I'm an emotional person. I work hard to make sure my emotions don't get the best of me, but when an issue strikes a chord, sometimes I can't stop myself from chiming in. Especially with the immediacy and availability of social media at my fingertips.
As Arizona State Head Coach Herm Edwards has long said, "Don't press send."
It's advice I take often, but nowhere near often enough.
As the events of the last few days continue to unfold, specifically the reaction to the video-recorded killing of a man named George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin, as his colleagues refused to intervene, near anybody with a propensity to give an opinion on anything has weighed in on either the action, or the country's various reactions.
The sports world has been no exception, and by extension, neither have I.
Perhaps the most vocal I've ever been about any topic involving the mixed subjects of race relations, media, and Arizona sports was in regard to an article written by Ric Bucher for Bleacher Report about Marcus and Markieff Morris. In his profile of the twin NBA players, and one-time Phoenix Suns teammates, Bucher took the following shot at the state of Arizona:
"Besides, simply sharing a house in the warm Arizona desert and being able to shop for vintage sneakers was mind-blowing enough, having finished high school sleeping on twin beds in the cramped, unheated basement of their grandfather's house in north Philadelphia, the ceiling too low for them to stand up straight. Living in a state slow to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and renowned for a six-time re-elected sheriff charged with racial profiling (see: Arpaio, Joe) wasn't always comfortable, but they had each other and just about everything else was ideal."
I was incensed. Arizona is my chosen home, and a home that I love dearly. Who was Ric Bucher to inject the issue of race into a story about two athletes whom Arizonans had plenty of legitimate reasons to be upset with? Is Arizona objectively on the front lines of several issues of supremacist discrimination and intercultural mistrust? Yes, and you'd be certifiably insane to deny that. But did it need to be brought up without any respect to context or how it personally affected the twins in their time here? Did my fellow Arizonans deserve to be painted with such a broad brush? I felt the answer was no, and I let Bucher know how I felt.
I tell that story to provide context for what I'm about to say, and to pre-empt protests that I'm driven to say it by some sort of deep-seated guilt, or need to virtue signal. In fact, I'm included in this criticism, for reasons I'll get into below.
To Arizona's Sports Media Community: We can do better.
While some may believe that it is not the place of corporate brand managers, athletes and entertainers to interject political, or even personal points of view into who and what they represent to their target audience, it's happening. There's no turning back. This is society now- at least in sports. If you don't want to hear what your favorite team, player, or coach thinks, the onus is now on you as the consumer to treat your entertainment options as a buffet-style entity. Pick and choose what you want to hear and see, and leave the rest behind. And if you can't do that, walk away altogether.
In the past few days, many high school, college and professional organizations, as well as their coaches, have all issued various statements about the part they hope to play in the upcoming moments of opportunity for healing that their communities will face.
Meanwhile, members of the varying sports media outlets have also had ample opportunity to discuss the state of things, and many of the topics they've explored have helped carry on a conversation that non sports fans, who don't have a cross-cultural and cross-partisan commonality may not have the blessing of being exposed to.
Are we, in the sports entertainment business, ready to shine a light inward on who and what we've been, and set achievable goals about what we'll be from this point on? It's gut check time for sports content producers, both on the events side, and the analysis side.
Now, you might be thinking at this point, "Just get on with it. Quit grandstanding and make your case for what needs to change and why."
The issue, however, is that on the sports media side at least, I'm probably not the person to actually be making that case. The people who should have a firm hand in representing which changes should be made, all too often have been excluded from having a seat at the table. It's incumbent upon those who are already at the table to make room for voices that reflect the experience of the minority community, particularly the black community, a community that is hardly a minority within the participation bloc of the events that we cover.
I can't tell you what needs to be done, but I can tell you that whatever we've been doing up to this point isn't enough, and it isn't working. There are countless instances of a lack of diversity in leadership positions in Arizona's various sports and sports media organizations, which is creating real, and completely avoidable, harm.
I'm not out to re-litigate issues of the past, what's done is done. But in my time following and covering sports in Arizona, those instances are plentiful, and recently, seem to be more and more obviously rooted in a culturally homogenized way of thinking.
This week alone, a popular local morning sports-talk radio program featured a conversation between co-hosts who got into their own personal stories of having come up from a place of poverty. That conversation included a point from one host that stated,
“It may come out of a position of ignorance and I don’t mind you pointing it out and saying you’re not seeing it the way I would like you to see it or the way I think you should see it or give me a different point of view but when we talk about this conversation, if you want to turn me off from the conversation use the phrase ‘white privilege.’ That’s a great way to turn me off of the conversation because there was nobody in my life telling me white privilege when I lived below the federal poverty line myself."
The show's co-host later followed up with an observation of his own:
"It’s interesting you bring up white privilege because you know my background as well. Grow up as a son of a truck driver and proud of that. On a dead-end street on the bottom of a hill that ended into a gravel pit. That’s for real. OK? That is for real. I grew up poor, ladies and gentlemen, so I guess the conversation has got to be it’s not like white people are the only people on the face of the planet that are racists. Right? I mean, can we agree on this stuff? This is where the conversation will be productive if we can all agree on the truth. It’s the truth that will set us all free.”
As Scott Bordow with The Athletic pointed out when he wrote about the conversation, the radio station decided to delete the exchange from the podcast form of the show.
A radio station feeling the need to redact a conversation about not understanding the concept of white privilege, and making claims of equality of responsibility for oppression amongst the various races, is something that could, just maybe, have been avoided if during this particular discussion, there was a culturally heterogenous presence in the room.
A discussion about the absence of white privilege on the air of a station that has a solely Caucasian talent lineup from sun-up to sun-down Monday through Sunday, is not the way.
It's not an isolated incident. I was listening to some audio content produced by a friend of mine earlier in the week, and the topic of the looting at Scottsdale Fashion Square came into focus. The discussion turned to how difficult it was to process that an event that happened on the other side of the country could have produced such inflamed passions in Arizona.
But it wasn't just on the other side of the country. Arizona's passions, in a very large part, were stoked by the death of Dion Johnson, a 28 year old black man who died after an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer found him sleeping in his car on a north Phoenix highway on May 25, and for some yet-to-be disclosed reason, shot him.
And that killing may be overshadowed by the national story of the calls of justice for George Floyd, but it's very real, and a very big part of what is going on right here in Arizona.
Now, these are instances of good and well intentioned men, in effect, trying to paint a picture of a forest without using the color green. The inability to complete the task successfully was a battle lost in preparation.
Sometimes, however, the issues that spring forth from a lack of black journalist, storytellers and entertainers in our industry are far more consequential bit of well-meaning but wayward conversation.
Like when a local photographer at a major media outlet uses his platform to dismissively mock black high school athletes who were taking a knee during the national anthem, ignoring the potential danger he could have put minors in, and the credence he was lending to his opinion by being a representative of that outlet.
Or when one of the local television sports journalists who came out to cover the story of the kneeling high school kids (spurred by the aforementioned photographer's mockery) was discovered to have 'liked' thousands of anti-Muslim, including specifically anti-black Muslim Tweets, over the course of several years on the job, and was able to quietly resign his position without so much as drawing the public ire or condemnation of any of his peers.
What message do we think that sent to aspiring, and current, minority sports journalists?
Look, It's not a question of 'if' media entities that cover sports should culturally reflect the communities they cover. It's a question of 'why don't they?' I co-run this website with over a dozen other people, and it's on all of us to ensure that we're representing this state fairly, and hold each other responsible with respect to the blind spots that we all have. But if we all have the same blind spots, how is that accomplished? I deserve to be held accountable for how this platform is used, and with relation to their own, so does everyone else. I hope that I can be humble enough to receive guidance and criticism in this area when it comes my way. In fact, if you're out there reading this, and you feel unseen or unheard, and you've got an Arizona Sports-related story to tell, pitch me. My DM's are open.
Test my commitment, because without an opportunity to prove that I believe what I'm saying here, they're just hollow words. We need to do better, and it starts here.
