First and Ten

1097852   Can I be serious just this once? In college I played behind a black quarterback and ahead of a black quarterback and in neither case was their color a matter of consequence. I mean, we could see. We knew all the running backs were black. That's why we called them (and they called themselves) the running blacks. Why not? If all the wide receivers had been white we could have called them the white receivers. But they weren't so we never got to use that joke. What I'm getting at here, is if all of us could have experienced playing behind a black quarterback and in front of another and had been able to call our running backs running blacks, maybe this thing about race relations, which sort of seems to be getting better but often isn't, wouldn't keep holding us back. That took care of it for me anyway. In fact, Scoop Jackson and I felt so enlightened about race relations we were able to commit to a story that might reinforce stereotypes for some of our viewers. But we're not going to sweat that. Those people (what do you mean, those people?) were going to hold certain views whether we did this segment or not. It's our hope, by making light of relationships that can often be tense, we loosened up a certain percentage of the citizenry. Laughing about our differences as opposed to stressing about them is a path that might have us acting colorblind when the stakes are higher than an internet show.   true

2009-06-16T13:53:32Z

87536 7 First and Ten

2009-06-17T05:47:25Z