Andy Hutchins
Sweat's the technique, don't sweat the technique.

It sure sounds like Stephen A. Smith said “nigga, please” on ESPN’s FirstTake on Thursday while discussing Kobe Bryant’s chances of returning from injury for the first game of the NBA season. It’s the exact sort of thing — there’s no way Kobe doesn’t play, one would think — that a black guy having a conversation at a barbershop might dismiss with “nigga, please” … but it aired on ESPN. So, of course, the folks who want to swing at ESPN for allowing a “racial slur” to be uttered on air have done so.

Ty Duffy of The Big Lead, no stranger to making Statements (“Free speech is a constitutional right. Remaining employed as a consequence of said speech is not.”) was one of the first to pile on ESPN and Smith for this:

Stephen A. Smith will not be reprimanded for saying the N-Word on First Take this morning, ESPN has determined. It appears the powers that be huddled for a couple hours this morning, and Stephen A. Smith convinced them that he didn’t say “Nigga please,” even though 99 percent of people who have seen the video. His non-apology denial is laughable. “I’m a New Yorker! I speak very, very fastly!” (He really said that.)

The first and obvious question: If he didn’t say it, why was the word scrubbed from subsequent airings of the show?

Reminder: This is the same network that suspended a Sportscenter host for saying “chink in his armor” when talking about Jeremy Lin earlier this year. That anchor, Max Bretos, was suspended for a month. It was almost universally agreed that ESPN made a terrible decision in that instance. I’m guessing here, but I think the opposite will be true on in regard to this Stephen A. Smith situation. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they changed their mind a put Stephen A. on the bench for a few days after the public sees his non-apology.

Duffy’s resistance to finding something wrong with Smith saying “nigga” other than the context in which it was said is telling. Duffy doubled down on that uncritical criticism in a post today.

Smith’s slip was casual and not intended to cause offense, but, unlike the Lin case, it was direct and objectionable. “Chink” has multiple meanings in English. “N—a” has one and it is not appropriate for television or polite society.

The offender exacerbates the problem. Stephen A. is one of ESPN’s stars. He’s a centerpiece of the “embrace debate” strategy employed to fuel conflict and ratings. He’s black, which, rightly or wrongly, complicates the judgement call. Smith also has a career built on playing the caricature of a combustible black person who would say “n—a please” outside a television-sanitized context. His whole MO is tapping into an informal bar or barbershop atmosphere which ESPN is trying to foster, breaking down the barriers between “on air” and “off air” sports discussion. This slip can be viewed as a logical outgrowth from that.

“The Lin case” mentioned here is a combination of two cases involving “chink in the armor” being used while describing Jeremy Lin, the incandescent Knicks-turned-Rockets player of Chinese and Taiwanese descent; in one, ESPN suspended a SportsCenter anchor for a month for using the phrase when asking about Lin’s flaws in a segment, and in the other, a writer, Anthony Federico, used the phrase in a headline for the mobile version of ESPN.com and was fired. In both cases, the use of the term was explained in part as an honest mistake, and Federico told his tale of being rendered unemployable by a mistake a while after. Duffy writes elsewhere in today’s post: “Being frank, there was more latent racism displayed by those drawing the connection.” (So there’s racism inherent in noting that “chink” used in proximity of an Asian is problematic, I guess?)

But Smith’s “nigga” — one he denies saying, like he denies saying it last year — is “objectionable,” Duffy writes, because it has one meaning in English and “it is not appropriate for television or polite society.” I cannot more strenuously object to the assertion that nigga has one meaning in English than by saying that it’s a) wrong and b) racist in its erasure of the reclamation of nigga by those who use it to mean something entirely different from what nigger still means.

(Duffy as arbiter of what is “appropriate for television or polite society” also rankles, given that The Big Lead (which, disclosure, I was an unpaid intern for in the summer of 2009, and was once in negotiations to write for pay for) is fond of leering at women. Here’s a post, written by Duffy, in which Natalie Portman is described as “looking incredible” at last Saturday’s Texas-Baylor game, and in which Duffy writes “That’s … quite an outfit. Wow. In the words of Tim Ryan: “!”.” Here I include my own reaction to that for fairness’ sake. Also: Duffy’s a white dude, it should be noted.)

In any case, Duffy goes on to dismiss ESPN’s decision not to punish a black man for possibly saying nigga on air as “cowardly” and writes that the network “display(ed) a startling level of cognitive dissonance” in doing so. This would be easily dismissed as clumsy writing about race if it weren’t held up as an example of a thing worth your time by one of the most respected names in sports journalism.

Duffy, though, managed to avoid most of the loaded language that will make Jason Whitlock’s more notable for phrases than its argument: Whitlock writes that the show engages in “negro-baiting,” that FirstTake has been “ghetto-ized,” that it “entices Smith and others to bojangle,” says that Smith was “desperate for his next hit from the TV crack pipe,” all in the service of rightly breaking down how ESPN has turned FirstTake into the closest thing sports television has to a peek into the black barbershop.

Whitlock’s not technically wrong about FirstTake or Bayless in saying they’re “negro-baiting,” to my mind: Bayless is a master-level troll, expert at making specious, often racist arguments that are designed to inflame sports fans, especially black ones, and I’ve watched a fair bit of FirstTake and have seen it shift time and again toward the black audience. The show’s tagline is “Embrace debate,” which would be an honest sign on the front door of the black barbershop as it is typically depicted.

In that sense, it’s in the tradition of barbershop discussions, but also in the greater cultural trend of dialogue being subsumed by debate. (I suspect the majority of barbershop discussions are more dialogue than discourse.) That trend’s particularly strong in the communities of sports fans and rap fans, two segments of the population that overlap and include many black participants, and ESPN’s certainly not wrong or racist to try to provide content those communities would enjoy. On FirstTake, though, “Embrace debate” usually translates to “We’re not interested in being right, just loud,” frees the discourse from the burden of making sense, and is used as cover for all arguments being considered, no matter their legitimacy in terms of logic or freedom from bias.

Whitlock is never afraid to discuss race, to his credit, but is fond of victim-blaming — he’s long criticized rap music for contributing to law-breaking (what I wouldn’t give for Killer Mike to chat with Whitlock), tweets things like this in refusing to engage critics, and tweeted a horrifically stupid racist joke about Lin’s penis size in February. Here, he blames Smith for “dancing for Bayless,” and writes that Bayless “is not the bad guy. He is what he is. He’s never hid it.” Whitlock concludes: “Smith owes us an apology and a few days off work to think about how to properly and respectfully use the immense broadcasting talents he’s been blessed with.”

The fealty to propriety that runs through the writing of both Duffy and Whitlock here, an exaltation of the idea that using the word nigga is a cue to invalidate someone’s opinions, is toxic and racist, to my mind. Nigger — usually a tool of whites — is a problematic word because it has power and is used by those in power to wound, and will probably always be problematic for those reasons; nigga — usually a tool of blacks, though other minorities use it — has far less power to wound, as it is almost never used by those in power, and does not carry the freight of history as heavily.

A white panelist using the word as a slur would have been truly objectionable; a black panelist using it in an idiomatic phrase is bait for half-baked arguments that get play in a society that cannot have conversations about race it should have on a daily basis, fuel for a culture that sometimes seems to run on outrage.

If there existed a sports television program that featured black pundits, like the one Smith can often be, discussing sports honestly and smartly, and allowed them to use whatever terms they deemed appropriate in discussions, I would probably watch it, and I have few doubts that it would be a success; FirstTake and ESPN’s preponderance of other programming based on debate about the topics of the day prove that there is at least a market for a product like that, even if the current product is not particularly appealing. (The network in charge could run it at 10 p.m., or another hour that allows for skirting of FCC guidelines.)

But ESPN has a show not entirely unlike that right now: Around The Horn, long reviled as the nadir of ESPN’s programming, has grown into a show that is basically bereft of trolling and often has smart discussions about difficult subjects. It did a great job of dissecting Warren Moon’s comments about race playing a role in perceptions of Cam Newton’s struggles earlier this week, with all four panelists — Bill Plaschke, Bomani Jones (disclosure: an SB Nation co-worker and friend in the sense that people I know from the Internet alone are friends), Michael Smith, and Jackie MacMullen — making cogent, valuable points. Part of Horn’s improvement is picking better panelists (I think few people write better on race in sports than Jones does, MacMullen is a pro’s pro, Smith has grown into one of ESPN’s most compelling voices, and other occasional panelists like Jemele Hill, Pablo Torre, and Israel Gutierrez have interesting things to say) than it did in the dark days of Jay Mariotti’s reign as regular, but host Tony Reali has developed a steady hand at the rudder, and the show as a whole is tighter ship than it has ever been before, eclipsing big brother Pardon the Interruption on a routine basis.

ESPN could take some lessons from Horn: once memorably parodied as Sports Shouting on 30 Rock, it’s now the rare ESPN program that has succeeded by turning down the volume and committing to intelligence. There aren’t many sports media products that couldn’t.