race-baiting

Case Study Of An Ethics Train Wreck: The Crooked Cap Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.

Behold…

During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”

Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.

Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!

“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”

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Ethics Quiz: The “Racist” Halloween Costume

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Is it stupid woke Halloween controversy season already? Sadly, it is.

Target removed a Halloween clown costume from its website and presumably its stores after social media mobs claimed that it was racist, evoking blackface and minstrel shows. As we know, companies are infamous weenies any time the race card is played against them, and virtually always grovel an apology. Thus Target sobbed on social media this week,

“An apology from us: We removed an offensive Halloween costume that should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer for sale. As a company, we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and we are looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”

I am strongly inclined to view this as another “Gotcha!” exercise from the race-obsessed. Talk about a case of “If you hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog” ! Let’s see: what aspect of the costume evokes blackface or minstrelsy? Did blackface performer swear orange costumes like that? Noooo. Did they wear black gloves on their hands? No! Did they wear little clown hats? Ruffles around their necks like Bozo? Also no. So what exactly creates the “minstrel show” vibe?It’s the fact that Target hired a black kid to model the costume! Put a white child in that thing and it looks like what it is: a clown costume.

Let me get this straight: Admirably, Target doesn’t see racist images at every turn, and hired a black model, when it should have hired a white model because the black kid made race-obsessed victim-mongers think of blackface. That wasn’t blackface, that was a child’s black face!

Is it the smile that’s the problem? You know, evoking this…

…? Again, it’s the actual black face wearing that smile that triggered the easily race-triggered. As for the smile , which the race-hustler think deliberately evokes “Mr. Bones” above, it is a creepy, killer clown smile, as worn by the murderous clown in Season 4 of “American Horror Story”…

Does that character evoke blackface and minstrel shows?

We are never going to get out from under the iron boot of race hustlers until companies and celebrities stop capitulating to race-baiting like this. On the other side of this ugly coin, what realistic, sound business options did Target have? Well, it could have asked whether its critics want the company to discriminate against black models. It could have educated the public and its customers about what is and isn’t blackface and minstrel imagery. It could have put a warning in the constume’s package, “Do not buy if your kid is black. The Woke and wonderful will think he’s in blackface.”

Or is this another example of the ditty, “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong”? If standing on principle loses a company sales and public support, is it ethical?

Your Ethics Alarms Early Halloween Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Target right to apologize and pull the offending costume?

Addendum To The Previous Post Because I’m Pissed Off…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
The Race-baiters can bite me,

I just left my hot cup of French Roast coffee and a Tastycake downstairs because a comment to the post “On Abdul El-Sayed” ruined my morning.

Somehow, I left out “except Richard Nixon” in the paragraph that was supposed to note that every U.S. President except Obama and Nixon had blue eyes. I don’t know how that happened: I thought I had written it. But while the comment, from a good friend, should have offered a correction (as is, sadly, often necessary especially when I write one late at night), instead the commenter accused me of being racist. The eyes bit was mentioned in a section about American leadership templates, which, while I might have written it slightly differently has it been mid-day and I were a bit fresher, I stand by it nonetheless Here’s the corrected version:

“Not too long ago, it would be impossible to imagine a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate named Abdul El-Sayed. Americans just didn’t elect people who had non American-sounding names. It was a silly bias, but a comforting one. When I wrote my thesis hypothesizing an American Presidential type, I noted that no American President had been elected who didn’t have an American-sounding name. (No, nobody thought of Dwight Eisenhower as German, for obvious reasons.) Not only that, every American President from Washington to Bush except Richard Nixon has had blue eyes. Barack Obama blew that template to bits, both in name and in eye-color.”

As I wrote just now in a correction prompted by that comment:

“I certainly knew about Nixon’s eyes: there is a controversy over their color: he is stated in some sources as having black eyes, and others call them dark brown. But he and Obama are the only brown-eyed boys: Trump restored the Presidency to its blue-eyed tradition. The Name Game has a chapter in my honors thesis, which was,indeed a controversial one: three chair-holding professors in the Harvard Government Department reviewed it, and couldn’t agree on the grade; eventually they compromised on magna cum laude. The observation about Presidents’ names was not original, and I had it thoroughly footnoted to a historian who specialized in the narrow field of Presidential character. Perhaps today’s DEI, bias-over-reality, conservative thought-suppressing Harvard College would have slapped me down for that section, but then it no longer is a top tier, trustworthy institution.”

I completed the correction this way:

“Fact: the template for the American Presidency in the minds of Americans is powerfully influenced by another fact. Every President before Barack Obama was white, male, born on the mainland and raised by Christians. He changed that mold, and if he had been a good President and better human being, he would have changed it more. I have reached the end of my patience with progressives and Democrats, yes, even Trump-Deranged friends, stooping to race-baiting when they have neither the information, the integrity nor the wit to counter opinions (and facts) they find inconvenient, as they appeal to emotion or worse. I wrote in the reply to an old and cherished friend’s accusation of racism in the comments to this post, ‘Shame on you.’ Shame on all of them.”

I stand by that, too.

Sears Cartoon Addendum: The Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Waay back in 2012, Ethics Alarms presented “The Knight Scale,” described as a “ten point scale for rating the outrageousness of race-card sightings.” I named the scale after a race-baiting L.A. blogger who insisted that the cartoon above, suggesting that First Lady Michelle Obama was taking on imperial airs as the Obama departed for yet another lavish family vacation, was “racist.”

I revised the Knight Scale in 2017, writing in my introduction that…

” Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated. I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical.  Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.”

Here is the current version of Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale (I’m retiring “Knight”). The race-baiting flagged in the previous post is a classic #11.

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Ethics Observations on That “Racist” Winsome Earle-Sears Cartoon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Observation #1: it’s not racist.

Conservatives and Republican pundits in Virginia and elsewhere are “pouncing”on an online political cartoon re-posted by the Powhatan County Democrats, who were transparently trying to change the subject after their party’s candidate for Virginia Governor looked like a coward and sounded like a fool in her recent debate with the Republican candidate, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears.

“The Democrat party of Virginia everyone. Open racism, open hatred, and endorsed violent fantasies. Where is the bottom of their depravity? This is disgusting,” quoth one social media wag in a tweet widely quoted by critics. Twitchy, the conservative website that focuses almost entirely on goings on at “X,” called the cartoon “blatantly racist.”

Much as it gives me pleasure to see Democrats and progressives “hoist by their own petard,” the petard in this case being reflex race-baiting, it’s still an unethical tactic. Here is the real Sears…

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Tales of The Great Stupid: Race-baiting Serena Williams Shows “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” Like Harmonious Race Relations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Why in the world would Serena Williams, of all people, think it is necessary or appropriate to engage in public race-baiting? The woman is rich and famous, and became a national idol playing a sport that has an overwhelmingly white fan base. Never mind: Serena was triggered when she encountered a decorative cotton plant (reportedly fake) in an un-named luxury hotel. The retired women’s tennis legend, now 43, took a video of the vase holding a cotton plant on a table in the hallway, and asked her Instagram followers, “Alright, everyone. How do we feel about cotton as decoration? Personally for me, it doesn’t feel great.”

Yeah, you’re right, Serena, the New York hotel placed a cotton plant in the hallway to slyly remind you that 150 years ago black slaves were forced to pick cotton in states hundreds of miles away. I think you should organize a boycott and start a protest organization called Cotton Plants Matter.

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Oh Dear! Patti Lupone Took My Advice and Now Broadway Wants Her “Cancelled”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the silly–but instructive—Broadway feud between diva Patti Lupone and performer Kecia Lewis, who is black, and who has received some accolades herself. Lewis was starring in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical about the life and career of Alicia Keys in a theater that shared a wall with the theater featuring “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and LuPone. The amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” at two points in the musical could be heard by the audience LuPone’s show, so LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at those points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. (The producer of “The Roommate”should have handled that, but Patti has power and influence and has never been shy about using them.) “Hell’s Kitchen” complied. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

But Lewis decided to play the race card, because that’s what so many of the Woke of Color have been taught to do, because it works. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for supposedly engaging in race-based “microagressions.” I wrote in “Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis ‘Oh, Bite Me!’” that I was ” hoping against hope that LuPone, who is the epitome of a diva (as this Ethics Alarms post demonstrates), either issues an emphatic “Bite Me!” to Lewis or ignores her completely as not worthy of attention from Patti’s perch on Broadway Olympus. Lewis is the racist here; she is the one who is stereotyping a white performer as insensitive and dismissive.”

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Unethical (But Unsurprising) Quote of the Month: Michelle Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“It’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready.The real question is: as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

—-Former First Lady Michelle Obama, suggesting that not electing Kamala Harris President will prove that America is “not ready” to have female president of color.

And there it is. The missing piece, and again, the standard accusation every time a black or female Democrat is judged by accomplishments, character and ability and found wanting: the critics are bigots. The race card, the gender card, and the fact that we have to put up with this insult and default accusation repeatedly is, all by itself, a good reason to have second thoughts about electing Democratic female and/or “of color” candidates. We had to put up with this when Barack Obama, a weak and divisive President, was called tor account, and when Hillary Clinton, corrupt and repellent, wasn’t able to win the 2016 election against a vilified real estate mogul with no previous experience in elected office.

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Note To CNN’s Race-Baiters: There Are So, So Many Reasons Not To Respect Kamala Harris…Stop Attributing It To Her Race

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A conclave of fools, knaves and ethics dunces on a CNN panel illustrated how Democrats and the news media are going to try to elect Kamala Harris: keep the conversation entirely on vilifying her opposition and concentrating on irrelevant trivia…like how to pronounce her name.

It serves CNN’s purposes to feature the worst and the dimmest of Republicans whenever possible: this time its choice was Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She’s on my list of 25 most embarrassing members of Congress. Mace either set out to troll professional race-baiter Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson by intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name or got confused; first she said the name correctly (with the accent on the first syllable), then reversed herself and said it the way that apparently drives the woke crazy, with the accent on the second syllable. (I sometimes forget which is the right way myself—luckily I’m usually typing her name rather than saying it). Democratic strategist Keith Boykin corrected her, and Mace defiantly said, “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.”

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Harris Is a D.E.I. Vice-President, and Ethics Alarms Hereby Pledges To Reiterate That Fact Every Time Some Liar, Hack or Gaslighter Says Otherwise…[Link Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m drawing a line in the sand on this one. I am sick of the flagrant attempts by shameless partisans, Axis of Unethical Conduct liars and desperate Trump-Deranged propagandists to deny the past and the present, their own misdeeds, and their cascading humiliating botches. I am also disgusted with the ongoing efforts of these same aspiring dictators to win arguments and election by strangling the language and issuing rhetorical taboos so it becomes difficult to reveal what they have done, or allows the public to be confused and misled permanently.

Readers here are aware of some of my unyielding pledges. I have vowed to blow a blast on a metaphorical Sousaphone every time someone quotes the phony “76 cents on the dollar” statistic “proving” that the workplace discriminates against women. (The last time I scored a politician for doing that? It was Kamala Harris. Of course it was.) I have sworn to embarrass any movie, TV program or ad that shows someone playing chess with the board set up incorrectly. I am determined never to let an ethics dunce argue that cheater Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame because “other players did it” or because “he was good enough that he would have had a HOF career if he hadn’t cheated.” (That one makes me furious just writing it.)

I am never going to countenance anyone calling the stupid January 6 riot an “insurrection,” saying that Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was “rigged” is “baseless,” or who repeats any of the multiplying Big Lies about what Trump has said in the past, the most recent example being flagged in a post today. I will not let any demagogue get away with saying that baker Jack Phillips discriminated against gay people when he said he would not be compelled to express approval of a gay wedding on one of his cakes because he believed this infringed his First Amendment rights.

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