Race has nothing to do with it, Jesse

By Chris Maza
Fan Fanatic Sports Staff

I will put it out there right now. I am not a fan of the NBA. I think of the four major sports, it is the one with the biggest legitimacy problems.

Lebron James' hour long special on ESPN culminated pretty much everything I don't like about the organization and the people in it. I hold Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert's letter to the fans in the same respect. It all seemed like a scene from professional wrestling when they set up the table in the ring and have the wrestler sign the contract for a title fight, then have someone else come down the ramp, steal the microphone and start yelling.

Gilbert's comments were bombastic, ill-advised, inflammatory and at some points unrealistic, but there's one thing they weren't - racist.

Jesse Jackson has crawled out of his hole to make the most unbelievable statements in this whole ordeal - that Gilbert assumed a slave master mentality and talked about James like he would about a runaway slave.

I don't know Gilbert or his politics or his feelings on race relations. When discussing what he had to say about Lebron, I don't need to know because none of that is pertinent to what he wrote in that letter to the fans. Surely Gilbert felt betrayed. He felt scorned. He felt played. That's why he wrote what he wrote. But let's say Lebron was white and did exactly what he just did. Would Gilbert's letter have been phrased any differently? Doubtful.

In addition, it's unreal that Jackson would compare Lebron, who made more money as an employee of the Cavs than Gilbert did as the team's owner and is one of the most highly-paid United States citizens, to someone who was actually OWNED by someone else, paid nothing, given no rights and forced to work under the absolute harshest of conditions with the alternative being death.

I am not dismissing the fact that slavery has had a ringing effect on the country and that equal rights were not achieved until a very short while ago. Rather, I'm saying that Lebron is probably the last person that should be called a poster boy for racial inequality and the fact that he is being compared to a slave actually is a slap in the face to anyone who has had to deal with real hardship. Comparing Lebron's situation to racism is basically making a mockery of the suffering that anyone who was a slave faced.

Lebron had a choice of where he was going to go and how many millions of dollars he was going to make to play a game, which is his right, a right that a slave, obviously, would not even have concept of. Gilbert had a right, too. That was the right to say what he really thought of Lebron, and it was a right he exercised. And while it may not have been the most eloquent letter ever penned, surely most people could at least see why he might write it.

He didn't write it because he felt Lebron was his property. He wrote it because of the way Lebron went about announcing his decision, that the guy who had given Lebron over $62 Million over the past seven years had to sit in front of his television and find out whether or not he'd have the pleasure of paying him another ungodly amount of money. He was insulted.

Jackson is so far from being relevant anymore largely because he is so hung up on race that he can't see that not every interaction between a white person and a person of color has a negative racial connotation. Every time the very deep wound caused by slavery and continued racism begins to heal, Jackson feels the need to take out the forceps and spread it wide open again. Any rational person sees that Gilbert was not saying James was his slave. Jackson, however, is not a rational person and that's why everyone of every color should take his words as nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic.