The dumbness of stereotyping

 I try to avoid giving racists and other niblet-brains sunlight. I also am not very good at doing that.

And so the other day I was riding the fence line on my social media spread when I came across a particularly vile post attributed to David Clarke, the Buford T. Justice sheriff up in Wisconsin who's the darling of the fringe righties these days because he supposedly "tells it like it is." 

This time Clarke was telling it like it is about LeBron James, who drew fire for blasting the police in Columbus, Ohio, for shooting to death a 15-year-old black girl who was wielding a knife at two other girls. Unlike so many other similar police shootings, this one actually might have been semi-defensible -- which might have been why LeBron  took down his original post, saying he didn't want to add to the prevailing hatred.

No matter. Clarke was gonna say what he was gonna say anyway. The fact he himself is black was no cover at all for the weary stereotypes about young black men he trotted out there.

"If LeBron James wasn't playing basketball he'd be on the block drinking malt liquor from a paper bag. He's the epitome of a dumb jock!" is how the quote attributed to Clarke went.

Since it's the internet, who knows if he actually said this. But if he did, it was an appallingly racist thing for anyone to say, let alone another black man; the whole "hanging out on the block drinking malt liquor from a paper bag" is an old lazy-black-man trope, the sort of thing you'd expect to grace a Klan pamphlet. And it revealed that the only dumbness here belonged to the speaker.

Of course, white persons of a partiKular Kulture no doubt ate up Clarke's alleged quote with a spoon, not being brain surgeons themselves. That is just the country we seem to be these days.

And it is endlessly exhausting to those of us who know better.

I covered sports for 40 years in Indiana, and I can't count the times I saw the "dumb jock" thing -- and specifically, the "dumb black jock" thing -- get blown to shards. I met people from all walks of life in those 40 years, see. Some of the dumbest turned out to be what we used to call captains of industry in this country; some of the smartest were those alleged "dumb jocks."

More than a few were dumb jocks of color, too.

I had the distinct pleasure, for instance, of interviewing the late Arthur Ashe once upon a time. A more perceptive, thoughtful individual I will never hope to meet again in this lifetime. No "dumb jock", he.

Ditto the late Eugene Parker, one of America's most astute and successful sports attorneys. Ditto Tiffany Gooden, now an attorney of note herself. Ditto many, many others.

And LeBron James?

Last I looked, he was not only the greatest basketball player of his generation, but a successful businessman who owns a video production company, pizza franchises and endorsement deals with Pepsi and AT&T. According to Forbes, he's the fifth richest athlete in the world, with close to $95 million in  annual earnings.

Most of that comes from sources outside of basketball.

"Yes, but basketball made it all possible," some people will say.

"Yes, but if he was really just another dumb jock, how much of that would already be gone?" is my answer.

I'll give those of you of a certain mindset time to think about that. I realize you may need it.

Not to stereotype or anything.