Climate is right at OSU: Hiring five full-time black assistant coaches sends powerful message
Posted on 09/04/2003 3:45:21 PM PDT by Davis
Can you recognize this excerpt from an essay published in an intellectual magazine of Liberal persuasion, The New York Review of Books?
And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male....For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation——remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic centrality.
Of course, there were sports fans who loved the stars on their favorite teams without regard to race. Sometimes, they even liked black athletes the most. Such white men tended to be liberals.
Yes, kiddies, it's Norman Mailer, former novelist, offering the intelligentsia a barrage of reasons the Americans went to war in Iraq. Not entirely gaga, Mr. Mailer is careful to describe this adventure into the secret racial psyche of white American as "minor but significant."
It impossible to tell how Mailer knows that we are possessed of an "ongoing malaise" which is rooted in our observation of the disproportionate achievements of black athletes. Is Mailer himself affected by this ongoing malaise? Has he discussed it with other white males of his acquaintance while sitting around the campfire on hunting trips? Is it the topic of conversation down to the 7-Eleven, the VFW, or over at Daryl's Bait Shop? Has he discovered it in the pages of Guns & Ammo and NASCAR News? Is it the subject of peer-reviewed articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and Lancet?
No, to all the above. This ongoing malaise on which Mailer's argument depends seems to have sprung full-grown from Mailer's brow. It's merely an assertion, a starting declaration. It is, of course, vague in the first place, unprovable, incapable of being quantified. In a word, it's muck.
Mailer moves quickly to tie his vague and dubious starting point, white male malaise, with facts that are correct but are generally ignored when they aren't actually denied by PC society and the Left press: the disproportionate achievements of black athletes in a number of sports. For a similar observation some years back, Nick the Greek Snyder was banished, discharged summarily by CBS. But Mailer is a card carrying intellectual and New York Review is at least a rung above the Enquirer, hence their intentions are honorable, so it's okay to say it and necessarily to imply that it is a racial characteristic, not merely a matter of training.
Mr. Mailer isn't upset by the disproportionate achievement of black athletes. He himself apparently suffers no malaise on account of it. Indeed, he seems positively gleeful, greeting it with the same joyous acceptance he accorded the events of September 11, 2001 when he described the Twin Towers as "two huge buck teeth" and declared their ruins more beautiful than they were. What an aesthete! Take that, white man. You deserve it.
In my experience and judging by the crowds at football and basketball games at the highest professional level, white males aren't sickened by black athletic ability. They are delighted with its excellence. And this isn't new. The guys I hang around with noticed black athletic ability years ago and have lived comfortably with this knowledge all our lives. But our delight with athletic excellence has not blinded us to other black disproportionate performance. Thus, many of us do not attribute the disproportionate lack of black achievement in other endeavors–SAT scores, science and mathematics, reading and writing and real estate, for instance, nor the squalor and criminal disorder of black neighborhoods to white racism or inadequate federal funding. Those, indeed, are malaise inducing.
Climate is right at OSU: Hiring five full-time black assistant coaches sends powerful message
2. The biggest "race" problem in baseball at the moment is not the ubiquity of black players, but their relative disappearance in terms of both raw numbers and percentage, in favor of Hispanics.
3. Did I mention that Norman Mailer is a self-aggrandizing fool?
It would probably be wise for all football factories to hire 20 or 30 black assistants if they wish to keep their "student athletes" out of jail and their program off NCAA probation.
He's Tiger, not "the Tiger". Nobody calls him that.
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