kalibane wrote:Future,
If you don't want race to be part of the discussion then perhaps you should be taking issue with the people who went to their favorite social media to call him a "monkey" or an "N-word".
As for Sherman's thoughts on people calling him a "thug" I agree with him 100%... 100%. There are a lot of negative labels you can apply to Sherman but he meets zero of the criteria for being a "thug". There is no context to label him that way. None.
The man's life is the complete antithesis of "thug life". He wears a three piece suit with a bow tie to his press conference. So you can't blame his wardrobe. He has no criminal history. He has no violence in his history. He doesn't even use slang when he speaks. He can be a jerk, but there are a lot of jerks. Philip Rivers is a jerk and one of the biggest trash talkers in the game. No one has ever called him a thug. Cutler is a big time jerk. No one has ever called him a Thug. Or how about Christian Laettner, one of the most notorious jerks in sports, and no one calls him a thug despite the fact that he actually stomped on an opposing player. Calling him a thug is coded language plain and simple. Just like he said, the other day a hockey team lined up with the intention of fighting before the game even started... but he's the thug?
With regard to Rivers, Cutler and Laettner, I think
punk is the term more accepted by the media — i.e. the cutesy little goody-goodys who've never even once in their entire lives so much as gotten a speck of dirt under one of their fingernails.
When white guys act like the way you described, they're more often than not called
punks. And I have never met so much as a single white person who has/ has had a problem with that.
I do not see either
punk or
thug as a racial term, myself. But okay, if we're really going to try to start a war of words over what we perceive to be the surreptitious, malicious intentions behind someone's words, maybe we should draw an imaginary Mason-Dixon line over those two words.
For what it's worth, I think Rivers, Cutler, Laettner, Ben Roethlisberger and Richie Incognito are all
thugs, myself.
I think Richard Sherman, on the other hand, is an extremely talented — if occasionally loquacious, as is his right to be — athlete on the field, and an exceptional human being off it, who just incidentally happens to be an inspiration to whites, blacks, browns, yellows, reds and fuchsias the world over who know what it's like to be "that other guy over there" who is sadly more often than not overlooked by society and the arrogant victors within it who write its often myopic history books.
I know Sherman is certainly an inspiration to
me.
I have seen the poor white version of the hood from whence he comes for the better part of my life. I completely understand what he's saying when he talks about how most of his peers with whom he grew up (or
up with whom he grew, to be a bit more mindful of proper Churchillian usage of prepositional phrases) thought the only way out of Compton, California was via either incarceration or death.
My bachelor's degree notwithstanding, that is yet a frame of mind with which I am unfortunately still not the least bit unfamiliar, what Sherman is saying there. Call me a
thug or a
punk, whichever you prefer: I have seen, from the poor white side of the fence, that very thing firsthand. I understand the anxiety wrought by the emptiness in the stratification of social quicksand.
They're just words,
kal. And when a stupid person says them, doesn't it say more about
him or her than it does the person about whom he or she is ignorantly denigrating by way of the tone he or she is employing to say them?
We don't need a civil war over what we think the
intentions behind someone's words are.
America is a tough, spiteful, unforgiving enough place as it is without trying to find yet another way to create yet another war that really doesn't — and indeed,
shouldn't — even exist.
God bless you,
kalibane, my friend, fellow Seahawk fan, fellow American, and most importantly, fellow human being.