Off Wing Opinion

In what I promise should be my last Rush Limbaugh-related post, I found two pieces that demonstrate the stark contrast between the two camps on this issue.

For the prosecution, Robert George at Salon.com:

[L]imbaugh's analysis failed factually and ideologically. Unfortunately, in the one area where it succeeded -- injecting controversy on ESPN's pre-game set -- it introduced a particularly corrosive line of thought.

It articulated the double standard that blacks fear underlies much of American society: The successes and failures of white individuals belong to the individual ("[Jake] Plummer's a bum!" "Plummer's great!"), whereas the success and failure of a black person belongs to the race. One week ago, after a poor start to the season, McNabb was being analyzed on his football skills. Today, he is analyzed on his race.

So Limbaugh managed to do in one moment what the media has actually refrained from doing in recent years. Removing their individuality, he has effectively "adjectivized" McNabb, McNair, et al. After succeeding on their own merits, they are once again black quarterbacks for however long the media chooses to continue with this story.

And in a surprise, for the defense, Allen Barra at Slate:

Limbaugh is being excoriated for making race an issue in the NFL. This is hypocrisy. I don't know of a football writer who didn't regard the dearth of black NFL quarterbacks as one of the most important issues in the late '80s and early '90s. (The topic really caught fire after 1988, when Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl.)

So far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of us didn't want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because he's black is absurd. To say that we shouldn't root for a quarterback to win because he's black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that we shouldn't have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was black. (Please, I don't need to be reminded that McNabb's situation is not so difficult or important as Robinson's

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2003 at 11:12 pm by Eric McErlain and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.