Amazingly, this is the actual size of Bill Hanstock’s head!
The article on SB Nation is called “White people celebrate Heat loss in exceedingly white fashion,” and consists of the writer, a guy named Bill Hanstock, whose article more effectively made me detest an author than any piece I’ve read in a long time, mocking individual spectators at the Chicago Bulls -Miami Heat NBA game (which ended that team’s epic winning streak) based on their faces, their choice of clothes, their beverages, their accessories, their ages, their hair (or lack of it), and most of all, their race.
The instant verdict here: not only is the article unfunny and unethical, not only should SB Nation’s editor be sacked for allowing such garbage to pollute the site and the web, but Hanstock is, to put it mildly, a virulent jerk.
The temptation is to criticize his whatever-it-is as racist. Obviously a similar post about blacks , Asians, or almost any ethnic group would have Chris Matthews’s eyes popping out of his skull and the appropriate activist groups and Congressmen holding apoplectic press conferences. I look forward to a future United States in which good-natured satire of all groups is accepted as humor and not taken as hate speech. However, double standards are heinous, and only add to racial discord, resentment and distrust. Hanstock can’t do this kind of stereotype ridicule unless he’s willing to do it to everyone, and of course, he isn’t. It would also help his case if he was even slightly witty or funny. It doesn’t matter ethically that Hanstock is white, or appears to be. A mean and unfunny published essay using racial stereotypes to mock real people is the same regardless of who the author is. Would the article be more offensive coming from a black author? I don’t think so. Swill is swill.
The author of a gratuitous, humiliating attack on perfectly innocent people would be a self-outed asshole, no matter what race he was. For the race angle is not the worst aspect of what Hanstock did. He picked six strangers out of a candid photo at a sports event and held them up to personal ridicule without their consent. Who does he think he is? What did these people do, other than to have a good time at a basketball game, that justifies his venom and mockery? This is gratuitous meanness and cruelty, unfair and disrespectful. Has Hanstock even heard of the Golden Rule? This is juvenile tabloid stuff, taking surreptitious photos of celebrities on the beach and zooming in on their cellulite. What a pathetic excuse for a journalist, a humorist, a columnist..
What a pathetic excuse for a human being.
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Facts: SB Nation
Ethics Alarms 
More in anger than in sorrow…
This IS racist, and bigotry against older white men… Where are the photos of celebrating younger fans, of celebrating black men of any age?
Hanstock is not only a moron, but completely unfunny, unethical, and frankly, Jack, you just gave him much more play than he deserves…
Question: Does he really get PAID for this unfunny, insulting, trash?
Jack,
Clearly you miss this columnist’s point. The guys in the photo are obviously guilty of making, or inheriting, a lot of money, enough to be able to afford to pay for the courside seats the NBA has deemed necessary to sell for huge sums of money (pushing the competing teams and coaches into the corners of the court). And of course, white guys can’t dance and they can’t jump, so they can’t really celebrate the win and they can’t actually play basketball at much of any level, never mind professionally.
Isn’t most of the vaunted, so-called, self-named “Fourth Estate” (or is it Fifth? I forget.) staffed by jealous, ink-stained wretches? Just more “It ain’t fair, man!” stuff from the “99%.” I’m surprised the author’s photo doesn’t just show one of those annoying Guy Fawkes masks.
Nonetheless, thanks for trying to place this awful column and writer in a humane, moral context. But clearly, this guy is a big-time “the ends justify the means” adherent. There’s no way he’ll be called out by all his fellow thugs in the media. They all do the same thing.
Yes this isnt a funny column but its not racist.
I donno, it seems like most racists comments seem to rely on relating irrelevent personal characteristics to a conclusion. That follows the model of an ad hominem. Implying that any comment in which the irrelevent personal premise is based on a person’s race, is racist, even if not meant to be offensive.
If that column had been written by a black sportswriter of any note, he’d be in hot water—not as hot as if the races were reversed, though.
Differing reaction to bad behavior doesn’t define the bad behavior as bad, just the consistency of the reactors. I’m not sure that qualifies or changes what I said about what makes a racist comment a racist comment.
But it wasn’t. It was written by a white man about other white men. If thats racist then every comedy ever made by a person about people of his own race is racist.
Sure, it’s racist, by the current definition. Whites can be racist about whites just like women can be sexist about women, and gays can encourage anti-gay stereotypes.
Being mean or picking on others who can’t respond and be heard as widely is just being a jackass, no matter the target.