Ben Roethlisberger and the Power of Privilege

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White is Right: Ben Roethlisberger and the Power of Privilege

David J. Leonard and C. Richard King

On Monday, District Attorney Fred Bright announced that Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would not face charges following a complaint from a 20-year old woman that he sexually assaulted her in a bar bathroom. Neither of us is surprised by this announcement given the ways that Roethlisberger has been rendered innocent by much of the media, by fans, and by the league throughout this investigation. Indeed, given that less than a year ago, after accusations that he sexually assaulted a woman in Lake Tahoe, ESPN issued a “do not report” memo, while others within the blogosphere went on the offensive against the alleged victim, what else could one anticipate. After the latest allegations, resulting in a culture of presumed innocence and wanton skepticism regarding the possibility of Roethlisberger being guilty, it is little surprise that Ben was seen as at worst immature and needing to grow up. Acknowledging that he is “innocent until proven guilty,” (or innocent until deemed innocent) we are left wonder why this protected right is one reserved for white athletes but not black athletes.

Jemele Hill, one of the few commentators to bring race into the discussion, directs attention to Commissioner Roger Goodell and his decision to wait to meet with Roethlisberger until the “appropriate time.” Hill rightly notes a double standard whereupon the Commissioner did not afford black players in the NFL similar patience.

When Goodell sat [Adam "Pacman"] Jones down for a year, he wanted to send a message that irresponsible behavior could cost an NFL player his livelihood…If Goodell doesn't schedule a meeting with Roethlisberger immediately, it feeds the perception that white NFL stars under criminal investigation are treated differently and will receive more benefit of the doubt than their black counterparts.

Whereas several black players, including Chris Henry Michael Vick, Adam Jones, and Brandon Marshall, were suspended prior to the conclusion of their criminal cases, with others being cut/suspended by their respective teams immediately after their arrest(s) (Cedric Bensen, Tank Johnson, and Plaxico Burress) Roethlisberger has been immune from the long arm of the NFL’s law (On April 13, the NFL announced it would “review all the facts and follow up at the appropriate time”). Not surprisingly, Hill’s insistence of looking at race prompted ample criticism and accusations that she was “playing the race card.” Still, Roethlisberger has benefited from a culture of presumed innocence not of athletes in general but specifically white athletes.

Still the accusations against Roethlisberger have elicited one strand of condemnation directed at the culture of the sports media and its refusal to report the criminal misconduct of today’s athletes. For example, regarding the Lake Tahoe incident, Jaclyn Friedman describes those who either refuse to cover or rationalize misogyny in sports as “apologists.” Accordingly, “The apologists are no laughing matter. They're an essential ingredient in the modern sports culture that protects and lionizes male athletes at all costs.”

Similarly, Anna Clark linked the media silence and the presumption of innocence to sports media culture: “Maybe, however, this inattention is dangerous; an implicit message that if you are athletically heroic enough (and Ben Roethlisberger is certainly that, if nothing else), then we as a culture will look the other way when you are accused of terrible, brutal acts.” Given the hyperbolic focus on the alleged misdeeds of black athletes within the media, from serious cases of sexual violence and domestic abuse to the more commonplace traffic infractions, given the suspensions doled out against ample black athletes, given prosecutorial decisions, and given the ways in which fans, pundits and commentators rally to the defense of athletes like Roethlisberger while convicting countless black athletes, it is hard to take seriously claims that society doesn’t take seriously criminal misconduct within contemporary sports. As argued by Jackson Katz, “media coverage seems to increase when black males are alleged perpetrators.”

According to Berry and Smith, “The truth about African American athletes' representation in crime may parallel the pattern of distorted representation of African American non-athletes in crime.” In other words, just as African American non-athletes become scapegoats, demonized menaces, and disproportionately imagined as dangerous criminals in society at larger, black athletes function as Herman Gray has argued as “a site of spectacle, in which whites imagine blackness as a potential measure of evil and menace.” Likewise, as whiteness signifies goodness, civility, and innocence within the broader culture, the key to Ben Roethlisberger remaining immune from league suspension, media condemnation, fan outrage, and criminal prosecution is his whiteness and it all it represents.

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C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.

The Benefits of White Privilege?

It takes a special kind of talent to take a civil rights novel about black maids to Hollywood. But do you also have to be Caucasian?

It 'Helps' To Be White
by Natalie Hopkinson

In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town's bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy.

"What am I doing?" Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. "I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady." Later, she justifies speaking out in 1960s Jackson, even though she faces violence and never getting work again. "I ... just want things to be better for the kids. But it's a sorry fact that it's a white woman doing this."

I am kind of with Minny. I absolutely loved The Help, Kathryn Stockett's wonderful book-within-a-book about segregation in her native, Mississippi. Here was a novel that tells the heroic story of black women who nursed white children and cleaned white homes while never missing a church tithing on Sunday. These women did the literal and figurative dirty work of the civil rights movement, sitting silently in the pews while the men in front of the pulpit made the magazine covers.

But with the movie version of The Help coming soon via Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks and the book making best-seller lists from Biloxi to Boston, Minny's troublesome observation about white privilege is still relevant 50 years later. In the world of publishing and Hollywood, it helps to be talented, as Stockett clearly is. But it also helps to be white. The book's title referred to 1960s maids, but the "sorry fact" is that in 2010 if colored people want to have a voice--and more importantly one that carries far and wide--you still need white help.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

Adam Mansbach on "White Privilege"

From NewsOne.com

OP-ED
Former VP Candidate Fails to See Her Own White Privilege
by Adam Mansbach

"Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment."

When former Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro made the remarks to which she refers in her May 30 Boston Globe op-ed, pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum consistently fell all over themselves to avoid accusing her of racism. Seldom in political life has the sinner been granted so much immediate distance from her sin.

What Ferraro actually said bears little resemblance to the facile pseudo-summary she offers in her editorial. Her comments were not about "the influence of blacks" on the Obama campaign. Her exact words to a California newspaper were "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," and she defended them by arguing that she, likewise, would not have been on the 1984 Democratic ticket if not for her gender.

Ferraro appeared not to recognize the obvious difference between being appointed to a ticket, as she was, and winning a record number of primary votes across the entire nation, as Obama has. In the days following her initial remarks, she claimed, as in her Boston Globe op-ed, that "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

Ludicrous-and sad. Ferraro has officially ruined her own obituary by adding a crimson asterisk of aggressively divisive, ill-informed, race-baiting to her own trailblazing career in public service. More important than assessing the magnitude of her self-destruction, though, is examining the notion she puts forth: that whites in America have been rendered voiceless, that "you can't open your mouth without being labeled a racist," that to be black is to be 'lucky' (to paraphrase another of her comments about Obama).

Read the Full Essay @

Adam Mansbach is the author of the novels The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) and Angry Black White Boy (Crown, 2005).

Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR:
Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself
by Mark Anthony Neal

So once again technology and the mainstream media have conspired to manufacture a political firestorm regarding another preacher, another sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ and another repudiation from Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Read the Full Essay

Zillah Eisenstein: "Hillary is White"

Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Hillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein

It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.

None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.

And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.

Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.

Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.

Read Full Essay

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Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007).