You might remember last June when, in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, The Associated Press updated their style guide with this:

It bothered a lot of people at the time. And while I had my own reasons for believing it to be condescending, I have not been able to come close to the eloquence of Jason Whitlock in detailing how truly offensive it is to black people.

In case you aren't familiar with Jason Whitlock, he has had a long and storied career in sports journalism and is the only sports writer to have won the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Commentary primarily for his courage in writing about the "intersection of sports and race."

I have some choice excerpts from his appearance on Tucker Carlson below, but regardless, it may be among the most worthwhile five minutes and fifty-seven seconds you spend today and is important to do true justice to his reasoning.

Tucker Carlson had a good take on what Whitlock was saying around the 2:35 mark:

"So, you've got a completely different take. I think, so most people when they saw this would say, ‘Okay this is an elaborate show of respect,' you're saying it's a means of control.'"

Whitlock answered, and elaborated:

"No question about it. When you go back 400 years when America instituted instituted and leaned into slavery, black people's skin color was, ‘hey that's a special classification of people, they're black, therefore because of their skin color they don't have as much freedom as everybody else. Their skin color tells you all you need to know about them. That's their defining characteristic.'

These people 400 years later, these are the ideological descendants of those bigots from 400 years ago saying, doubling down a written reminder to black people your skin color is your defining characteristic and therefore we're going to limit your freedom."

And he was just getting warmed up.

"You spend all of your energy trying to be unapologetically black. Everybody else gets to go out and try to be intelligent, gets to… responsible, god fearing, patriotic. Look, Asian Americans come into this country and they don't try to live up to their skin color. They're not sending their kids off into the world ‘be yellow,' they consider the word ‘yellow' a slur and an insult. They don't want to be defined by their skin color. They send their kids out in the world, ‘no you go be smarter than everyone else, define yourself by your intelligence and ability to achieve in this country.'"

And then he just obliterates the argument AP and others are making. He is a measured pro, but you can hear an undertone of frustration and anguish in his voice.

"Black people? Unlike everybody else, you go out and prove to everybody how black you are, become unapologetically black and we're gonna celebrate it. And then, as black people, we don't even control what is black, right? That's told to us by Chelsea Handler and every liberal running Hollywood… If you don't think all these liberal thoughts you're not black, we're not even in control of that so we're actually trying to meet standards defined for us by other people to live up to their standards… and they're defining blackness as a lot of things that just aren't healthy for us.

They just aren't, again, Being a rapper and saying the N-word is about the blackest thing you can do according to Hollywood.

This is crazy."

Yes, it is, and should make decent people furious.

Whitlock had addressed this on Outkick in a piece titled, "The capital B in black is a scarlet letter that diminishes, destroys, and disenfranchises black people."

Appropriately enough, it's part of a regular segment called, "Outkick is Fearless with Jason Whitlock."

"We (black people) are the system, the hard drive infected with systemic, anti-black racism. Our programmers, among other places, work for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, the Democratic Party and the Associated Press.

They tell us what to think and believe. They define our value.

The ideological forefathers of our programmers wired us for free labor. Their descendants rig us for self-destruction."

Trust me, black is a color. It's not a human being, a person or an all-important defining characteristic. It's a shade of humanity that has long been weaponized by American bigots to cast a segment of society into a special category devoid of the inalienable rights guaranteed by our constitution."

Fearless indeed 🦾

The whole piece is worth reading as well for a soothing antidote to our crazy times.

And you might want to add Whitlock to your regular reading list.