupied in the front. And of course, I was not in the front of the bus as many people have written and spoken that I was — that I got on the bus and took the front seat, but I did not. I took a seat that was just back of where the white people were sitting, in fact, the last seat. A man was next to the window, and I took an aisle seat and there were two women across. We went on undisturbed until about the second or third stop when some white people boarded the bus and left one man standing. And when the driver noticed him standing, he told us to stand up and let him have those seats. He referred to them as front seats. And when the other three people — after some hesitancy — stood up, he wanted to know if I was going to stand up, and I was not. And he told me he would have me arrested. And I told him he may do that. And of course, he did.
Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950’s Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.
I was going to write a bland platitude such as “Rosa Parks has passed away, but her legacy will live on.”
But the truth is that her legacy will not live on by itself. The battle for civil rights, for racial equality, is an ongoing struggle, an ever-present fight. Only by engaging the problems in America’s past, and understanding the ways in which they continue to plague its present, can we hope to brighten America’s future.
Conservative pundits often say mean things, but seldom do they go so far as to say what they really mean.
At rare moments, however, the mask of civility slips off, and the public is offered a glimpse of the ghastly, pock-marked face that lies beneath the smooth surface of the conservative movement.
Then the mask is quickly put back in place, and followed up with countless photo-ops and explanations of what the pundit really meant to say.
That is exactly what happened a few days ago, when former Republican Education Secretary Bill Bennett suggested on his radio show that America would be a safer place if all black babies in this country were aborted. And I quote:
I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Who ever said conservatives weren’t compassionate?
Bennett’s statement, which he now says was hypothetical (or, to use his own language, “a thought experiment about public policy”), is so clear, and so forthright, that it needs no parsing.
That, at least, is what I thought when I first read it. But I see that my new friends on The Corner would disagree with me — Jonah Goldberg calls this “a silly, manufactured, attack on Bennett. Maybe he could have phrased it differently, but the point he made is rational . . .”
Of course, the rationality of the point depends on what your definition of “rational” is. Personally, I don’t think that conducting involuntary mass abortions on the basis of race is a very rational solution to the problem of crime in this country, but what do I know — I’m just one of those kooky bloggers, not a former U.S. Secretary of Education with a nationally syndicated radio show and a “philosophy professor’s hat.”
At any rate, though the import of Bennett’s words are clear to most of us, the spin he uncorked after a controversy broke out is a little bit harder to follow.
In fact, it is so convoluted that it has sparked the return of the hottest craze sweeping the nation. Yes, my friends, I speak of Parse This!™, an exciting game of literary exegesis in which contestants attempt to unpack the opaque utterances of public figures.
Now, before I reveal today’s quote, allow me to set the stage: Bill Bennett has just been accused of uttering bizarre and racist statements. The President’s spokesperson has said that George W. Bush “believes the comments were not appropriate.” But Fox News gives Bennett a chance to appear on Hannity and Colmes in order to explain himself and put his words “in context.”
Well, the context was a radio show that I was doing yesterday, and the topic was abortion and we were talking about bad arguments in regard to abortion. A caller suggested he was opposed to abortion because he said if there were more babies there would be, eventually, more tax payers and a larger GNP, a smaller deficit. I said you want to be careful with that kind of argument because someone could postulate a situation where child’s not likely to be a productive taxpayer. I said, arguments in which you take something that’s far out, like the GNP and try to connect it up with abortion are tricky. I said make the case of abortion on the basis of life and protecting life. I said abortion is invoked in another way; you could make an argument that if you wanted to lower the crime rate, you saw the quote; you could practice abortion in very large numbers. You could do it in the black community; you could do it in other places. This is, by the way, the subject of a book for economics by a professor at Yale.
I feel like Bennett is saying something here, but I have no idea what it is. Can you help out? Please, Parse This™!
In the right wing litany of family values, small government, low taxes, god and guns the missing word is racism. They don’t have to say it. It’s part of all those things.
These last two weeks I’ve heard the old school racists dragging out the “n” word, but they are dying out. We aren’t going to see a lot of that anymore, thank god. But the code words were being slung around more freely than I’ve seen in ages. The first thing I heard out of people’s mouths was that these people had been “irresponsible” for not following the directions they were given. The next thing I heard was that “looters” were taking over the city and they should be shot. Then there was the “why do they have so many kids” and “why can’t they clean up after themselves” and “defecating where they stood.”
Two shaky House incumbents, Democrat Melancon and Republican Boustany, hope response to hurricane rallies voters behind them. House Republican campaign chief Reynolds touts chance to market conservative social-policy solutions; Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge is overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as “strangely surreal and almost detached.” At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
Benign as it may be, we know now that passive indifference that Obama noted becomes malignant in a moment of crisis when it is manifest in one who’s supposed to be a leader. Bush may be, as the song goes, a good ol’ boy who’s “never meaning no harm,” but the record of what’s happened on his watch is another reality.
[snip]
Kayne gets it. Bush doesn’t care because he doesn’t get it. If he got it, he’d care. But he doesn’t care to get it. It’s not an active hatred. It’s a “passive indifference.’ Unfortunately, it’s recently proven as deadly as active hatred.
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Rick Bowmer/AP
Some will see these photographs as an exploitation of tragedy; others will see them as unduly macabre;
and some will recognize that only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.
Found via Talk Left and Pam’s House Blend, they are graphic and disturbing. Click on them at your own risk:
In an essay that appeared in an 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War dead — the first wartime photographs that brought the reality of war to American breakfast tables. Holmes wrote:
Many people would not look through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.
There are too many stories yet to be told. We need to hear them. We need to see them.
But even that is not enough.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! –mon semblable,–mon frere!
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Clearly, the federal officials purportedly in charge of the disaster recovery efforts bear the heaviest burden for these deaths. The President who appointed them, and those who continue to support him, have revealed themselves for the callous, inhumane, immoral creatures that they are.
But I can’t help feeling that we are part of the problem, too. By continuing to participate in this corrupt and morally bankrupt society, we all bear some measure of the burden.
We live in a country whose President openly wonders “what didn’t go right?” as FEMA orders 25,000 body bags.
He will never know, because he will never face these dead.
But we can, and we must.
The last five posts I’ve written, and then deleted, have all been titled “What’s the Point?” In the face of our failed efforts to make a change before this disaster, I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question, but the one thing I do know is that everything is different now. After Katrina, things cannot continue to go on as they did before. Something has to change. Everything has to change.
We need action. We need to open the doors of this cabinet of horrors, this grotesque nation of repulsive privilege and old bigotry.
Finding Latoyia: Your Actions Can Make a Difference
The blogswarm is having a noticeable effect: Latoyia’s picture was all over the place today. Please help us keep up the pressure.
The reward fund for Latoyia continues to grow, but it remains far short of the goal. If you’ve thought about giving, but haven’t done so yet, please consider doing so. Every contribution, no matter how small, will help.
If you’re a blogger, please consider putting one of the following ads on your site, and linking it to this ASZ post. (ad 1 | ad 2). Remember: our best chance for finding this young woman is to bring her image before as many eyes as possible. Please do your part.
A detail I’ve just read about, and that could be a good identifier, is that she has the word “Angel” tattooed on her wrist.
SpinDentist Drills Tucker Carlson
Even as he has received accolades for his role in pushing the MSM to cover Latoyia’s disappearance, Richard Cranium has received accusations of political bias. He deals with them effectively in this post:
. . . on an issue like Latoyia Figueroa’s disappearance, the lines of politics disappear completely. Latoyia could be any one of us, our children, or other family members. So, keep this in mind as you peruse articles on ASZ other than those relating to Latoyia.
Some people, unfortunately, refuse to hear that message. During an interview last night on MSNBC with All-Spin Zone’s own SpinDentist, Tucker Carlson had this to say:
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George W. Bush and Bill Bennett in happier times
