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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Terrell and Nicollette and the "Monday Night Football" sex scandal: Isn't the whole mess really about race? The readers write.
Nov 18, 2004 | You readers have been writing, and what you've been writing about mostly is the ongoing, ridiculous controversy over the Terrell Owens-Nicollette Sheridan skit at the beginning of "Monday Night Football" this week.
And many of you have brought up a subject I didn't mention in Wednesday's column about the brouhaha: race.
"Am I the only one who thinks there is a racial element to this whole 'MNF' flap?" writes Geoffrey Reed. "Was the problem that it was racy? Or was the problem that it was a black man with a blond, white woman?"
I assured Reed he isn't the only one who thinks that, and he wasn't anywhere near the only one who wrote to say the same thing.
The race issue has been strangely absent from most of the national discourse on this matter, though a few people have addressed it, and don't we miss the late Ralph Wiley this week? On the controversy's second day, someone connected with the league finally brought up race when Colts coach Tony Dungy called the skit "racially insensitive."
"It hit at a lot of stereotypes towards athletes, the black athlete in particular," Dungy said. "Any player, I would have been outraged, but the fact it was a black player, me, as an African-American man, I was hurt even more."
I guess it's never strange, exactly, when Americans don't want to talk about race, but considering how many of my readers and friends brought it up in the Owens-Sheridan flap, and how quickly, it's a little odd how quiet the typing and chattering crowd has been about it.
Me included.
Here's why I didn't mention race in Wednesday's column: My initial feeling was that the flap wasn't racial. I thought about that aspect of the controversy, but the indignation just didn't feel racially motivated.
I thought, and still think, that there were parents genuinely upset to find their kids watching a steamy little minidrama when they expected to be tuning in a game of good ol' American appropriate for all ages football. And there's the "I've rewound the tape and watched it 12 times and boy am I outraged!" crowd, who would have been outraged if the player and actress had both been white. Those people are feeling their power at the moment, and I think they're seizing any opportunity to wield it.
