"Truth to Power:"? No Truth or Empowerment in Jason Whitlock's Tweet

"Truth to Power:"? No Truth or Empowerment in JasonWhitlock's Tweet by the Collective | The Feminist Wire | NewBlackMan
We come together to express our collective disappointmentover Jason Whitlock's recent tweet about Jeremy Lin.  We hope that our voices, our analysis, and our angerdemonstrates not only our opposition to this sort of rhetoric but theideologies and stereotypes that provide a foundation for people like Whitlockto stand upon.  His tweet is a symptomof a larger problem and therefore warrants analysis and condemnation in aneffort to transform the very culture that produces these sorts of comments eachand every day.
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PerhapsJason Whitlock is suffering from (L)insanity. Or, perhaps on a much morepolitically incorrect level, Whitlock is on that bull.
Histweet wraps misogyny, stereotypical phallic fantasy, and race into one awkward'joke' that provides enough side eye for years to come. Perhaps most disturbingis the crude attempt at humor with little to no purpose and situating it withinpolitics of (ir) respectability. Further complicating (complementing?) thepeculiarity of this tweet is the imposition of digital anonymity/privacy ofWhitlock and his followers: because I'm behind a screen name (or lack thereof),is it cool to laugh and 'joke' about such sensitive and taboo topics? Is itrespectable?
DoesWhitlock have (social) responsibility? Damn right. Why wouldn't he? Because, inan offsetting way, Whitlock's crudeness is a representation of the publicdismissal of race as a marker of American cultural discourse. And,simultaneously, how jacked it is – ReginaBradley

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Maleprofessional sports, like the military, have long been valued for its abilityto allow talent to flourish, in spite of the realities of race and ethnicity.  Professional sports are often viewed asthe most natural of American meritocracies, though such opportunity, as itwere, rarely extends beyond the field into the realms of management andownership.  This is not to suggestthat racism, sexism, and homophobia are non-existent in professional sports,but that impact is largely muted by performance.
Onelocation where intolerance remains unfettered, is of course, within the arenaof commentary where sports-talk radio and the comments sections of sports sitesrecall the kind of racist, sexist and homophobic rhetoric that many believedwent underground generations ago. Ironically such rhetoric has proved big-business for big Media, creatingcelebrity in hosts and sports journalists, whose bad behavior is celebrated as"realness" and who somehow think that thoughtful and reasoned analysis andcommentary are towing some invisible line of political correctness. 
Inthis regard, Jason Whitlock is not alone—his now infamous idiotic, racist,sexist, homophobic and xenophobic rants are part of his brand, and it's a brandthat apparently serves him and his employer Fox Sports, very well.  Bless them.  And while I feel no real need to compare Whitlock's recentcomments about Jeremy Lin—as misogynistic as they were racists—to theill-advised comments on twitter by journalist Roland Martin, I would at leastexpect that the same fervor in which GLAAD demanded that CNN punish Martin, andthat many of Martin's Black peers demanded that Martin be reinstated by hisemployer, would be deployed to protect a young Taiwanese-American basketballplayer, who is simply doing his job to the best of his ability within ameritocratic structure that we all claim to value – Mark Anthony Neal

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Appalled.I find myself rendered nearly speechless in the face of the harmful andrepulsive comments of Jason Whitlock and many others with regards to JeremyLin. We, however, cannot remain silent about such racist and misogynisticcomments. Relying upon deeply infuriating racial, sexual, and genderstereotypes to "celebrate" Lin illuminates not only the absurdity of apost-racial society or national, cultural imaginary, but makes apparent themost disgusting and deeply entrenched stereotypes that are foundational tosocial and cultural discourses on race in the United States. To merelydisregard Whitlock's or other comments about Lin that pivot around deeplyproblematic racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes as "jokes" or "harmlesssports banter" minimizes the dehumanizing nature of such comments. In the samebreath that we laud Lin, let us also collectively deplore the words of thosewho rely upon damaging stereotypes in their commentary - Treva Lindsey

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There are so many levels on which Whitlock's (knee)jerkattempt at satire was sad and wrong; most of them have been covered by others,including the boorishness of greeting a player who's risen to the toughest ofchallenges by ceremonially unmanning him; the pathetic symbolism of a man whose racehas historically suffered because of sexual mythology unleashing the tools ofsuch distortion and degradation on a man of another race that has so suffered;the almost antique misogyny of Whitlock's phrasing and innuendo. So I'll focuson something I haven't seen raised: The enormity of Whitlock's imposition ofthe darkest stereotypes of the modern celebrity athlete on a young man whoclearly is anything but. Lin is humble, hard-working, clean-cut almost to afault -- and a deeply, deeply devout Christian who has spoken of joining theministry after his playing days are over.
Forget the ridiculous anatomical slur: The suggestionthat he might celebrate a victory he dedicated to God by having random sex witha "lucky lady" is almost certainly what would offend and horrify Linmore.
Now, given that his employers at Fox will likely loselittle if any sleep over Whitlock's arrant racial offense, the question I askis this: Will FSN -- whose sister networks carp endlessly about the war onfaith -- punish Whitlock for demeaning Lin's deep, professed Christian beliefs?
If so, I'll take it - Jeff Yang

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JasonWhitlock's tweet brings me back to a time in the early 70's when I was playingon a football team comprised of players from Harlem, the Upper West Side and anItalian Restaurant near Lincoln Center. The only way people could communicatewas exchanging ethnic slurs and boasting about sexual conquests, a discoursethat reduced me to total silence. It is sad to see how much that atmosphere, sodeeply entrenched nearly 40 years ago, still dominates sports journalism andshapes the way men immersed in competitive sports construct their masculinity,irrespective of their racial or cultural background. Needless to say, thatatmosphere creates a camaraderie rooted in fear and suspicion on the field. Italso promotes violence off the field toward those who are targets, especiallywomen, who are viewed as appropriate subjects of sexual aggression followingsports victories, and inhibits real relationships based on candor and trust. Inshort, it is really bad, and really sad. I had hoped that younger people hadmoved beyond what I had grown up with, but apparently not. Predatorymasculinity is alive and well and living in America –Mark Naison

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Atwhat point will we resist re-assigning markers of difference that have workedto asphyxiate our identities as people of color for centuries? And, when willwe realize that our deployment and projection of racial fantasies andstereotyping toward our selected "Others" not only destabilizes our ability toflourish as humans, but also are antithetical to our own personal and politicalinterests? Further, on what occasion will black men and boys constructmasculinities that are courageous enough to loosen the yoke of cultural (mis)re-presentationsand broad enough to embrace the complex subjectivities of both self and others?
JasonWhitlock's recent tweet regarding Jeremy Lin is obscene. And for those who wantto dismiss it as normal sports talk, shame on you! Whitlock's tweet is part andparcel of a larger, inter-textual grand narrative on classificatory violence,which aims to categorize things that feel out of place—in order to bring usback into a so-called normal state—or worse, get rid of the "problem" bythrusting it into the realm of "the spectacle." Does this sound familiar? Itshould. Herein lies where identities, of both the signified and the signifier,get reinvented. However, in the present age of hyper-social-media, it is alsowhere public discourse turns into a theater of fetishized display, where bodiesserve as indisputable evidence for racial, sexual, ethnic, and gendereddifference. This is where the signifier hopes to mark himself as "normal."However, sadly for Whitlock, he too is part of the joke. He too isproblematically fixated at a level of genitalia; no longer a black man, but apenis (pun intended) - Tamura A. Lomax

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JasonWhitlock's tweet fails not only the racism/sexism test but also the satiretest. The racism is obvious--though it should be pointed out that thealternatively "positive" and "negative" stereotypes of Asians and Blacks (e.g.nerds v. athletes) have always been designed to complement each other andreinforce white supremacy. I might even be more offended by the patheticattempt to be funny. It seems that any time someone breaks through a majorpublic color barrier that America is required to go through an initial cycle ofexorcising all of the most tired stereotypes before we can adjust to a wholenew condition. So congratulations, Jason, you made the list alongside thebirthers and Fuzzy Zoeller's "fried chicken" (he forgot to add "pad thai")comment about Tiger Woods – ScottKurashige

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JasonWhitlock might as well have pulled up the corners of his eyes and said, "ching,chong, ching, chong," like the kids who used to taunt me on the playground as akid. (And I'm not even Chinese; I'm Filipina).  In less than fifteen words, he managed to dredge up the mosttired racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes associated with "oriental" people:the hypersexuality and ready availability of Asian women, and the effeminacyand queerness of Asian men. His comments play into the longstanding techniquesof divide and conquer that have pit people of African and Asian descent againsteach other since colonial times. We have much more to gain in working togetherto combat white supremacy, not just in the United States, but also across theglobe. Whitlock's comment does nothing to encourage the development of thesetypes of solidarities – TheresaRunstedtler

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U.S. racial discourses remain arrested in that primalscene of childhood violence: the schoolyard. For so many of us, the schoolyard "wisdoms"about which Jason Whitlock tweets are not just a bad memory but a daily reality. It isespecially painful to hear such "wisdoms" repeated by a black man. Whitlock'schauvinism denies Jeremy Lin's body the capacity to represent the nation aswell as more obviously the NBA and the high stakes capitalist world of sportscelebrity. Bodies like Lin's can never measure up. But in a sense neither canWhitlock's. This was the terrible irony that left me feeling more saddened andbroken than angry. Whitlock participates in the very logic that demeans hishumanity. His comment suggests that he has embraced racist notions of blacksexual prowess as the sorry (mis)measure of his own masculinity and self-worth—hisfantasies about Lin's body, inversely reciprocal, certainly speak to suchunhappy investments – Hiram Perez

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JasonWhitlock's racially insensitive tweet about rising Asian-American NBA superstarJeremy Lin betrays an investment in an impoverished Black masculinity narrativethat pivots upon the erroneous and scientifically disproven idea that Black menhave bigger penises than every other group. Whitlock's need to re-establishBlack masculine potency vis-à-vis narratives of athletic and sexual dominancesuggests the presence of a threat. But why is the presence of an Asian Americankid who can ball his ass off so threatening? Perhaps because Lin's presence inthe Black male dominated space of the NBA rightly demands we rethink our tiredand dangerous investment in the myth of biological Black male athleticsuperiority. Coupled with the homophobic tweets of news commentator RolandMartin, it is clear that the logic of hypersexual Black masculinity isdangerous (e.g. lynching, myth of the Black male rapist, etc) not only to Blackmen but also to other subjugated masculine subjects, be they Asian men, gay men(Black and otherwise) and women, who become the targets of straight Black men'smisguided need to re-establish dominance – BrittneyCooper

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Whatmakes Whitlock's tweet funny? First, of course, there is the nod to the socialconstruction of Asian men as feminine and sexually passive, which then getsplayed out in our (oh so necessary) cultural discourse on the size of theirpenises. So that's funny. Then, there is our collective racial imagination ofbasketball as a sport in which Black men demonstrate a certain aggressive kindof masculine performance. So the presence of a Chinese American in this sportdemands that he be assessed for his ability to perform race consistent with ourimaginations, both on the court and off. He impresses us with his on-courtmoves, but we are obsessed with whether an Asian male can compete with(naturally) virile Black ballers when it comes to really laying it down. Sothat's funny, right? Oh, and of course, we all know women can't help but fightover dick, especially the dick of a basketball player, which, as we've alreadyconcluded, is huge because it's black.
Unless…haha… it's not. And what (all) women really want at the end of the night is to be"lucky" enough to score a big dick, so they can feel the "pain." So Whitlock'stweet is also about this woman lying there prostrate, sexually frustratedbecause Lin couldn't deliver, which, of course, she should have known becausehe's Asian. So once again, women are not only insatiable in bed, but are alsonaïve, particularly about sex. Which just confirms what we already know aboutwomen. And that is hilarious, no? – MichaelJ. Dumas

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Itmakes me wonder about you, Mr. Whitlock, that you assume Jeremy Lin shouldcelebrate his stellar performance on the court last night by inflicting "pain"on a woman. Is that how you celebrate your tweeting achievements? It is amazingthat you could be so unaware of the irony of racially stereotyping Lin'sanatomy and linking it to sexual violence, given the ugly history in which "southernjustice" has been justified again and again through fantasies of black men,their genitalia, and their supposed propensity to inflict sexual pain on women.But then again, given your "achievements" as a sportswriter in the past, yourcluelessness is not all that surprising – AnoopMirpuri

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Myresponse is flavored by spending the past few days immersed in a discussion ofthe liberation that is to be experienced with Post-Blackness. In the age ofsocial media, I remain amazed by the lengths bullies, masquerading as "writers,"are willing to take to demonstrate their ability to use micro-aggressive meansto exert their supremacy over others. As a Baby-Boomer, I'm left withquestions. Is social media a mechanism used by the socially inept to exercisetheir "voice" that is impossible in a face-to-face environment? Does somesocial media exacerbate the breadth and depth of stupidity possessed by theowner? Does it foster stupidity; perpetuate it? I believe that all of the worldvia the blogosphere is a stage and juxtapose this medium against an old schoolwarning that I received in the 1980s to avoid emulating a colleague who was awild cannon in the work place because with that person it was always "whatcomes up, comes out." But in those days, what you said was only heard by thosewithin hearing distance. Should you think before you tweet? Jason Whitlock's "performance"at perpetuating racial stereotypes is flawed on way too many levels to begin toarticulate – Valerie L. Patterson

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Jason Whitlock, who describes himself on his twitter page as "too honest"and someone who "speaks truth to power" once again showed the power in speakinghurtful untruths based on stereotypes, assumptions, and systemically producedbiases.  Jason Whitlock has made anentire career in demonizing Others, disseminating the ideologies of whitesupremacy, and peddling sexism.  Heoncerefereed to Serena Williams as an "unsightly layer of thick, muscledblubber, a byproduct of her unwillingness to commit to a training regimen anddiet that would have her at the top of her game year-round."  This is the same man, whohas described "hip-hop culture" as "nothing morethan prison culture," and who onceprovided this assessment of blackyouth:
We have a problem in the black community, and it didn't make its debutat All-Star Weekend Vegas. What was impossible to ignore in Vegas was ondisplay in Houston, Atlanta and previous All-Star locations. With the exceptionof Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million Man March, it's been on display nearly everytime we've gathered in large groups to socialize in the past 15 or so years.The Black Ku Klux Klan shows up in full force and does its best to ruin ourgood time. Instead of wearing white robes and white hoods, the new KKK has nowtaken to wearing white Ts and calling themselves gangsta rappers, gangbangersand posse members. Just like the White KKK of the 1940s and '50s, we fear them,keep our eyes lowered, shut our mouths and pray they don't bother us. Our fearmakes them stronger. Our silence empowers them. Our lack of courage lets themdefine who we are. Our excuse-making for their behavior increases theirinfluence and enables them to recruit more freely. We sing their racist songs,gleefully call ourselves the N-word, hype their celebrity and get upset whenwhite people whisper concerns about our sanity. And whenever someone publicly statesthat the Black KKK is terrorizing black people, black neighborhoods, blacksocial events and glorifying a negative, self-destructive lifestyle, we denyand blame the Man. I don't want to do it anymore.
The recent tweet about Jeremy Lin is a continuationof more of the same from Mr. Whitlock, leaving me to wonder if he would be better-suitedwriting stump speeches for the GOP or better yet keeping his "honesty" tohimself – David J. Leonard

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Whitlock'stweet was a cheap shot of the basest proportions. He's an embarrassment to thewriting establishment – Oliver Wang

Contributors
Regina Bradley is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Florida StateUniversity
Britney Cooper is a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University
Michael J. Dumas is an assistant professor of Education at New YorkUniversity
Scott Kurashige is the Director of Asian/Pacific Islander AmericanStudies at University of Michigan
David J. Leonard is an associate professor of Critical Culture,Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University
Treva Lindsey is an assistant professor of Women's and GenderStudies at University of Missouri
Tamura A. Lomax holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt Universityis co-founder of The Feminist Wire
Anoop Mirpuri is an assistant professor of English at DrewUniversity
Mark Anthony Neal is professor of African and African American Studiesat Duke University
Mark Naison is professor of African American Studies and Historyat Fordham University
Valerie L. Patterson is an assistant professor of Public Administrationat Florida International University
Hiram Perez is an assistant professor of English at VassarCollege
Theresa Runstedtler is an assistant professor of American Studies atSUNY Buffalo
Oliver Wang is an assistant professor of sociology at Cal StateLong Beach
Jeff Yang is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal Onlineand can be heard regularly on WNYC 's "The Takeaway."