diversifiedminds

You ever have one of those moments where you hear something so outrageous and ridiculous that you look around the room thinking that you are in a bad episode of Ashton Kutcher's "Punked". That happened to me this morning when I heard former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's comments in Esquire Magazine. For those of you who haven't heard the quote, Blagojevich stated "I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where he lived. I saw it all growing up." Excuse me?! Where do I begin? Firstly this commentary is so ignorant that I really wonder how a man like this even gets elected as governor of a state. I know Chicago politics are wild but come on. What I find extremely troubling with this commentary is not that Blagojevich would even say it, but the fact that he uses shining shoes and living in a small apartment to sum up what being black is. T...

Let me begin by saying that I have never seen the impact of racism in modern-day America so blatantly practiced than in the state of coaching in Div-1 college football. I have always believed that racism today is much more institutionalized than in your face. College football has not only proved that. It is my belief that college football has become the equivalent to the old-boy's club. And one of the only ways to join this network is to be a white man. In 2004 Tyrone Willingham was fired from the University of Notre Dame. At the time I thought he was given an unfair deal. In 2002, his first year at Notre Dame Willingham began the season 8-0 and won 10 games becoming the only first-year coach in Notre Dame history to win 10 games. For his efforts he was named the ESPN/Home Depot College Coach of the Year, the Scripps College Coach of the Year, the Black Coaches Association Male Coach of the Year and the George Munger Award College Coach of the Year by the Maxwell Football C...

Now I have resisted putting in my two cents on the current state of legal affairs that athletes have found themselves in during the past two weeks. Well the time for this is over. The gloves are off! O.J. Simpson: What the hell! Now if I got off on two counts of first-degree murder, when all of the evidence in the case either pointed to me doing it or knowing who did it, I would probably join a religious order and keep my ass quiet. Not this guy. He ends up trying to rob people of merchandise that technically he would have to sell anyway to pay off his settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit. Once he got arrested it became increasingly clear that he was going to get the punishment he deserved. Once I saw the make-up of the jury (all-white with the only blacks being selected as alternates) I knew he was done. And I could not be more happier. God doesn't like ugly. And O.J. represented all that was ugly. I think the funniest thing about this case is that O.J. was willing to take a...