After waxing disingenuous about how they respect and encourage athletes of all different races, backgrounds and viewpoints to express their political opinion regardless of what it may be, ESPN’s Jemele Hill and Michael Smith used a significant portion of their program “His & Hers” on Thursday to further solidify the fact that the only viewpoint supported by ESPN is one that supports the radical activism of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In response to Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman’s statement that if black lives matter, they should matter “all the time,” Smith and Hill dissolved into near sputtering hysteria with an almost 5-minute long tirade punctuated by this outburst from Michael Smith:
This was extremely counter-productive commentary. I applaud and admire athletes with the courage to speak up on social and political issues. Even again even if we don’t agree. But everybody can’t bat 1.000. I respect the hell out of Richard Sherman and where he has come from and where he is now. He is a smart brother. I like him a lot but he is dead wrong on this and with all due respect I think he needs to do a little more reading before he speaks out on this and a little more thought and introspection and it’s so counter-productive because he undermines the movement that is ‘Black Lives Matter.'
One cannot dismiss the irony of the sports media telling a black athlete raised in Compton and educated at Stanford that he needs to “do a little more reading,” before speaking out on issues involving black people. My guess is Sherman has done far more “reading” than Hill or Smith ever have.
Yet, because Sherman has probably spent more time reading Tolstoy and Frost instead of Deray McKeeson and Shaun King, he’s judged to be knowledge deficient.
Okay.
The fact is Hill and Smith are apoplectic because Sherman called BLM out on their BS. It is a monstrous hypocrisy to found a movement based on the value of black lives while black people are committing genocide against each other. But he also poses a bigger threat to BLM. Like Ray Lewis, who has also been critical of BLM, Sherman shirked the victimology advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement and embraced the drive and determination needed to succeed in life, regardless of race.
And in so doing, Sherman, Lewis, and others show BLM to be a morally and intellectually bankrupt void whose only real effect is to keep black people where they are, instead of helping them realize their potential and moving them forward.
