espn | Mass incarceration has turned segments of Black America so upside
down that a tatted-up, N-word-tossing white goon is more respected and
accepted than a soft-spoken, highly intelligent black Stanford graduate.
According to a story in the Miami Herald, black Dolphins players granted Richie Incognito "honorary" status as a black man while feeling little connection to Jonathan Martin.
Welcome to Incarceration Nation, where the mindset of the Miami Dolphins'
locker room mirrors the mentality of a maximum-security prison yard and
where a wide swath of America believes the nonviolent intellectual
needs to adopt the tactics of the barbarian.
I don't blame Jonathan Martin for walking away from the Dolphins and
checking himself into a hospital seeking treatment for emotional
distress. The cesspool of insanity that apparently is the Miami locker
room would test the mental stability of any sane man. Martin, the
offspring of Harvard grads, a 24-year-old trained at some of America's
finest academic institutions, is a first-time offender callously thrown
into an Attica prison cell with Incognito and Aaron Hernandez's BFF Mike Pouncey.
Dolphins warden Jeff Ireland and deputy warden Joe Philbin put zero
sophisticated thought into what they were doing when they drafted Martin
in the second round in 2012.
You don't put Jonathan Martin in a cell with Incognito and Pouncey.
You draft someone else, and let another team take Martin. The Dolphins
don't have the kind of environment to support someone with Martin's
background. It takes intelligence and common sense to connect with and
manage Martin. Those attributes appear to be in short supply in Miami.
"Richie is honorary," a black former Dolphins player told Miami
Herald reporter Armando Salguero. "I don't expect you to understand
because you're not black. But being a black guy, being a brother is more
than just about skin color. It's about how you carry yourself. How you
play. Where you come from. What you've experienced. A lot of things."
I'm black. And I totally understand the genesis of this particular
brand of stupidity and self-hatred. Mass Incarceration, its bastard
child, Hurricane Illegitimacy,
and their marketing firm, commercial hip-hop music, have created a
culture that perpetrates the idea that authentic blackness is criminal,
savage, uneducated and irresponsible. The tenets of white supremacy and
bigotry have been injected into popular youth culture. The blackest
things a black man can do are loudly spew the N-word publicly and react
violently to the slightest sign of disrespect or disagreement.
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