In one of my first blog posts at The Public Professor, I took NBC’s Bob Costas to task for being a cranky old man who is out of touch with the modern world. Sanctimonious whining now seems de rigueur during Costas’ weekly halftime pieces for Sunday Night Football. Last Sunday’s was nothing special, just the usual, bland commentary, this time expressed in some self-righteous finger-wagging at the “knucklehead” players whose excessive celebrations sometimes draw a penalty flag. Whatever.
However, Costas upped the ante by combining his now trademarked crotchety old man routine with some disturbing racial undertones during the pre-game show when he interviewed two up and coming wide receivers of the Pittsburgh Steelers: Mike Wallace and Antonio Brown.
Wallace (25) and Brown (23) are both quite young, and neither have much experience with the national media, or could be described as exceptionally articulate. So the usual fluff questions were met with some shy mumbling and nervous giggles.
However, Wallace and Brown made non-verbal statements with their clothing; they apparently coordinated to some degree, both of them wearing eye-catching black/white outfits. Brown in particular popped with a black suit that featured a sliver lining along the blazer’s lapel. For some reason, Costas elected to end the interview with a battery of snide questions and snickering comments about Brown’s outfit. And it felt wrong.
I’m probably making too much of it, but watching an old white guy, who at this point is popularly perceived as being a bit out of touch and having a major leagu
e stick up his ass, spend a little too much time making fun of a young black man’s slightly flashy suit, left me wondering if it were really the 21st century.
When the interview was over, the show returned to the NBC studio, with hosts Dan Patick, Tony Dungy, and Rodney Harrison. It seemed to me that Harrison, who is also black, had daggers coming out of his eyes after viewing the piece.
I might be reading too much into it, but the whole scene reminded me of the 1984 film A Soldier’s Story. Ostensibly a murder mystery set in an segregated black army unit during the waning days of World War II, the movie is really about how the stresses and strains of racism contributed to intense black-on-black hostility; how oppression doesn’t usually lead the oppressed to stand shoulder to shoulder in noble resistance, but rather to turn on each other amid the brutalities of arbitrary pecking orders and internalized hatred.
The movie was based on Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and Adolph Caesar got Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for his turn as the abusive Sergeant Waters.
Ground up in the gears of a racist society, and frustrated by having his ambitions severely limited in pre-civil rights America, Waters turns his anger on fellow African Americans. In particular, he harbors a deep animosity for darker skinned blacks whom he feels are clowning, acting buffoonishly, or who otherwise conform to demeaning stereotypes. Waters is fiercely proud, and the threat of being tarred with the undignified behavior of fellow African Americans unleashes within him sharp cruelty and burning rage.
The tragedy of Sergeant Waters is that instead of directly combating racism, he has largely internalized it. He is proud of his relatively light skin and reactionary in his attitudes. He blames the victim.
I sensed none of that from Rodney Harrison. Instead, I would like to believe that the daggers I saw in his eyes were pointed squarely at Costas, and that Harrison’s hostility was no
t focused on two young football players, who could hardly be called victims anyway, but rather on an aging, self-important gas bag who seems to think nothing of moralistically preaching about the evils of touchdown celebrations, then relentlessly mocking the suit and tie worn by an interview subject nearly forty years his junior, and all on the same show no less.
But then again, maybe this is all in my imagination. Maybe Costas did nothing wrong in commenting on Brown’s outfit, maybe Harrison was not actually perturbed by any of it, and maybe this entire essay says nothing about race in America, and instead merely reveals my own racial hangups and my increasingly irrational hostility towards a minor pop culture icon.
I wouldn’t rule it out. Either way though, Brown actually looked a lot better than Costas did. Christ, at least he wore a tie. And Brown did have the good manners not to mock Costas’ toupee or plastic surgery.