Bridging the Perception Gap

It was the finest of negative stories—the most beloved kind. We had a man with a twisted fetish for watching poor, defenseless dogs rip each other apart; and if they didn’t try hard enough to please him, he’d ruthlessly slaughter them in ways only fit for a Hostel movie. Add in a dash of rich, spoiled athlete and a sinister sneer and face to match, and you had a recipe for quite a firestorm.

The saga of Michael Vick this summer was just that. Columnists opined on the atrocity, evoking emotion by bringing up the impressionable youth. Talking heads on radio and TV chest-bumped and high-fived each other, delighting their audiences with thundering hyperbole and really old—but still funny—prison jokes. Even serious news outlets like CNN jumped into the fray. The bloodthirsty public watched, and loved it.

It was all fun and games, until someone felt the need to break up the party. Like clockwork, someone had to play the “race card.”

For the most part, as usual, it was summarily dismissed. Most talking heads would close the book with something to the effect of, “This is not a race issue; it’s an issue of right and wrong.” Columnists were no more amenable to the race discussion. John Feinstein of The Washington Post declared, “Those who want to make excuses for him…entirely miss the point. So do those who want to play the race card and claim that Vick would have been treated differently if he had been white.” Even ESPN's Jemele Hill, who is black, set aside the race issue when speaking about Vick: “Now that we know of his guilt and complicity, let’s be honest and not use racism as an excuse.”

While whether or not race played any role in the media treatment, fan reaction, or investigation of Mike Vick is not necessarily the point, it does seem a bit odd that most who dismiss the role of race in this case will simultaneously acknowledge that race plays a very prevalent role in our society. Nevertheless, they never seem to acknowledge it in any particular instance, including within sports, where a predominantly white, middle aged media talk about young, black men with frequency. At any rate, to say race is irrelevant to the Vick scandal is silly—the fact of the matter is that black people and white people saw it differently, and that means something. A Pew Research Center poll had 51 percent of African Americans saying the coverage of Vick was unfair in contrast to only 12 percent of whites. A New York Times/CBS News poll also showed similarly large disparities.

Some columnists were bold enough to address that disparity. In a column for the Miami Herald, Dan Le Batard weighed in: “You’ll forgive black people if they aren’t terribly comfortable with white people making the rules for them…When the distrust is that large and pervasive, it is going to seep into some places it doesn’t belong—like, for example, this Vick case.” Wright Thompson of ESPN.com wrote a piece detailing the racial history in Atlanta, and how African Americans are supporting Vick because of their past experiences, “because they see inequality, because it’s what they’re trained to do.”

Pretty valid points, I suppose. But there is something eerily chilly about them that demonstrates a very bad trend for race relations. For columns that appear to be taking the “black side,” they are oddly similar to the ones that don’t. The dismissals claim that blacks are irrationally supporting Vick because they want to make excuses for one of their own (and that’s just what they do). These others claim that blacks are irrationally supporting Vick because they’ve been trained to see racism and are still very sensitive to it.

The unifying similarity between the two? Black irrationality. This is the most vexing problem in race relations, and it’s feeding the “race card” rhetoric that most African Americans hate. There is a perception gap between how different races view our country, but it seems that most of the fault for that has been laid at the feet of blacks. It is black irrationality and not, perhaps, white racism (gasp!), that is at fault. This allows the majority to continually ignore race because it’s not really their issue—it’s the responsibility of blacks to get over the past and stop making excuses.

Majorities in power rarely ever concede things to minorities unless they’re compelled to, and this is a perfect example. Phrases like, “Why can’t we be colorblind?” are really only proxy to, “Why can’t black people just stop whining and get with the program?” It allows race relations to be solely a black issue, and not a national issue—it’s the reason why the vast majority of people who care enough to march down to Jena, La. to protest racially motivated injustice are black. The more white people see themselves as the rational and intelligent ones here, and black people as the opposite, the more it reeks of the superior beliefs that are the hallmark of racism.

American society is most certainly not colorblind. In fact, most that invoke a desire to live in a colorblind society are really expressing a desire that we all blind ourselves to the way one’s skin color affects the way they’re perceived and treated in this country. And the real question becomes: Who benefits most from that situation?



Aparicio J. Davis ’10 is an economics concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.