ESPN’s Jemele Hill Writes Racist Article

If you want to read the actual story or see Jemele Hill’s other articles, I will post the links in the comments section below.

Jemele Hill, of ESPN.com, wrote a very blatantly racist article recently entitled “Whatever Happened to the White Tailback?” in which she questions why for the last twenty years, most running backs have been black. Hill discusses several possible reasons, including “position profiling”, but eventually seems to settle on Jon Entine’s racial studies. Entine puts forth a theory that “there are real differences in the gene frequencies in the east and west African population, which is quite different from populations around the world.” The idea he believes is that because east and west Africans live in certain geographical regions, they have developed special “athletic” genes that make them naturally superior to white people in sports. Hmmm… where have we heard similar theories before? Ah yes, Sir Francis Galton believed the same basic things and used his own supposedly scientific studies to show that other races were mentally inferior to whites. Why do people keep trying to use genetics to differentiate between races? Didn’t we learn our lesson the last few times this happened? Has everyone forgotten about eugenics, white supremacists, and the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews? Jemele Hill needs to take a serious look at history and reconsider proposing such ridiculous theories that only lead to pain. Once people start thinking physical abilities are attributable to race, it’s a very small step to start linking mental abilities to race- and this is the pseudo-scientific theory that was the backbone of slavery in America.

The article “Whatever Happened to the White Tailback?” is not the first serious blunder that Jemele Hill has made either: she previously had said that “cheering for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim.” ESPN suspended her for that comment (which I don’t actually think was intended to be offensive, it was just an ill-thought out joke). However, it appears that in the case of the “Whatever Happened to the White Tailback?” article, Jemele Hill was trying to make a statement and push people’s buttons.

I would like to raise another question: What if the “Whatever Happened to the White Tailback?” was written by a white writer instead of Jemele Hill, an African-American? I think that the response to such a racist article would be immediate and overwhelmingly negative. The author would probably be out of a job already. The article itself probably would never have gotten close to being published, since the editorial committee would have crushed it in the bud. Don Imus made similar blunders and was publicly crucified by his listeners and the company he worked for. Jemele Hill actually was even one of the authors who did the criticizing of Imus. Jemele Hill’s collection of articles almost always include references to blacks and whites and she keeps trying to stir the racial pot and get people fired up at each other. To see what I mean go look at her article archive on ESPN.com. Jemele Hill has stirred up a hornets nest in her comment section with this article, generating over 757 comments, and most of them strongly criticize Hill and her racist writing.

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