We just learned that privileged white leftists do eat their own. Julie DiCaro, a clearly unhinged white writer at Deadspin, chewed up and spit out ESPN's Adam Schefter, whom she accuses of embodying white male privilege. DiCaro excoriates him for harming others while attempting to score Twitter points.
Schefter angered DiCaro for posting this counter-intuitive Tweet about a big day coming up three weeks from now. People assume at first he's talking about the election, but he's really referring to the NFL's trade deadline. Too much for DiCaro to bear.
"Sports media is overpopulated by privileged white people, myself included," DiCaro writes. "But it’s especially populated by privileged white men, who are never called to account for their privilege or use it in any constructive way. ..."
The nation seemingly accepts this because the “leave politics out of sports” crowd has succeeded in shouting down and exhausting people like DiCaro who insist sports is not and never was apolitical.
Privileged white male media person Schefter's tweet exercised "such terrible judgment, such lack of compassion or care for the people they cover, that it merits calling them out on it," DiCaro writes.
It's a poor attempt at humor during a good year, "and a 'fuck you' to every non-white person who has been and continues to be deeply affected by the actions and policies of Donald Trump in 2020. While the President continues to refuse to disavow white supremacy (shoutout to Jemele Hill, who was light years ahead of the rest of America on this one), while COVID continues to ravage Black and brown communities at two and a half times more than white ones, while people wait in line to vote for upwards of 11 hours in Marietta, Ga., this is the joke Adam Schefter decided to make."
No worries for privileged white male media person Schefter, though. As a handsomely paid white guy, he doesn’t have to worry about these things. He’ll be fine "no matter who sits on the Supreme Court, no matter who occupies the Oval Office," DiCaro writes.
As ESPN's senior NFL insider, privileged white male media person Schefter built his career and reputation on the backs of a league whose players are 70 percent African Americans. The league he covers is also "run, coached, and covered overwhelmingly by white men."
DiCaro hopes the non-privileged NFL players saw Schefter’s tweet and will remember it the next time they "decide who they trust with their stories and information." In other words, non-privileged people toiling in the NFL's trenches should not cooperate with said white privileged boy seeking inside NFL scoops.
Schefter's indiscretion cannot be dismissed as a joke, DiCaro continues:
"At what point, though, do we start holding people accountable for bad jokes that actively ignore harm to others in the name of scoring some Twitter likes? When do the white men who cover largely Black leagues have to walk a mile in the players’ shoes?"
Sports media has its reputation for privileging females as well, but DiCaro wants to know when sports media will "stop being a haven for mediocre white men to make hay off the suffering of others?"
Further examination reveals that Schefter's family does know suffering. The previous husband of his wife, Joe Maio, was killed on 911. Schefter wrote a book about his wife's tragic loss, titled "The Man I Never Met."
