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Once when I was in college, a friend was hosting a prospective student for the weekend. A group of us were going to play some basketball, and we asked the young man if he wanted to come along. With a kind of grudging look, he said yes. While the game was just a friendly 3-on-3, this guy's skills were sadly inadequate -- couldn't dribble, couldn't pass, couldn't shoot. Walking back to the dorm, he said somewhat sadly, "Everyone thinks that because I'm 6-5 and black, I must be great at basketball." It was plainly not the first time he had been embarrassed in this way.I tell this story not so much to defend George Allen who is currently running to reclaim the Senate seat he lost in 2006, but perhaps to begin to understand him:
NBC 4’s reporter-anchor Craig Melvin is a tall African-American. Which apparently led to this exchange with former Sen. George Allen, according to Melvin’s Twitter account Tuesday night:"For the 2nd time in 5 months, fmr. gov. and sen candidate George Allen asks me,'what position did you play?' I did not a play a sport."One of the things you have to learn to do if you're a politician is quickly establish a rapport with people you've never met, or whom you've met but don't remember. The really skilled ones can do in a matter of seconds, in a way that the target will remember forever. The ones who are slightly less skilled come up with techniques they can use to make you feel you really matter to them; some of these techniques are more effective than others. George Allen, whose father was a pro football coach, obviously learned that when you want to connect with men, this is an easy way to do it. As Allen said in his tweeted apology, "sorry if I offended, ask people a lot if they played sports Grew up in fball family found sports banter good way to connect." By saying that he said this to Melvin because "sports banter good way to connect," Allen is owning up to the artificiality of the exchange, which I guess I can respect. The fact is that we all carry around stereotypes with us, even those of us who are the most well-intentioned. The difference between George Allen and the rest of us is that when we see a tall, fit black man like Craig Melvin, a voice in our head might say, "I'll bet that guy played football or basketball in college," but that voice is followed by another voice that says, "Come now, that's just a stereotype." That voice is followed by yet another voice that says, "Don't even think about being such a jerk that you'd actually say something assuming that he was an athlete!"You'd think that after Allen lost his Senate seat because of the fallout from calling a kid "macaca," those second and third voices would be a little louder, if for no other reason than his own political self-preservation. But apparently not. Does that make him a stone-cold racist? No, it doesn't. It does suggest that what people have long thought about Allen -- that he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed -- might be true.
