Keith Murphy's interview with Chris Doyle

[PCHawk]

To be clear, I wasn't referring to the Doyle situation specifically. As others have rightly pointed out, if he chose to exert his power in a bully fashion, he got what he deserved.

Perception trumping facts is a much broader issue, but probably can be applied in his case.

IIRC, one player complained that Doyle told him he could "go back to the ghetto" if he didn't like the way things were, but someone observing that interaction said that Doyle told him he could go back to (whatever city he was from) and didn't use the word ghetto. The player perceived the phrase differently through the lens of someone who grew up in a poor oppressed environment, and assumed Doyle's implication was racist.

Was Doyle implying that due to subconscious bias, or, in a worst case scenario, as someone who is frankly racist? We'll never know, but either way, the facts of the statement took a back seat to the perception. That's a dangerous power right now, and akin to the witch hunts of the late 1600s - if a group of people perceived you as a witch, you were deemed a witch. Facts didn't matter.

If I remember right, that player was known to talk about how he never wanted to have to go back to that neighborhood. If that's correct (and who knows if it is) then the implication is pretty obvious. Using the players own fears of having to go back home as a motivational tactic to work harder. Again tho, who knows if that part of the story was true.

 

[PCHawk]

See that's stuff I think Doyle could or could have gotten past and worked through if he'd have admitted to it. That's a little different than racial slurs, etc. Admit you're old, white, out of touch, and that you didn't see what you were doing for what it was...treating black people differently and not respecting them to the same level as white athletes. Apologize for it.

But all I got from the interview was, 'I never used the N-word and I have plenty of black friends...'

It seems like there was definitely some old white out of touch dude going in. The rumor is some white players had issues with that too. Pretty much every white kid with long hair.

I remember years ago I used to say I swear Kirk is racist. If there was ever a position competition between the talented black player and the hard working white player that couldn't keep up, it was always the white player that won the starting spot. Obviously that's not true, but it sure seemed that way. But truthfully tho, there are plenty of schools in the country where "black culture" is the perfect fit. There's also plenty of black kids around who fit in perfectly well with "white culture". So if one school wants to have the white culture way, it probably shouldn't be a big deal. Especially when the whole premise of white culture and black culture is kinda bs anyway.

 

[CP87]

Did you read the report? The black players interviewed generally love the community. They specifically said that wasn't the problem.

I grew up in Iowa City in the '80s and early '90s. Iowa City was less diverse then, yet Iowa had basketball and football teams with lots of black players. We even had two black head basketball coaches! This isn't some situation where a university in a po-dunk town suddenly recruited black players for the first time recently.

It's ok to accept the report's findings.

Not disagreeing with anything, just adding some other info. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa had an external review fairly recently, and one of the glaring findings was that many minority students found the campus/community to be unwelcoming. Not insinuating that this in any way exonerates Doyle or anyone else on the FB staff, just pointing out that the rest of the campus has some work to do, as well.

 

[CP87]

I feel tension between 2 different ideas:

1) There is bias built into our various institutions that make it more difficult for some people to get ahead, and we all have our own personal biases that can make it difficult to understand others on a personal-level. Things like DEI programs were developed to address these issues.

2) Overemphasis on an "oppressor-oppressed" framework creates a victim-mentality that might not really be solving any problem.

Broad over-generalization coming: It seems like much of the DEI push is coming from white liberals who are well-meaning, but ultimately get hung up on semantics and academic theory, and don't necessarily do much to dismantle the systemic barriers which are the main problem. For example, I'm pretty sure it was white people that decided that Latino should instead be "Latinx" to avoid being sexist, while less than 5% of US residents of Hispanic-descent actually use the term Latinx. I think it is pushback to some of this forced, but ultimately not useful, DEI stuff that is driving some Hispanic and Black men toward the less politically correct political party (to be fair, both of those demographics still overwhelming support Democrats, but there has been movement since 2020).

I think everyone should work to become more culturally sensitive, and I think as a society we should work to identify and dismantle systemic barriers. But I also think we sometimes go too far in centering victimhood, and that we focus on relatively meaningless things like words, instead of more important things like policies.

No solutions to be offered here, just explaining some of the challenges I have when trying to think about topics like this.