- Patrick Semansky/AP Photos
- Ray Rice has made indignation easy for the media.
Sports sections do indignation nicely! But there are so many indignities sometimes they blur together.
Levenson’s e-mail to team execs addressed the issue of a troublingly small season-ticket base, which he’d been told was due to a failure to “get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs.”
I have been open with our executive team about these concerns. I have told them I want some white cheerleaders and while i don’t care what the color of the artist is, i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that’s our season tixs demo. i have also balked when every fan picked out of crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black. I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.
Some might own teams that will not hire major black contractors to do lucrative construction projects. Some might be the heads of large universities that will not invest with black-owned investment firms, even as their schools field football and basketball teams that thrive with a largely black presence. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Levenson’s comments is that they reflect a deep-seated bias toward blacks that has nothing to do with content of character, but rather their existence and proximity to whites.
TMZ posted the Ray Rice video, which was taken by a security camera inside the Atlantic City elevator where last February Rice walloped his fiancee, Janay Palmer. The Ravens then kicked him off the team and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who’d originally suspended Rice for two games, suspended him indefinitely. Everyone weighed in.
“I’m uninterested in a moral debate over whether this was the right thing to do, because I’m unsure myself,” wrote SB Nation’s Kevin Trahan, naming an excellent reason to be interested. And in a similar vein, Steve Greenberg wrote in the Sun-Times, “I’m not outraged by the NCAA’s softening of its stance on Penn State. I’m not happy about it, either. Nor am I surprised.”
