But let’s be fair: maybe white people forgot that ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to do commentary for the Sunday NFL Countdown. Rush Limbaugh wasn’t hired to do anything but talk about football. It wasn’t a political move at all! Rush was probably hired for his football expertise. So it was way out of bounds when he argued that Donovan McNabb was overrated, by bringing up race: “Sorry to say this, I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go. I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”
So maybe the same people who are mad at Colin Kaepernick for injecting politics into football forgot that Rush basically said that if McNabb was white, he would just be an ordinary quarterback. They must have forgotten about that. Kaepernick is ostracized from the league because he wanted to draw people’s attention to injustice. The same league that hired Rush Limbaugh, who made political statements all the time as a commentator, to talk about the black people whom he denigrates all the time on his radio show. He once told a caller, “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.” You can’t put a racist like Rush around that many niggas and think that he ain’t gonna say something that lets you know how he thinks.
And Hank Williams Jr. is back on Monday Night Football after comparing Obama to Hitler. Hank Williams is a racist, but I gotta admit: that is the best football theme music I’ve ever heard. Nothing says “Are you ready for football?” more than people that hate niggas. But that song is so good that even black people are like, “Hey, bring that nigga back here. Come on now.”
But I digress. I’m just saying that maybe when the NFL criticizes Kaepernick as too political, they should remember who brought politics into the sport in the first place.
Leave It on the Field
And what about race? Mike Ditka just said that there’s been “no oppression of black people in one hundred years.” Jim Crow just ended. I was born in 1964 and I’m the first one of my mother’s children that was born with the full rights of an American citizen. No oppression of black people? White people like Ditka only see what they want to. They make up their own reality. The reason they can’t see racism or oppression is that they never look behind them. If they’re not certain where oppression is, they’re looking in the wrong places. Look behind you.
They think that racism and oppression are irrelevant if you’re paid enough. They’re all saying, “Why are these football players protesting? They’re all rich.”
Here’s the thing with that: What’s that common bit of sports advice? “Leave it on the field.” Well, we can’t. Because the very attributes that people applaud on the field—speed, size, agility—are the same things that get you killed off of it. “He’s built like a bull.” Walk fifty feet off that field and that shit is not an attribute. The same shit they hire you for in the NFL is the shit that gets you killed out of it.
Recently the Seattle Seahawks’ Michael Bennett was in Vegas when the cops ran up to him, jammed him up, and pulled guns on him. They yelled, “Don’t move! Motherfucker, I’ll blow your head off!” And he didn’t do anything except be who he is: a big, black dude. He found out that you can never score so many touchdowns, or tackle so many runners, or kick so many field goals or blitz so many quarterbacks that you ain’t a threat anymore. The very things he’s cheered for on Sunday are the very things that could get him killed on Monday. Being a big, black fast dude is great on the field. Off the field, it might get you shot.
So white people want to us to leave sports on the field, but leave race off it. How? This time Michael Bennett didn’t get shot, but like he said, cops pulled guns on him “for doing nothing more than simply being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.” You know what the wrong place at the wrong time is? Being black anywhere at any time.
If you put big, strong, fast, agile, fearsome, high pain tolerance on a draft board, you would go high on the draft. You put that on a police report, a grand jury is gonna indict him. It’s almost like for football players: being big and strong is not an attribute—because big, strong niggas get shot first. So, after the game is over, they say chuck all that size, speed, and ferocity, and they should fucking turn into Kevin Hart.
For white people, the game of football is a distraction from their everyday life. That’s fine. But even though it’s a game to a lot of people, it’s a game played by black men. On the field, there are other people trying to hurt them all the time. Off the field there are people trying to hurt them. There’s no break for them. One is a game, and one is a game of life.
So race is always going to be a part of football for black people, whether Mike Ditka or Jerry Jones wishes it weren’t true. Hell, you’d think the NFL owners would hate police shootings because they’re shooting the crop! One man’s suspected terrorist is another man’s first-round draft pick.
If You’re a Big Black Guy, Don’t Be
Police didn’t just jam up Michael Bennett because they’re racists. That idea is so upsetting to white people. They think innocent people don’t get slammed to the ground and get guns pulled on them. Police jammed Michael Bennett up because he matched the description of a shooting suspect.
It seems like that happens a lot. We have another case of a big black dude matching the description. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a big black dude? That’s the subtext, that’s the justification for the cops treating him and many other innocent black people the way they do: he’s a big black guy so he must be dangerous. He must have done something.
So what’s the solution? Get small.
If you’re big, look smaller. In the animal kingdom, if you are confronted with a superior hunter, an apex predator, your goal is to be so threatening that the animal doesn’t want to take a chance attacking you. If it’s a bear or a mountain lion, they always say, “Look bigger, try to be intimidating.”
A cop is the ultimate apex predator, and everything that works in nature; throw it all out. In nature: don’t show fear, be intimidating. Here: no, show fear, don’t be intimidating. In nature, look them in the eye; here don’t look them in the eye. Don’t get big, get small. You can’t get small enough for the police.
At Least He Didn’t Get Shot
Well, at least he didn’t get shot. That’s good, right? I mean, here the police were investigating a shooting and slammed an innocent man to the ground and put a gun in his face, but at least they didn’t shoot and kill him. They were just doing their jobs! That’s society’s attitude about it. Nobody got killed and you’ve gotta admit: Michael Bennett is a big scary black dude at a club in Vegas after a boxing fight. That’s dodgy as hell.
Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine if Tom Brady got thrown to the ground in Boston, a gun put to his head. In Boston? They would tear that fucking city down. If you ever want to see if the reaction to violence against a black man is muted, just do a little substitution. Tom Brady for Michael Bennett. There you go. It’s like asking “What if Obama did what Trump did?” There’d be rioting in the streets. The answer is so clear: it’s only acceptable because of the color of his skin.
Okay, but take a different athlete: James Blake, a top-ranked former tennis player in town for the US Open in 2015. He’s six one, but not football player big. He’s a tennis player (a tennis player!), hanging outside his nice hotel in midtown Manhattan in the middle of the day, and a bunch of undercover cops roll up and question him. Before he knows it, cops are slamming him to the ground and cuffing him just like they did to Bennett.
I mean nothing can be safer than the US Open, right? That’s probably the safest major sports event in America. There’s not that many black people there—usually just the Williams sisters—so there’s nobody to be afraid of. It’s not like at the NBA All-Star Game in Vegas. People dr
inking mint juleps and shit. Why are the cops so beefed up during the US Open? They weren’t there for a shooting. They weren’t there for a stabbing. They were there for somebody writing bad checks or something.
So do you need to tackle someone for writing bad checks and slam them to the ground? Even if you’re not slamming the totally wrong guy to the ground, not even slamming James Blake, why do you need to slam a bad-check-writing suspect to the ground?
Both James Blake and Michael Bennett know that they got lucky, even though they didn’t do anything wrong: they didn’t get shot.
Bennett, by the way, is still waiting for his apology. Why? Apparently the cops can treat black people like that without showing any contrition. (In fact, the Vegas police officers’ union believe they are the ones owed an apology!) So remind me again why athletes are supposed to steer clear of politics?
15
Stop Making White People Say the N-Word
“Popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot of corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk nineteen-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing.”
—Bill Kristol, defending the fraternity brothers of SAE for chanting “There will never be a nigger SAE” by blaming rap music
Here we have white conservative pundit Bill Kristol grappling with the “N-word.” It is very confusing to white people. They know that they can’t say the N-word. But why do black people get to say it? Some white kids, like the frat boys of SAE, try to say that they learned the N-word from hip-hop. I mean, if white kids listen to hip-hop music by black musicians, isn’t it possible that they learned the “N-word” from them? Sure. So . . . in a way, black people are to blame for white people saying “nigger”! Maybe white people wouldn’t say it if they didn’t hear it so much!
First of all, they can’t be serious. “Nigger” has been in the American lexicon since the 1700s. Hip-hop’s been around since 1975. What came first: “nigger” or the Sugar Hill Gang? Who came first: Grandmaster Flash or Mark Twain?
White people don’t need hip-hop to teach them this word. I was doing a show at Florida State University and they had an interpreter for the deaf doing sign language next to me. I said “nigger” and her hands didn’t stop flying around. Every language in the world knows how to say “nigger.”
It seems more likely that the frat brothers of SAE learned it in the same way most white people learn it: from being fucking racists. The SAE charter used to explicitly require that brothers be “members of the Caucasian race.” So maybe they learned this song full of N-words from their brothers, not some other brothers.
Who Can Say the N-Word?
Fucking black people! That’s it!
Who Should Say the N-Word?
Nobody. Let’s remember, this is a book of advice from white people. So even though you’re allowed to say the N-word, white people would rather you did not. And nowadays, white people have more subtle ways of describing black folks than to say the N-word. If you want to talk white, try some of these on:
“Thug”
“Ghetto”
“Sketchy”
“Urban”
“Ethnic”
That way, you can still mean nigger, without offending a white person.
Summary
White people find the N-word confusing.
Nobody learned the N-word from hip-hop, since it’s been around since at least the 1700s. But damn that would be a cool idea for a movie: Ghostface goes back in time to teach the N-word to the colonists.
If you’re white, don’t say it!
If you’re black, use one of white people’s “code words” or go ahead and N-word all you want!
Let’s Meet
Bill O’Reilly!
Karppinen
Bill O’Reilly. Where to begin? When you think of the most hypocritical, angry old white guy you can think of, you gotta think of old Bill here. How many years did he spend on Fox News talking shit about black people in every possible way, acting superior, when in fact he was a serial sexual predator?
This dude is mad at everyone but himself. He paid $32 million to settle a sexual harassment suit and then pretended to be the victim. As an old white guy, he’s in the most protected group that exists, but he said about his enemies, “If they could literally kill me, they would.”
And then he said, “You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.”
So, if God is mad at you, what chance do niggers have? Black people didn’t even get mad at God for slavery. And I mean, nobody praises God more than black people. Nobody. But even white prayers must be different. They must speak at a different frequency, like a dog whistle or something. “Don’t feel protected”? God was doing his job protecting them from you. That $32 million is protection money.
But look, Bill O’Reilly has always had a skewed perspective, trying to tell black people about race and what’s racist or not. Look, if we let white people decide, we’ll never get anywhere. We’ve tried that already.
Bill O’Reilly even tried to defend slavery when Michelle Obama talked about the slaves who built the White House. She gave the keynote speech at the first night of the Democratic convention in 2016, saying “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. So don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again, because this right now is the greatest country on earth.”
Pretty inspiring. Black people built the White House as slaves and now they’re in charge. But Bill O’Reilly had to make sure that everyone knew that slavery wasn’t that bad. On his show The O’Reilly Factor, he gave us a history lesson: “Slaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring [“hiring”?] slave labor in 1802,” he said. “However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So, Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working, as well.”
Well fed. Decent lodgings. Room and board, just like college. Maybe they got to throw the Frisbee around the quad in between work assignments! Sign me up!
Bill thinks black people are savages. When he went to Sylvia’s in Harlem with Al Sharpton, he “couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ ”
I’d say that the latest dismissal from Fox would mean that we won’t be seeing much of O’Reilly anymore, but nobody’s been given more second chances than this cat.
16
How to Not Come from a Single-Parent Household
“Don’t abandon your children. Don’t get pregnant at fourteen. Don’t allow your neighborhoods to deteriorate into free-fire zones. That’s what the African American community should have on their T-shirts.”
—Bill O’Reilly, prior to losing primary custody of his children after allegedly abusing his ex-wife
White people like Bill O’Reilly are always citing single-parent households as a major problem in the black community. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presented data indicating that in almost 72 percent of births to black women, the women were unmarried. Statistics like that get white people asking, is there something wrong with black culture? Black children need fathers in their lives! Why don’t they marry? White people get unhappily married all the time. Why don’t black people?
Don’t Wait for Mr. Right
If you’re looking to meet a nice
black man to marry, the odds are stacked against you. Why? Because you can’t marry someone who isn’t there. Because black men are killed or put in prison at a higher rate, there are only 83 black men for every 100 black women. In some places it’s even higher, like in Ferguson, Missouri, where there are 60 men for every 100 black women. Let’s face it, ladies: If you want to marry a black man, you can’t be too picky. There are only so many black men who are not in prison or dead.
Marry a Prisoner!
Almost one in twelve black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are behind bars. That’s a lot of eligible bachelors behind doors number one, two, three, and so on. For nonblack men, it’s only one in sixty. Strict mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, “zero tolerance” policies in schools, and heavier policing in communities of color disproportionately affect black men. Consequently, more black men are imprisoned. Then, when they get out of prison, they naturally have trouble finding work, so they may turn to a life of crime, but they have kids. This becomes a vicious cycle. You can’t have a nation that incarcerates this many black men and not have this impact on children and marriage rates. So if you don’t want to be one of the unmarried black women with a baby, get ready to find a prison pen pal.
If You Like It Then You Better Put a Ring on It
When Bill O’Reilly criticizes unmarried women giving birth, he’s missing something: fewer and fewer black women are marrying their partners. People are living together, but unmarried. So that’s one way to have an unwed birth but not be in a single-parent household. And it also turns out that married black women are having fewer babies, so the proportion of births to unwed mothers is higher. Now, maybe Bill thinks that everyone should get married, but should we take marriage advice from a man who was fired from Fox for multiple sexual harassment lawsuits, many of which were settled so as not to endanger his messy custody battle with his ex-wife?
How Not to Get Shot Page 8