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The A-List: 01.17.03

This week on the A-List:

1. Shaq's Wack Anti-Asian Attack
Nearly six months after mocking the Houston Rockets' Chinese Yao Ming rookie sensation on national television ("Tell Yao Ming, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so.") LA Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal offered a lame apology this week, giving Asian America the mixed message that while he was sorry if anyone was offended, they should all lighten up and learn how to take a joke. "I'm an idiot prankster," Shaq explained. "I said a joke. It was a 70-30 joke. Seventy percent of the people thought it was funny. Thirty didn't." It was the kind of bullsh*t non-apology that if applied to a slur against African Americans would have black folks steaming, but in the context of a slur against America's model minority, the performance quickly won the stamp of approval of the NBA, the Lakers and the ex-jocks and waterboys in the sports press. O'Neal went so far as to signal his complete disregard for everyone involved by staging another "prank" (he sat at his locker pretending to learn how to say "I'm sorry" in Mandarin), but rather than further indict him the antics were pointed to as final proof of Shaq's harmlessness. If Mike Tyson had made the same remark we'd all be talking about how thoughtless, crazy and sad he'd become, but with Shaq the rule of the day seems to be hate the sin, but love the sinner. Call the A-List a cynical old media whore but the only difference seems to be that Iron Mike isn't the kind of black athlete that can push sodas and burgers.

Like John Rocker, O'Neal doesn't believe he's racist, no matter how many of the offended tell him otherwise. There is a blunt cynicism to the "idiot prankster's" use of percentages that a pitcher like Rocker might appreciate. Shaq's humorless thirty percent, when applied to the pool of 300 or so million potential fans can easily contain 10 Asian Americas, making the enmity of an entire ethnic group relative small potatoes in a Shaq-sized fame economy. Although Asian American outrage (powered mostly by the internet, which kept the story bubbling below the mainstreams radar since last June) had scaled enough to make the NBA take notice last week, it had not scaled so much to force anyone non-Asian to cross party lines and take O'Neal seriously to task. A few African American talking heads on the sports beat winced at the irony of it all, this just before chastising Shaq the way you might an overactive, overgrown puppy --bad Shaq! --while others, stalwart defenders of the everything black, explained at length to their white co-hosts exactly why black folks can never be racist, the internationally famous multi-millionaire reduced to a powerless victim-waiting-to-happen. The threads of the "no-institutional-power-no-racism" argument have always frayed around the question of how dis-enfranchised groups interact with one another (by its logic, a black man can't be sexist or homophobic either) but they're particularly weak in the sports world, an abstract, endorsement-driven arena where talent, winning percentages and likeability all combine to create success, celebrity, and, yes, power. At the end of the day Shaq represents something, and it's precisely the idea --created by advertisers and the NBA for consumption by fans --that he represents something worthy that unravels when he cheerfully tosses racist jabs at an athlete of color who has been called "the Chinese Jackie Robinson."

Last month, five months after he'd uttered his slur, the Celebrity-Ass-Kissing Department at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund gave O'Neal a "Young Leader" award. The good folks at NAACP LDF (i.e., the folks who do the actual legal work, and who have partnered with the Asian American Legal Defense Fund on countless cases) should strip him of his award until he makes a more genuine apology. The A-List doesn't think O'Neal should be fired by the Lakers (Trent Lott still has his main gig) but Shaquille O'Neal isn't fit to represent black folks or reap accolades from our leading civil right organization.

2. Affirmative Action is Racism Itself! Exclaims Yale Legacy Bush
Martin Luther King, Jr., a master of the use of the English language, would be spitting mad at the mistreatment it has received at the hands of Supreme Court-appointed, imposter president, George W. Bush. Bush's administration is filing an amicus (or "friend of the court") brief against the University of Michigan, whose affirmative action policies are about to come under consideration by the High Court, with the Bushies, in a typically Orwellian twist of logic, assailing U Mich for employing a "quota" system. Yeah, right. In much the same way that conservatives describe estate taxes as "death taxes" and automatically cement "frivolous" to the word "lawsuit," the quota bit is demagogic sophistry, high-level, linguistic tricknology designed to make fair assessment of U Mich's system impossible. The A-List's dictionary defines "quota" as "a proportional share, as of goods, assigned to a group or to each member of a group," and we can cite real-life examples from Harvard College once-upon-a-time imposing a quota on Jewish students, to the US government imposing limits on the number of immigrants from a given country will be allowed to settle here in a given year. Those are quotas. What the University of Michigan does, in both its undergraduate and graduate admissions policies, is assign a value to minority status --just as it assigns a value to family history with the school, being a varsity athlete, being from the Great Lake State itself, and so on, all of which factor into a student's application for enrollment there. That, dear reader, ain't a quota, and if Bush tells you otherwise --or if he has the gall to echo conservatives who try to draft MLK into the anti-affirmative action camp based upon a willful misreading of his "I have a dream" speech --then he needs to renounce his college degree, because we all know there's not a chance in aych-eee-double-el hell Shrub would have gotten into Yale if his daddy hadn't gone there first.

3. NFL Hands off to Marvin Lewis and Avoids Sack by Cochran
Until the start of the 2003 season, and as of this past Tuesday night, the A-List's favorite NFL team is the Cincinnati Bengals! Why? Well, in case you haven't heard, Cincy, otherwise known as the home of Jerry Springer and "Race Riot Central 2001" (this in the aftermath of the police shooting yet another unarmed, fleeing black man), has tapped Washington, DC's defensive wiz Marvin Lewis to be the Bengals' head coach. (Before joining the unfortunately named Redskins, Lewis called defensive plays for the 2000 Super Bowl champs, who set a record for fewest points allowed in a 16-game season.) The A-List would like to take this opportunity to write on a big piece of oaktag "'Nuff Respect Ray!" The A-List recalls Africana pitching Lewis as a credible head coaching candidate back in 2001, and although we're glad to see the rest of the world finally catching up to us we're still wondering about two things: Is the NFL's suddenly seeing the light about Lewis the result of pressure brought to bear on the league's 32 teams by Johnnie Cochran Jr. and Cyrus Mehri? And why did they give a brother the worst team in the league? We're glad he was hired and all, but asked to choose between Dr. King's dream of a color-blind society coming true and the Bengals going 8-8 this century, we're betting on King to cover.

4. Two Channels Down, Too Many To Go
The A-List isn't bragging, but we get over three hundred channels on our digital cable service. (It's true. You should come over and watch TV with us sometime. It's fun. We're a good host and we serve fine wine and we have a nice fluffy rug by the TV that you can lay out on while we change the channels back and forth, over and over and over.) This tele-visual bounty is deceptive, though, as there's still but one channel dedicated to the demographic that is the collective black A-List. (PPV porn doesn't count.) This why you can imagine how, er, excited we were to hear that Comcast and black/urban-oriented FM behemoth Radio One were teaming up to smash the more than 20-year black boob-tube reign of Bob Johnson's BET.

The big question, of course, is whether there will there be enough advertiser support to make the venture successful in the long. It's early, but new network proposes to "compliment" Johnson's teen-focused cash cow by gearing "quality" programming towards the more mature 25-to-54 market segments, which takes money. (The perverse logic behind BET's stranglehold on the youngblood-type cooning is that booty-videos come pretty cheap.) The strategy raises a few fiscal flags, especially at time when advertisers are increasing interested in maximizing dollars by targeting the a du-rag demographic and their proven ability to influence buying patterns across geographic, age and ethnic lines. The A-List is optimistic but also skeptical --we've been getting treated like our money's not green for far too long. Still two things are certain: first off, about this time next year, the stock photo companies will have another major market for black-and-white profile portraits of MLK looking non-violent. And second off? What with all the recycling that goes on in black media, expect the news heads that rolled away from BET last month to be back in business by '04. Welcome back, Ed!

5. God Bless Us and the Little Biracial Children!
Martin Luther King, Jr. urged us all to judge people by the content of their characters, not the colors of their skin, and would likely have been appalled by statements attributed to Jendra Loeffelman, 52, a teacher at Crystal City Elementary School in Crystal City, Missouri. Accounts diverge as to the exact details of the teacher's comments, but the school district, now holding hearings to determine whether or not Loeffelman can keep her job, alleges she not only expressed disapproval of interracial marriages, but added that biracial children were dirty and inferior. "She basically said I shouldn't have been born," biracial eighth-grader Billy Bingham told the local newspaper after testifying in the hearing. The A-List feels your pain, Billy. We know what it's like to be first person but plural, to be neither print column nor weblog. Sometimes the blogs, they accuse us of acting column-ish and say that we're not "real" because we're an AOL Time Warner, Inc. property. But the columns? They're not any nicer. They act like they're better than us and they never respond to our forwards, especially Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman, who we used to have huge crushes on until we heard them saying bad things about the Internet. So we feel your pain, Billy, but don't worry: sounds like Miss Jendra about to take some early retirement. ;)

And while we're on the race-mixing tip, why did The Today Show's Matt Lauer feel the need to (fumblingly, blushingly) assure viewers that the two participants in the morning show's recurring segment on modern matchmaking --a black man and a white woman --were NOT going to be dating each other? All embarrassment and innuendo, his blurted protestation was like something out of Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes' richly layered evocation of repressed desire and stifling conformity in Eisenhower's America. Lauer either doth protest too much (wink-wink) or any reminder of Katie Couric and former co-host Bryant Gumbel's tempestuous relationship (we'd wink here, but we don't want to get sued) still gives Today show staffers the heebee-jeebee's.

6. Wash Your Mouth Out With Soap, Serena! (And Then Cut Your Hair!)
Being the pragmatic Christian that he was, the-Good-Reverend-Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. would have forgiven Serene Williams her profane purple outburst, wherein she cursed to herself after losing a point in her winning match against France's Emilie Loit at the Australian Open earlier this week. And although we'd have to live a few additional lifetimes before we could ever attain Dr. King's moral sense and clarity, we forgive her, too!. Who the A-List doesn't forgive --good Gaia/Lord/Yaweh/Allah, no! --who we just can't forgive, is whoever it was that lied and told that girl a platinum weave was a good idea. Now don't get us wrong, Serena and Venus are beautiful women --and we'll take the weave over multicolored plastic beads any day --but we think the $1500 fine, which is supposed to support some international tennis charity, was aimed at the wrong offense. Somewhere there is a hairdresser that should be fined to the fullest extent of the law will allow and there's no line judge in the world with the power, will, or inclination to find them.

7. Yes Virginia, There is a Death Chamber...
Now that Virginia has decided to try sniper suspect John Lee Malvo --a minor under the influence of a crafty, dominant father figure --as an adult, Malvo faces the possibility of a death sentence if convicted. Statistics suggest this isn't a popular position among black folk, but what the heck: as far as the A-List is concerned, state-sponsored killing is an absurd, barbaric practice rightly abhorred by most of the world except for the United States, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and North Korea. Additionally, Malvo has been charged with one count of murder under newly terrorist laws enacted in the post-September 11th whirlwind. Few will likely lament the conflation of murderous categories like "serial killer" and "terrorist," but Malvo is just the first high profile example of how the hurriedly composed and broadly worded expansions of police power post-9/11 can be re-purposed to serve just about any prosecutorial end. If MLK were alive today he wouldn't know where to begin.

8. Saint George of Tarsus, IL
Virginia's fevered casting about for the fastest way to kill John Lee Malvo this week was in stark contrast to events in Illinois, where Republican Governor George Ryan capped a years-long drift to the anti-death penalty camp by blanket-ly commuting the sentences of 137 prisoners on the state's death row. The spectacle of Ryan --white, conservative, plain-spoken and rubber-faced --evoking Civil Rights, abolitionism, Lincoln and (of course) MLK as a build-up to his historic act was profoundly American in a way that brought a tear to our cynical eyes. Ryan, who in the complex way of things is under threat of indictment for fraud and corruption, is both a classic American hero and a classic American crank, the Governor doing the right thing by evoking an obscure (and some would argue anachronistic) power derived, not from the people, but from the pre-Enlightenment "divine right of kings." Like monarchs of old, Ryan found himself invested with the power to grant life and death, and like a kindly king he offered life (in prison) to the 137 mostly black men in his custody. Although there are plenty of folks in Illinois who have suggested the Governor acted mainly to secure a legacy under threat of being marred by allegations of corruption (most of it is the sort of graft that plagues most city and state bureaucracies, like the charge that IL driver's licenses were for sale while Ryan was Secretary of State), the A-List can imagine no better spokes-model for the cause of death penalty abolition. Walking down the road to a fat, comfortable, Midwestern retirement, Ryan --who not only supported the death penalty as a state legislator, but drafted Illinois' statute --was struck by a righteous lightening and now walks the earth with no other purpose than testify to his change of heart. Death penalty advocates beware: there is no more rabid (and radical) believer than the convert.

9. GOP Meets With Black Conservatives
The A-List had to stifle a yawn upon hearing that black members of the GOP were going to be meeting with party leadership in order to discuss race, African American issues and the question of the party's unpopularity with colored folk. Now don't get us wrong. Black Republicans taking on the question of the party's racism is a monumental existential leap. (Imagine a fish suddenly becoming cognizant of, like, water.) Our suspicions were confirmed, though, when Armstrong Williams, the self-proclaimed "principled voice for conservative and Christian values in America" urged everyone to maintain proper perspective, opining that while the GOP "has to realize that it cannot be lily white any longer," being lily white "doesn't mean that they are racist." Whatever Armstrong. MLK's birthday is next week and Black History Month is next month and we made a pact to be nice to as many black people as possible from now until March. That, unfortunately, includes foolish black Republicans who still haven't realized that the Party of Lincoln is now run by the ideological sons of the Confederacy.

That's it for this week A-List. Join us next week, same Africana Channel, same Africana time! And if you like the A-List, please do send it to a friend or two or seventeen. Forwarding articles is what makes the wide world web go round...

About the Author: The A-List is the Original Afro-Asiatic Man