John McWhorter on Dave Zirin's new book, Welcome to the Terrordome, the Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports

"In his contempt for David Stern’s decree that basketball players stop doing interviews in full “thug” regalia, Zirin exemplifies an old white lefty tendency: believing that Not Being a Racist means exempting black people from basic civic responsibilities. Thug regalia symbolize violence, aloofness, and dismissal, and symbolism matters. Zirin understands this well when it comes to the Confederate flag or Hitler salutes, which he invokes frequently in other contexts. "


"Zirin typifies much of the hard Left in viewing himself as a paragon of higher awareness while engaging in the same visceral, unreflective mudslinging that he reviles among people on the right. For him, conservatives are people who casually assume that “injustice is the tolerable status quo,” and David Brooks is a “Republican stenographer,” rather than the almost ponderously reflective soul who writes New York Times columns."

"If you’re politically active, you’ll love this book,” Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel gushes in a blurb. Note the assumption that “politically active” means leftist, as if other positions were unworthy of the label. But the self-congratulatory rhetoric of leftism, when translated into policy, neglects the very people the leftist claims to be concerned about, or worse, holds them back. Welcome to the Terrordome, despite its good intentions, is an object lesson in how lefties who affect to be looking out for blacks are often looking out for no one but themselves."

John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Race and Ethnicity. His most recent book is Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (2006).