The culture wars are bad for business, said Disney/ESPN top dog Bob Iger recently, and he vowed to “quiet the noise.” Iger’s idea of quiet, however, is apparently a sane American’s idea of an ear-splitting cacophony (you know, like a gaggle of woke activists for baby-killing at a pro-Moloch rally). He has withdrawn his behemoth corporation from the culture wars by featuring race-hate huckster Ibram X. Kendi in a new ESPN series on the pervasiveness of racism in sports. That’ll calm things down for sure, Bob!
Fox News reported Wednesday that Kendi, “an anti-racist activist who founded the Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, debuted a new ESPN series, ‘Skin in the Game,’ to dissect racism in sports.” That Center for Antiracist Research is not the glittering resume item it may appear to be (at least to leftist dopes) at first glance. After receiving millions of dollars in donations, much of which is unaccounted for, the Center folded last “amid allegations of mismanagement.”
BU Professor Saida Grundy, who was the Center’s Assistant Director of Narrative (now there’s a quintessentially leftist title), admitted: “I don’t know where the money is.” Nor does Kendi, apparently. But the sought-after activist has already moved on. His new show, which premiered on ESPN+ late last month, ‘delves into and challenges racism in the sports world, and will reveal how pervasive racism is in sports, while challenging the thoughts and systems of various governing bodies.’”
This is absurdity on stilts, with a side order of ridiculousness. As the famed firebrand New York Yankee manager Billy Martin once remarked, “I’ve always said I could manage Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hirohito. That doesn’t mean I’d like them, but I’d manage them.” He would manage them, that is, if they could help him win. That was all that mattered to Martin, who also once observed: “Everything looks nicer when you win. The girls are prettier. The cigars taste better. The trees are greener.”
Ibram X. Kendi and Bob Iger likely don’t know it, but Martin was articulating a universal principle in sports: it’s all about winning. A sports team that passed up on a competent player who could help it win games wouldn’t do well; other, non-racist teams would snap up the discarded player and win more games than the racist team, whereupon the racist team would lose money, and people don’t play professional sports, or own professional sports teams, in order to lose money.
What’s more, the professional sports leagues have made repeated and often self-conscious efforts to avoid and reject racism. Does Ibram X. Kendi really expect us to believe that the NBA is racist? As Old Joe Biden would say, Come on, man! Even that whitest of sports, professional hockey, is trying to become more “diverse”: last year, a report was presented to the NHL’s Board of Governors and distributed to multiple internal committees that noted with horror that fully “83.6% of the NHL’s workforce is white and that men make up nearly 62% of the total.” Even worse, “more than 90% of players and nearly all coaches and officials are white.” Even though hockey is popular in areas where most of the people are white (such as Canada and Russia), the NHL vowed to make concerted efforts to recruit all those would-be hockey stars from Venezuela and Nigeria.
Related: National Hockey League Discovers It’s Too White, Promises to Do Better
Major League Baseball has made a demigod of Jackie Robinson, who is the only player whose number has been retired by every team. Every year, there is a Jackie Robinson Day on which the great man is celebrated anew, and baseball has begun numerous initiatives to try to raise interest in the sport among black Americans who long ago turned to basketball and football.
Kendi’s show will undoubtedly ignore all that and present more of the same usual leftist stew of the fake victimhood of “people of color” and numerous anecdotes about how evil white people were in the bad old days, with the strong implication, if not the outright statement, that those days are still very much with us. If this is Bob Iger’s idea of toning down the culture war, maybe it’s Opposite Day over at Disney headquarters. All he is going to do with Kendi’s series is increase division and resentment. Oh, and line the pockets of Ibram X. Kendi. And so everyone will go away happy, except Americans who are tired of all this nonsense.
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