Sports columnist?
Via Newsbusters
When you and I watch the Olympics, there’s three colors we care about: red, white, and blue.
But for liberal sportswriters like the Washington Post’s Mike Wise, well, all they can see is skin tone, and they won’t let the games pass without moaning about it. Beating the daylights of his hobby horse, Wise began his Feb. 13 column — mercifully buried on page D7 — by highlighting perhaps the best-known African-American athlete in Sochi, speedskater Shani Davis and by making lame cracks about the whiteness of the Games:
SOCHI, Russia — COLUMN | Don’t listen to your friends back home saying the Winter Olympics are just for white people who like the cold and vacation in Aspen. This is the most inclusive Winter Games ever. Why, there are Caucasians here from almost 88 different nations.
Bada-bing! I’ll be here all week.
Actually, I will be here the next 10 days. And in that time, I will encounter no more than a dozen people of African American descent. They are the same ones I see over and over.
Speedskater Shani Davis, Lolo Jones and the U.S. women’s bobsled team, NBC correspondent Lewis Johnson and about three other black journalists, one of whom I sang backup for in a Salt-N-Pepa karaoke gig at the media dorm at 3 a.m. the other night. (I was Salt.)
Maybe it’s because I lived in the District for eight years. Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years in a real melting pot: rural Oahu, Hawaii, where diversity in ethnicity and culture are part of island life. Maybe I’m just used to seeing and feeling comfortable being around a variety of people, many of whom don’t look like me.
Whatever, this place is whiter than an episode of “Downton Abbey.”
Lawrence Murray, an intern for the U.S. Olympic Committee finishing up his masters in journalism at Southern California, ran into a fellow African American colleague the other day.
“He stopped me,” Murray said, referring to an instant level of kinship based on complexion. “He was like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ He’s the only one I’ve seen or talked to.”
When Murray got off the plane in Sochi, Russian police approached, which has to be every foreigner’s nightmare. Except . . .
“They wanted to take a picture of me,” Murray said. “First, one guy would take a picture. Then his friend wanted one, then another guy. That was my welcome to Sochi. My travel partner said, ‘They probably think you look like Shani Davis.’ ”
[…]
Now, you are reading this and thinking one of two things: What’s with the white guilt, son? Or, What does race have to do with the greatest athletes in the world competing in their chosen disciplines, most of which just happen to be contested against other Caucasians?