Sugary Admiration Masks Racist Attitude That Blacks Are ‘Other’

Well-intended or not, television sports personality Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder’s remarks about hard-working black athletes, better physically suited for certain sports like basketball and football, are ultimately insidious. Though Snyder can be said to have damned black athletes with “faint praise,” his apparent conviction that blacks enjoy a special physical prowess reinforces the erroneous but apparently still virulent mythology that blacks are so biologically different as to be a breed apart.

The lack of animus, the sugar-coated admiration that arguably lies beneath the surface of his observations about racial differences made them all the more pernicious.

On the very birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning cleric martyred because of bigotry and racial misconceptions, Snyder said that “the slave owner would breed his big black (man) with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid.” The consequence, in Snyder’s pop evolution theory, is that in the remarkable span of a century or so blacks are physically stronger than whites.

According to Snyder, blacks have the “thighs” you need to excel in rough and tumble sports. These thighs, he believes, are connected to strong backs.

The remarks recalled Dodger executive Al Campanis’ view that blacks lack the buoyancy in their bodies to succeed as swimmers. Unlike Campanis, who said that managerial and executive jobs are better suited for whites, Snyder said that if blacks “take over coaching, like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for the white people.” Though more benign perhaps on black ability to lead, Snyder’s remarks were most ominous on this score, suggesting a sort of “us” versus “them” dichotomy.

Now Snyder is history--something that he in his prescience never would have predicted. He has been fired for saying what many white Americans believe (and who knows how many blacks have internalized the myth of meaningful biological difference?). According to this national myth, blacks constitute a distinct, if not lesser, form of (presumably) the human order.

By immediately dissociating itself from Snyder, CBS buried a victim of the mentality of racism, and presumably any prospect of renewing his six-figure yearly contract. But the legends that sustain racial discrimination are yet to be interred.

Snyder’s fond ignorance is a needed reminder that, given the continued racial segregation in everyday American life from the neighborhoods that we live in to the places where we worship, the nation’s caste system still holds sway over the mentality of too many of our citizens.

One only has to recall the conventional wisdom that “Jackson can’t win” mouthed ad nauseam by the nation’s political pundits. They freely declared that Jackson couldn’t win because he was black; then a collective discomfort set in, and they began to say that Jackson “can’t win, not because he’s black but because of where he is on the issues.” This is not to say that reporters are necessarily prejudiced, but that they believe in large part that Americans are.

More dreary examples could be cited to remind us that racial prejudice abounds in the United States--a prejudice fueled by the most abysmal and awful misconceptions. Yet, encouraged as we all must be by undeniable signs of progress against racism, Americans wince when the Neanderthals of the nation speak openly about what many must secretly feel.

Perhaps CBS had no choice but to fire Snyder. Public decency, if not company executives’ consciences, required it. But, like Campanis before him, Snyder is in his own way a victim of the mythology of “black difference.” Too many Americans believe that the persistence of disadvantage among blacks is due to something intrinsic and not to historical and/or socio-economic factors. Contemporary science teaches what the Constitution preaches--that “all men are created equal.” Yet legends used to help “explain” those whom we do not know or understand persist.

Burying the patients won’t cure the madness. Firing Snyder, who served to remind us about the intractability of racism in America, will not eradicate the virus of racial prejudice. Berating Snyder by pretending that he is an aberration serves more to cover over the enduring stain of bigotry, not to eliminate it.