Slurs and racism are routinely hurled at minority athletes, and the media often help fan the flames of abuse Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder had a good run as CBS’s lead sports prognosticator. And then 30 years ago, on the Friday afternoon before Martin Luther King Day, the gruff 70-year-old sat down to lunch with a black Washington DC television reporter and told America what he really thought about the players he covered every week. Snyder characterized the black athlete as superior “because of his high thighs that go up into his back”. He sourced this opinion in antebellum times, “when during the slave trading, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he would have a big black kid”. And he made plain his reservations about black athletes taking roles of greater intellect and authority in sports. “They’ve [blacks] got everything,” he said. “If they take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people.” Snyder expressed some regret for his remarks shortly after they aired (“I thought I was being instructive, when in fact, I was destructive,” he told the Washington Post), but by then a firestorm of outrage had already gathered. “Some of his explanations as to why blacks have emerged to a point of near dominance in sports make it clear the man is abysmally ignorant,” Harry Edwards, the eminent sociologist, said at the time. “How he could sit there for 12 years with the network not knowing of his views is beyond me.” The incident was enough to embarrass CBS into cutting ties with Snyder. Moreover, it pressured competing outlets to not only choose their words more carefully, but also the people who get to say them. In the wake of that controversy was born a new era of diversity in sports media that brought with it a heightened degree of cultural sensitivity. Continue reading...
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