Your lying eyes

Last updated on: September 25, 2007 at 9:20 am by Fred Clark

Your lying eyes 2007-09-25T09:20:12-04:00 Fred Clark

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See, this really isn’t that complicated. If you told me your life story and I responded that you really didn’t understand what you were talking about as well as I did, you would (rightly) think I was an idiot. But for some reason, sportswriters are eager to exhibit exactly this idiocy whenever some black athlete speaks candidly of his life story.

Consistent with the claims of dozens of black athletes before him, Donovan McNabb* has said that he has experienced criticism due to the fact that he is black, i.e., due to his race and not his performance as a quarterback. This claim is demonstrably true (see again the contents of Mike Freeman’s inbox).

One can reasonably assume that white athletes are rarely, if ever, criticized due to their being black.

Thus, given all of the above, either you have to believe that there is a conspiracy of black athletes promoting the false claim that they experience such criticism — a conspiracy that goes so far as to send false-flag e-mails full of racist bile directed at one another — or else you have to conclude that their claims are true.

Try to note the limits of this claim. Donovan did not say that black athletes and only black athletes are ever criticized.

It’s obvious to anyone who can read, but that point seems to have escaped the notice of many people. The fact that Mike Schmidt or Rex Grossman or any other white athlete has been criticized is irrelevant.

Such false comparisons are similar to when people claim that Kurt Vonnegut’s chain-smoking longevity “disproved” the AMA’s claim that smoking increases the risks of heart disease and lung cancer. That’s not a counter-example, merely an example of something else. It may disprove something else — such as the claim the AMA didn’t make, that everyone who smokes will instantaneously die — but it does not prove or disprove anything like what these folks seem to think it does.

Also, Donovan McNabb did not suggest that athletes ought not to be criticized for poor performance. (His interview occurred before the Eagles’ clumsy 0-2 start.) Yet even though he never even approached making such a claim, people seem to be spending an awful lot of time responding to as though he had. Odd that.

Now we come to the bottom line: Who does it seem more reasonable to believe?

A host of black athletes have described their first-hand experience. Their descriptions are consistent, reinforcing one another. (This seems like a case in which data really is the plural of anecdote.) Their mutually reinforcing claims are also supported by credible evidence — a multitude of odious public statements, postings, e-mails, call-ins and letters to the editor demonstrating exactly the kind of race-based criticism they describe, a kind of criticism that, by definition, white athletes do not experience.

Standing against this mountain of anecdotal evidence, you have the opinions of a bunch of sportswriters with no first-hand experience, yet who nonetheless insist that every person they have ever interviewed who does have such experience is unreliable, mistaken and wrong.

So again, who do you think it’s more reasonable to believe?

Here let me note that it is logically possible — if factually unlikely — that Donovan McNabb, his teammates, and hundreds of other athletes dating back to at least 1947 have all misinterpreted their own experience, and that they have all misinterpreted this experience in precisely the same way.

Arguing for this highly implausible possibility, however, becomes difficult, since it would require one to explain why this group of athletes have all done so. Any such explanation is likely to involve either: A) theorizing that it is due to some distinctive negative aspect of the experience of black athletes — which would contradict the premise that their experience has no such negative aspect; or B) theorizing that it is due to some inherent inferiority/unreliability that prevents them from interpreting their own experience accurately, which would seem to demonstrate the very racism this theory set out to disprove.

The** likelier, more reasonable explanation for all these similar complaints is that the people with firsthand knowledge are describing something true about their experience and the people contradicting them, who have no such firsthand knowledge, seem to be acting on a whole range of scarcely understood motives, about which more later.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* I realize that many people reading this don’t know, or care, much about American football. Fair enough. I myself regard football primarily as a pleasant distraction to help pass the time until the pastime itself returns in the spring. But this really has very little to do with the particulars of football. It has to do with race in America and the curious vehemence with which many people insist that it is inconsequential in our culture, our history and our present.

** Acrostics are fun.

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