This column was first published on Aug. 21, 2007.
NFL (National Football League) star, Michael Vick is the nation’s latest bete noir (French: Black beast).
The venom and hatred directed at him for his off-field dog fighting connections is nothing short of remarkable.
|
Not since football great O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, or perhaps Mike Tyson’s rape trial, have we witnessed such an outpouring of outrage.
If you think it’s got nothing to do with who he is, rather than what he is alleged to have done, then you’re trippin’!
Vick signed a monster NFL contract several years ago that virtually guaranteed him a lifetime of wealth.
All of that, not to mention other product endorsement deals, is up in smoke.
Don’t get it twisted. I’m not suggesting, in the least, that hurting animals is cool.
As a MOVE supporter, I recall the late Frank Africa (MOVE’s Naturalist Minister) telling me about seeing guys fighting pit bulls in West Philly’s Cobbs Creek Park. Frank would challenge them to fight him instead of the dogs. (He didn’t find a lot of takers).
Frank was martyred by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and the United States of America) on May 13th, 1985, along with 10 other men, women and babies.
While we hear the sports world and the talk show pundits bay for Vick’s blood for dog fighting, it’s important to remember that if Vick serves one day in jail that’ll be one day more than the bombers, snipers and baby-killers who massacred 11 people on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia (Oh, yeah—come to think of it, several dogs were killed then, too!)
Football is the nations’ weekly ritual of violence, where big guys pummel other big guys, with the intent of crushing the opponent. It was not for naught that an American president (and general!), Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Sports are perfect for preparing young men for war.”
In the hyper-world of talk and sports radio, few things elicit more umbrage than the spectacle of a Black man, from an impoverished background, coming into great wealth.
That athlete (or artist, for that matter) is expected to smile, never address politics, and generally, shut up (especially regarding issues of race!)
Implicit in the sports contract is an unwritten agreement to be what one Black sportswriter called a “million dollar slave.”
Because many Black athletes come from poverty, and communities where life is cruel, brutish and short, they have acquired the tastes, modes and habits of their environs. In the South (and North as well), dog-fighting is not a rarity.
If he were Mexican-American, he may have enjoyed cock-fighting, or, if or another ethnicity, perhaps bull-fighting.
But, such sociological observations have no place in the hot house of media mouthpieces and hype artists.
I’ve seen more heat around Vick’s treatment of dogs than American soldiers treatment of Iraqis!
For Michael Vick, for now—the game is over.
Copyright Mumia Abu-Jamal
