Some black players won’t play for Rush Limbaugh if he buys Rams
Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has some Americans that love him and plenty that hate him. And the fact that he spouts such right-wing opinions doing his day job may hurt Limbaugh’s chances of getting some players if he manages to buy the St. Louis Rams, according to the New York Daily News.
Please don’t throw me into the briar patch! The Rams might actually lead the way in breaking through the caste system. Even though I’m being delusional here. All I think is going on is that some black players are going to try and play the racial panderer Rush Limbaugh for all they can get out of him. If Rush were a real bigot like me, they’d know they wouldn’t get the time of day if I were in the market to buy a piece of the Rams. They are barking at Rush, but wouldn’t bark at me. Don’t show fear in front of the dog.
New York Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka would love to play again under Rams head coach Steve Spagnuolo, who was his defensive coordinator in New York, but Kiwanuka is saying that there is no way he would go play for St. Louis if Limbaugh takes over. New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott(notes) told the paper the same thing yesterday and it seems that it may be a general sentiment for a lot of black NFL players.
Okay then, avoid the Rams. Go play for the San Diego Chargers. Now there’s the team to play for if you want to play for a politically progressive owner.*
How would Mr. Kiwanuka like it if the Giants released him because one of its owners had a conservative viewpoint and didn’t like having a liberal employee? I wish the Giants had a conservative owner, and s/he could talk the rest of the owners into doing so. Then the popping off at the mouth from people like Mr. Kiwanuka would stop.
“All I know is from the last comment I heard, he said in (President) Obama’s America, white kids are getting beat up on the bus while black kids are chanting ‘right on,’” Kiwanuka told the paper.
I think that sort of thing might have actually happened.
But that leads me to another point. The NFL is workplace, and not an explicitly political workplace, therefore, if you’re not a boss, you leave your opinions at your own front door. If I were a Rams player, and Rush Limbaugh was about to become a part owner of my team, I wouldn’t piss him off EVEN IF HE IS LYING about the Belleville Bus Beating or anything else. If he has strong opinions, let him take his lumps in the marketplace of ideas; if he’s blatantly wrong about something, he’ll be the one who has to eat his words and face the embarrassment, not me. He doesn’t play football at a professional level, I don’t get mixed up in his politics. Rush Limbaugh could be as crude, rude, foul-mouthed, hateful, bigoted, conceited, demagogic, full of invective, and blatantly wrong as he wants. But he would be all those things AND MY BOSS. Do you really want to piss off your boss? Even if Rush brings politics into his job as an owner, (and I don’t think he will), I wouldn’t make it worse (and by “worse,” I make the assumption that I, as a Rams player, had left-of-center politics) by bringing politics in myself. Rush isn’t that type of person who wouldn’t sign players just because they’re libs or libkooks, but I wouldn’t chance it with ANY boss. ESPECIALLY in a situation where Rush partly owns the economic factor of which I am an employee, and a multi million dollar employee at that. It’s either that, or push a mop at not much more than minimum wage, or (at best) juggle a dozen PowerPoint presentations, reports and spreadsheets at $40,000 a year.
I would expect people like Mr. Kiwanuka to do this because this is the kind of thing I have to do myself. Even though I don’t have an explicitly political job in an explicitly political institution, the hard fact of the matter is that there is a lot of politics involved where I work. I’ve held two different positions within the same institution; the first involved me being one of only two guys around a bunch of hateful angry white feminists, and other other (and my current), while it is all-guy, and very heavily white, and FAR more tolerable in terms of work conditions, the prevailing mentality is that of, shall I say it charitably, racial egalitarianism. What I do involves many young black men, especially in matters that raise money to make the department in which I work profitable. (I knew I wasn’t much liked in the first position; That’s why I grabbed onto my current one once it came open. I suspect that after my last day at the first position, they held a party to celebrate that I was gone.) I don’t have the luxury of popping off at work. I don’t even have the luxury of being public and non-anonymous in the medium that you are reading. At least Mr. Kiwanuka runs an extremely low risk of being fired just on politics alone. So why should I carry his water, when he won’t carry mine? I would have him walk a mile in my shoes.
* – The owner of the Chargers, Alex Spanos, is a friend of Rush Limbaugh and on the same political wavelength. But let’s keep that our little secret. I’m trying to trick them into taking on another conservative boss after they said fuck off to the potential of working for another conservative boss. At that time, Spanos would have their nuts in a vise grip.
