I've seen the recently released Netflix series on Michael Jordan described as the best sports documentary ever - I've not watched it and I doubt if I ever will. With apologies to anyone who might think this is a clumsy and inappropriate analogy given that i would have thought the large majority of professional basketball players in the USA are Afro Caribbean, I can't stand basketball, it's too easy to score and games are decided by how often you don't score the expected points when you attack.
The thing is though, my opinion of basketball is blinkered and biased, I come up with a bunch of preconceived notions about it which, almost certainly, makes it impossible for me to be objective about it.
I wrote a weekly column for the Echo on City for about eighteen months a few years back, but, by far and away, the most comment any of the pieces I wrote during that time attracted was one I did where I told a story against myself at the time of the Malky Mackay racism controversy. I won't go into too much detail now, but, back in the early eighties, I made a racist comment (I called them a P*k*) about a member of the public I'd just had a fairly troublesome phone conversation with in work. I thought the Sri Lankan gentleman who worked close by I was quite friendly with was at lunch at the time, but it turned out he heard me. We barely spoke again after that, but word got back to me that he was very disappointed with me because "he thought I was better than that".
That comment was absolutely perfect if it was meant to upset me and make me think. It had a profound effect on me and drove a coach and horses through my opinion of myself that I was a "right on" non racist. However, I would say in partial mitigation that I was a product of my time and anyone who is not old enough to have, first, lived through and, second, understood what was being said in so much of the print you read and the television and radio you watched and heard in that decade, cannot really comprehend the way my generation was being influenced to think of people with a skin colour that wasn't white in derogatory terms.
Nevertheless, there is so much thinking on a par with my attitude towards basketball in this thread - people pontificating and agreeing sagely on a subject they know very little about (i.e. what it is like to be black in countries in the "developed" world). I freely admit that I don't know what it's like because I cannot do, but, based on this thread, there are plenty of white, middle aged/old men who think they know exactly what it's like.
The thing is, Delmbox absolutely nailed this it with this argument in another thread when he said;-
"The question I think you need to ask yourself is when you see a group of people protesting because they're clearly angry and upset about something, why your reaction is to think of "what about, what about" reasons why they shouldn't, rather than thinking about why they are."
End of argument as far as I'm concerned.
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Originally Posted by William Treseder
