Finneran: Too Old, Too White, Too Male To Understand….
Friday, October 31, 2014
I don’t get it. And I guess I never will.
Can someone please tell me why parents would allow their young children---girls specifically---to be degraded by adults? And while we’re at it, could someone explain the concept of “too white” or “not black enough”? Too white for what? Or too black for what? Didn't’t we fight a bloody Civil War about such idiocy?
Let’s start with the little girls and their shameful excuses for parents. A crappy rip off T-shirt company has put together an ad that features cute little girls prancing around and dropping multiple F-bombs while hustling T-shirts under the guise of social justice. Is there a legitimate feminist out there who is as appalled as I am and who is willing to condemn this ugly exploitation of young girls? What ever happened to the idea of good taste? Or to the idea that children were off-limits for the money-grubbing harangues of an imbecilic adult world? Btw, what ever happened to feminists? Shouldn't’t this ugly little act be condemned by them as evidence of a vulgar war on women? Little girls are dressed like tramps and prompted to swear like sailors……..need I say more?
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTTry as the company might to dress the video up as a cry of rage over “wage inequality” and sexual assault, it fails. Rather, it feels so contrived, so controlled, so offensive, and so generally icky as to constitute child abuse. I suppose the company and its marketers must be desperate for attention and it may well be that a huge collective silent remonstrance would pain them greatly. Yet silence might connote acceptance and what they have done here to little children is very ugly and quite unacceptable.
As bad as the company and its marketers might be, I reserve my greatest contempt for the parents of the little girls in the ad. We really can’t expect discernment and judgment from a seven-year old. That’s what the child’s parents are supposed to supply, teaching right from wrong, while teaching good manners, good taste, and acceptable language.
These parents seem to have sold out for a fistful of dollars and a micro-moment’s worth of “fame”. Shame on them. They pimped their own children. How utterly disgraceful.
Also in the news of the week was Russell Wilson, the splendid quarterback of the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks. According to a sportswriter’s report, Russell apparently is “not black enough” to have “cred” with some of his black teammates.
Silly and naive ol’ me, I would have thought that his stellar play on the football field would have been enough for the rest of the world to give him abundant “cred”. You know, like Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson and a host of others have shown us---that behavior, achievement, and content of character are the things that really matter rather than silly and superficial things like skin tones.
I recall that Barack Obama and Deval Patrick may have endured something similarly peculiar in their lifetimes. Governor Patrick has related a story of black family members or friends commenting negatively that he talked “like a white person” when he would return home to Chicago from his studies at Milton Academy. As I recall the story, it was his grandmother who corrected his critics by noting that he talked like “an educated person”. That’s a classic putdown by a wise woman.
Barack Obama, as a candidate in 2008, had much the same experience of questionable “cred”, phrased inartfully by the question as to whether he was “black enough” to pass muster in the black community. At the time he was being tested by Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill was known as “the first Black President” and who enjoyed very strong support in the minority community. The question was whether Barack, of unusual heritage and with no slave bloodlines in his family background, could somehow connect with more traditional or “authentic” Black Americans, denying the Clintons minority community support. The rest of course is history……………………………………………………
But what remains is very unsettling. Here we have a President, a Governor, and a Super Bowl Champion quarterback all of whom have been teased and criticized about degrees of “blackness” and acceptability. I’m clearly too old and too white to get it. I’m Irish and Catholic, proudly so, and I was raised on the content of character standard. I’ve known idiots in all races and nationalities. Happily, I’ve known saints and geniuses too.
If the rules have changed and color now counts more than character could the people from that hoary school of thought stand up, speak up, and be counted as the durable racists they clearly are?
Russell Wilson should pay them no heed.
Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.
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