I get tired of writing about stupid racist comments made by people of so-called fame or political importance. One would think in this day and age, individuals would know better. But my sensibilities are particularly offended when the mainstream media doesn’t apply the same standard of fingering wagging to blacks when they utter racial obscenities, as members of the press do when whites do.
Black Syndicated radio host Tom Joyner of the popular Tom Joyner Morning Show thinks Washington Redskins coach Mike Shanahan is a modern day slave owner. Yes, you heard me correctly. During Joyner’s January 7th broadcast, Joyner expressed displeasure at Shanahan for forcing Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III to continue to play with an injured knee in Sunday’s game against the Seahawks.
Laughing throughout the discussion with his sidekicks, Joyner compared Shanahan to the Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candy, who Leonardo DiCaprio plays in the movie Django Unchained, directed by Quentin Tarantino. “He’s as bad as the mean white man in Django,” declared Joyner. Mr. Candy is cold-hearted slave owner with a lust for Mandingo fighting, where slaves were forced to fight to the death like dogs or roosters used in animal fighting. “If you saw the movie, just like DiCaprio had the Mandingos fighting in the room. That’s what he did. That’s what he did to RG3,” said Joyner.
Let’s be crystal clear. What Joyner is saying is Shanahan looks at Robert Griffin III (also referred to as RG3) as nothing more than a piece of “black property” he owns and is willing to quite literally “play to his death.” Shanahan has white players. Are they slaves too? One of Joyner’s sidekicks on the program said Shanahan may as well have told RG3, “Keep fighting, negroes!” Joyner laughed and added that by putting RG3 back in the game after his knee injury, Shanahan was saying “you did a good job n--word.”
All I could think about when I heard the audio of Joyner’s comments is how INCENSED the media would be if an equally popular radio host Rush Limbaugh said something similar like “Wow, Robert Griffin III acted like Django the way he tore up that field.” I can assure you the mainstream liberal leaning press would have howled for an apology from Rush, demanded advertisers pull their support from Rush’s show and so on.
Joyner’s racist comments in and of themselves are bad enough but equally as stomach curdling is his erroneous story telling about what transpired during Sunday’s game. According to the Washington Post, team physicians didn’t bar Griffin from playing the Redskins Sunday’s game against the Seahawks, contrary to Joyner’s claim.
After injuring his knee Sunday, Griffin insisted he wanted to continue to play, team doctors okayed it so Shanahan put him back in the game, “I’m not going to take the chance on his career to win a game,” he said. But Joyner didn’t bother to mention these facts in his rant about Shanahan “the slave master.”
When I did an Internet search for Joyner’s comments, the only mention was a tweet by theRootDC. The lack of media outrage at Joyner’s disparaging remarks about Shanahan and MSNBC Political Commentator Toure’s Romney “n-ggerization of Obama” comments last year suggests because of slavery and civil rights injustices wrought against black Americans, blacks get a bigotry pass.
I wonder what Tom Joyner would say if Mike Shanahan joked “When Joyner told blacks they should re-elect Obama because he’s black, Joyner reminded me of Mr. Candie’s dutiful head slave Stephen in the movie Django.” Seems to me we, including the media, should apply the same standards of decency to all Americans regardless of race. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.