Heavyweight Racial Hypocrisy

He called him “a gorilla.”

No.  The maligner was not a virulent white Southern racist.  It was Mohammed Ali, narcissistically attempting to contrast what he regarded as his pretty, brilliant self with Joe Frazier, the man he perceived as ugly and dumb—essentially subhuman.

Lonnae O’Neal Parker, an African American journalist, quoted Jelani Cobb, Rutgers Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University: “There was something searing and non-evolved about this tall, light-skinned black man calling another black man a gorilla. With the rest of America, especially black America, co-signing it.”  (Imagine if a white man had referred to Joe Frazier as a “gorilla.”)

The Parker article sometimes stated and sometimes implied how hurt and angry Frazier remained even in his later years; for instance, when Ali lit the Olympic Torch at the 1996 Games, Joe said that he would have liked to have tossed him into the flame.

Of course, as one would expect, Ali, the “real” black man, had to racialize his disdain for Frazier, calling him, “an Uncle Tom,” for only God knows what.  Parker quoted Janks Morton, Jr., whose father trained Sugar Ray Leonard, as saying,

“I can still see [Ali] sitting next to Howard Cosell punching that [rubber] black gorilla, saying, ‘It’s going to be a thrilla in Manila when I kill that gorilla.’ ”

Morton, 48, a documentary filmmaker from Laurel, says that “what Ali represented, that black-power vein, everybody was rooting for him. But we didn’t stop and pause to understand that was a painful period for Joe.”

Since Frazier died, Ali has decided that he will always remember Joe Frazier with “admiration and respect.”   Touching isn’t it?  This is a typical self-serving raceketeer trick—racially batter black identity non-conformers until there no longer is an advantage to continue.  Then take the high road and the bows appertaining.

Now there is a new black heavyweight on the scene.  He doesn’t box, but he has been a life-long fighter.  You might have heard of him—Herman Cain.  And, as one would expect, the black racial identity slavemasters are swarming. 

Long before accusations of sexual impropriety surfaced, Harry Belafonte, Jon Stewart and scores of others mocked Cain as being racially inappropriate, and some flat-out call him an Uncle Tom.  Chauncey DeVega on Salon.com wrote a piece called, “Herman Cain: Lover of Jim Crow, Apologist for White Racism."

The 21st Century slavemasters are trying to denigrate Cain’s racial credibility, just as Ali and his henchmen did to Joe Frazier.  When Herman dies, maybe they will conclude that he wasn’t so bad after all.