While I was gone, a video surfaced of an NFL player saying the N word.
This dumb statement is huge news because the player is white, the word ended with an -er, and sportswriters are the most pussified, politically correct writers in the history of the English (or any other) language. The sports-writing world lost its collective mind.
In this offseason, a lot of NFL players were arrested (poverty apparently doesn’t cause crime). The fact that so many players were arrested allows us to compare how sportswriters view the severity of a racist remark in relation to other crimes.
The only crime (that I can find) that got more mention (based on the number of stories yielded by a news search) than the racist statement was Aaron Hernandez’s murder charge. The following crimes are (by this metric) less noteworthy than a racist statement (the utterance of a word, which I’m sure is never, ever said by anyone else in the NFL): child abuse, gun possession, DUI, drug possession, missing a court date, stealing from a casino, public intoxication, resisting an officer, assault, battery, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, fighting, solicitation, street racing, and (last but certainly not least) attempted murder.
I think it’s likely that if a lesser player than Aaron Hernandez had committed murder, we probably could have added murder to that list.
Anyway, it’s unclear if the racist player will actually play following his remark. Forgiveness is for real criminals, not necessarily thought criminals, apparently.
