Locker rooms all across the NFL sound similar to the one in Miami, and every team in the league has an Incognito on its roster. To be a fly-on-the-wall in any NFL program would expose us to language and culture harshly redolent with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and any other sort of inflammatory language you can imagine hearing. Despite laws to the contrary and a buttload of lawsuits to show for them, how many of our workplaces are completely absent of any and all behaviors that, if made general public knowledge, could be seen as a breach of etiquette, ethics, and law? Is the chattering class serious that we must respect Jonathan Martin's feelings and needs and make our assessments of Incognito and the Dolphins exclusively on that basis?
Where men are required to depend on one another, the spoken word doesn't even come from the same psychological spigot as it does among a bunch of food-powered, make-work sissies dressed up in suits and acting important. Soldiers within a unit can say and do whatever they want with each other, because what appears as hostility in the slack-jawed world appears to the soldiers as a means of alleviating tension and building interpersonal rapport. At a very fundamental and objectively real level, the language doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, actions speak louder than words. The derogatory nature of the language loses its offensiveness when seemingly antagonistic soldiers are literally putting their lives in each others hands when engaging the enemy. It doesn't matter what color or ethnicity or religion the man next to them is, because, once the bullets start flying, everyone's lives are in the hands of the "other."
Now the NFL locker room isn't a barracks, and despite all the militaristic language we use when describing the gridiron, the line of scrimmage will never be the same as a killing field. That said, have we reached a point where the perception of society's rules is entirely defined by society's weakest link(s)? The Miami Dolphins players are majority black. Of those players, only one has voiced offense regarding Incognito's behavior. Accusing all these other players of speaking the way they do to keep their employers happy, labelling them sellouts and uncle Toms, and pretending that the extremely odd man out in that context is the bellweather for truth - is.a.priori.ridiculous. The logic of fellow Dolphins in defending Incognito has been similar to that found at a military squad level. Epithets lose their meaning, because for many teammates, they know that Incognito is going to back them up and support them on the field, in the bar room, and every place else their collective dirt gets done.
Blacks and whites who are all dressed up but with nothing useful to do would of course never dream of using the "n-word". These same dressed-up, spineless, slack-jawed saducees will scurry across the street with a quickness to avoid encountering an unfamiliar black adolescent in a hoodie. These very same "diversity" and "difference" respecting judges and jurors of "the rules of the rest of society" never use a racial epithet while engaged in their food-powered make-work, but when you get right down to it, their stuck-up and craven response to an unfamiliar adolescent in a hoodie is vastly more offensive than the unvarnished barracks-room/locker-room trash talk coming from men of action.
Wherever sausage is made, wherever wheels meet the road, wherever teams are gelled and stuff actually gets done, all manner of "politically incorrect" stuff gets said as a matter of course. Team members embarked on missions of destruction are not, however, the only people who let their hair down with one another. The process of creating involves paring back all the dampers and baffles that keep a stick permanently up the butts of those firmly ensconced in the land of do-nothing, pretend respectibility and constant, reflexive lying.
Toxic masculinity emanating from the barracks has done more over the course of the past 70 years to foster, promote and defend diversity than all the slack-jawed and perpetually aggrieved academics, scandal-chasing lawyers, and lying politicians combined.
