Interesting article on the death of Redskins safety Sean Taylor.
My response
I too have a checkered past, I fought & was suspended & high most of freshmen year in high school, but if my death is newsworthy it should be about whatever claim to fame I had. There certainly hasn't been much mention, of hTaylor's football career. Not enough coverage for my taste on how he bled to death & how long did the ambulance take to get there. The repeated million dollar question "what was he doing in Miami?" was also disrespectful, he was injured, and free to be wherever certainly at home with his daughter. The coverage & that article says pretty much he deserved what he got, for being at home with girlfriend and baby. Were Paris Hilton to be raped, beaten to death how much, live by the sword die by the sword, pushed sexy in life until sex pushed death, rhetoric should we expect?
If a white man in Jersey is a gunned down in his home, do we blame the Sopranos? We live in a violent country, 18 year olds dying in Iraq, quick-draw cowboy president, try watching TV without violence, & I was raised on it, cause my folks were working all the time. Black folks don't corner the market on violence, or misogyny, that's American, poor white people are known for violence & misogyny as well, compound that with oppression, greater, poverty, & less access to adequate eduction & it will of course be amplified. This is not evident of a black KKK, the KKK killed out of hatred & fear, how many thugs on the block do you know with enough self hatred to endure the stench of burning flesh? A black KKK would have killed Taylor, burned the house to the ground & forced his wife & child to watch, then put the charred remains on display. I didn't hear any of that in the report. I see that term as nothing more than inflammatory exagerration.
Indeed we do have problems we most certainly need to fix, hip hop needs to change & our people need to change, for sure, but recurring scathing, commentary & inflammatory name calling from the middle class, isn't going to get it. How very crabs in a barrel is that? Early in the article Whitlock says " Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now.", I'm sure it's more than just one, I know some die hard Skins fan, who are having a hard time, this article probably didn't do much for healing. Those in mourning for their loved one, teammate, or favored player, were probably hoping for respect at least from black media
1 comment:
It's really unfortunate that Sean Taylor's demise has become the center of debates and speculations that may very well be irrelevant. Perhaps Whitlock was out of pocket for his statements, which he made clear he could very be, in the beginning of his composition. However, Jason Whitlock gave what he believed to be truth and justice regarding our troubled people. A series of paradigm shifts need to occur in our culture, and that we can all agree on. Firstly, we need to understand that everything is subject to change, us included. Secondly, karma is far more real than what we perceive through our five senses.
To explain the first point, our culture has become retarded by the notion that keepin it real means regressing back to the behavior and lifestyle we've done prior our change in situations (i.e. accomplishing goals that equals financial independents). Once you've succeeded at something, you are no longer the person you were, you have upgraded yourself. Therefore, if you've made it out of the hood, you can't go back to being who you once were, because your peers will no longer see you that way, and in essence you're no longer that way. A change has transpired whether you're cognizant of it or not. Many of us that have succeeded don't know this, and as a result they spend most of their lives with conflicted emotions and having trouble fitting in because of this need to be on both sides of the fence. As a result of this need to fit in with what they once were, because many of us are afraid of leaving our comfort zone, we, with willful thoughts and actions, do things that contradict the change we've experienced.
Those willful thoughts and actions, and here I'm getting to my second point, that has contradicted the inevitable change, is karma that catches up to you depending on the intensity of the thought and action. And it applies for many of us that are successful with the retarded notion of keepin' real or keepin' it hood.
With that being said, we can't fault black or white media because they're are apart of a machine that runs off any information it's given, and if there's little information it will find whatever information it can in order to keep funcitioning. We need to continue to work on our thinking, apart from that, everything else isn't that important.
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