Bernard Goldberg
"Every now and then a news item pops up that is so ridiculous that you figure it's just got to be fake
news, somebody's idea of a joke. You check the calendar to make sure it's not April Fools' Day. And
when you realize it isn't, you come to understand that in our hypersensitive culture, a news story can
be factual, accurate and preposterous all at the same time.
"Which brings us to the TV play-by-play man for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team in the National
Basketball Association. The announcer, Brian Davis, was calling a game in which the team's star
player, Russell Westbrook, was having another spectacular game. He had just made a pass setting up
a basket -- one of a stunning 19 assists he made in the game -- when Davis put an exclamation point
on the Westbrook pass, saying Westbrook was playing "out of his cotton-pickin' mind."
"Davis is white and Westbrook is black, in case you haven't figured that out. And in case you have
absolutely no knowledge of history, slaves once upon a time picked cotton in the South.
"So reparations for the ugly past had to be paid, more than 150 years after slavery ended. How? By
taking what passes for the moral high ground. The Thunder suspended Davis for one game. No
fooling.
"Never mind that cotton pickin' is a term used in the South by a lot of old white guys and old black
guys as a genteel replacement for a harsher words, like damn.
. . . "The term has ugly racial connotations mainly for those who look in all sorts of places for supposed ugly racial connotations."
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