Mostly White Media Has Field Day with Dungy Comments

Mostly white media has field day with Dungy comments
John Steigerwald
http://www.observer-reporter.com/art...6#.U9RlLCx0xuc

Tony Dungy is homophobe of the week.

He’s spending time in the national media’s barrel because, when asked about the St. Louis Rams’ Michael Sam, the NFL’s first openly gay player, he said he would not have drafted him if he were still an NFL head coach.
Dungy was a wildly successful and universally admired player and coach in the NFL for more than 30 years and is now an analyst on NBC’s Football Night in America, the No. 1-rated TV show in the United States. He gave an honest answer and said Sam would be a distraction and that, “It’s not going to be totally smooth … things will happen.”
He teed himself up for the self-righteous national media and they knocked him out of the park.
But Dungy knows things very few in the media know.
He knows what it’s like to be in an NFL locker room, not as an interloper, but as a member of the team. And here’s something else he knows that all but a microscopic sliver of media critics don’t: Dungy knows what it’s like to be black. He knows that gay black men have it much tougher than gay white men.
Everybody knows two-thirds of players in an NFL locker room are black.
The white media stars who got on their high horses and lectured Dungy on his hypocritical lack of tolerance could have done a 10-second Google search and found plenty of references to the unique hardships endured by gay black men.
They could have found this quote from gay CNN anchor Don Lemon: “It’s quite different for an African-American male. It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.”
They might have found the study done by Rutgers journalism professor Michael LaSala last year for the Journal of GLBT Studies that found being a gay black man presents unique challenges. One challenge, according to LaSala is “The rigid expectations of exaggerated masculinity” held by many in the black community.
LaSala said, it was a common theme among relatives of gay black men that, “They carry a special stigma that some straight black males may find particularly disturbing. The world already sees you as less than others. By being gay, you’re further hurting the image of African-American men.”
Dungy was in the NFL for more than 30 years. He’s been black all his life. Could it be that he knows that, despite what black players say in front of the cameras, many, if not most of them, might not be as tolerant of gay black men as the mostly white media would like to think they are?
If acceptance of gay men is already a problem among African-Americans, would it be surprising to find even less tolerance in the typical hyper-masculine NFL locker room?
Should it be shocking Dungy believes, “things will happen,” and those things would make it less likely he could do what he’s paid millions of dollars to do – win a championship?
Of course, Dungy could never say it out loud.
Do you know why?
The mostly white, holier-than-thou, national media wouldn’t tolerate it for a second.