ESPN’s Around the Horn is fast becoming the incubator for every unhinged, crackpot leftist theory that the unhinged, crackpot leftist sports network wants to initiate. On Monday’s episode we told you about ESPN’s Kevin Blackistone, and his anger towards Michael Jordan for donating money to the police instead of Black Lives Matter.
Well, the days of rage at MJ continued unabated on Tuesday’s show, where ESPN’s Bomani Jones voiced similar discontent. Not because MJ donated money to the police. Instead, Jones was angry that Jordan didn’t call the police racists:
Tony: J.A., you were at Carmelo Anthony's town hall yesterday. Team U.S.A. Teammates from the men's and women's teams, Los Angeles youth, Los Angeles police as well. Bomani, I saw you're on Twitter, and on Twitter this morning you talked of how Melo and Michael Jordan don't have an obligation to speak out the way they are. And you saw the "Chicago sun-times" headline on Jordan, "Better late than never. J.A. Adande, the floor is yours.
J.A.: Well, first, if we are going to demand and demand certain athletes to speak out, when they do, we can't say it is only words and doesn't matter. Michael Jordan did make $2 million worth of donations in addition to that. Yesterday you saw the consequences and results of words. Carmelo started offer with the Instagram post. Then that call to action with the guys at the ESPYs. Yesterday you saw that implemented. You heard results. You heard police officers understanding the perspective of the people in the community. One officer acknowledged ok, we need to hold ourselves accountable. We need to acknowledge our mistakes. You heard members of the community understand and gain perspective from the police officers' side. All they want to make sure is get home safely to their families. That is the priority in their minds when the situations escalate. They need to protect them. What can people do to alleviate the situation and make things safer. So there was progress, and I command Carmelo Anthony, Tamika Catchings and all members of U.S.A. Basketball to helped make a difference.
Tony: Bomani Jones?
Bomani: I appreciate that Carmelo is trying to do, just like I appreciate Michael Jordan gave $2 million yesterday. When you say we can't playbook at them and say they are not just words from Michael Jordan. We can talk about the words he chose to use. The words he chose to use were as non-offensive as possible. Some of these things are going to have to be uncomfortable in that we are all in this together. Let’s just talk it out. It sounds good, it’s great for narrative and it makes for great photographs. But these are very particular institutional and systemic issues at play here. And just saying we’re going to have Town Halls to fix it will not be the thing to do it. So, hey, good for Michael Jordan for giving the money. I did not appreciate some of the things he had to say in the process, and I applaud Carmelo because he seems really dedicated to making this happen. However it is going to take a lot more than just a bunch of people sitting around and talking and airing grievances in order to make some sort of progress on this. There has to be a significant acknowledgement of the fact that we are not here because of racial tension, but because of racism.
Tony: You said you didn’t agree with some of the things Jordan said. What specifically, Bomani?
Bomani: I had a gigantic problem with the way that he characterized people and their, quote, “deaths at the hands of law enforcement” versus the “cowardly and hateful killings of police officers” as an active/passive voice sort of thing that is used very often to diminish the plight of marginalized people. Those people didn't just die deaths. They were killed. Whether you think it was justified or not, they were killed and it should be held on the same level as anybody else getting killed.
Tony: I saw you addressed this on Twitter today. How did you respond when someone said, isn’t this just semantics?
Bomani: You can tall it semantics. But someone on Michael Jordan’s payroll got paid a lot of money to pick all those words carefully. None of them are accidents. Those things are phrased like that for a reason, and the phrasing should be parsed.
So, Michael Jordan saying black people are killed “at the hands of the police,” is somehow not radical and descriptive enough for Jones. Who, apparently, wants Jordan to say that blacks are killed by police because they are black. Only one problem with this, black cops are even more likely to shoot at blacks than white cops are.
According to the Daily Wire, a 2015 DOJ study of the Philadelphia Police Department proved this fact. Which was then bolstered by a University of Pennsylvania study, which, “…determined black cops were 3.3 times more likely to fire a gun than other cops at a crime scene.”
Are these the cops that Jordan should have called racists, Bomani?
Not to mention, in order to follow this Jonesian theorem, that a higher percentage of blacks getting shot by the police equals racism, then one would also have to conclude that a higher percentage of cops killed by a particular race also equals racism.
Again, according to the Daily Wire:
“Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black. According to Mac Donald, the police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person.”
So, if the truth serum ever penetrates the warped, race-mongering world of Bomani Jones, then by his own rationale we must say that the real problem in America is not white cop racism against black people. The real problem is black cop, somehow, racism against black people. In addition to black people in general, being murderously racist and/or prejudiced against all cops.
The other sad part of this, obviously, is that we all live in a world where Bomani Jones is on our television.
