This fall, Colin Cowherd went on ESPN Radio and called John Wall a nigger. A few days later, amid great hue and cry, he went on the air and called him a nigger again. I don't use this word lightly, but what else could Cowherd have wanted us to hear? He talked about "IQ judgment" and Wall's "wild, out-of-control style" and said something about robbing a bank and used the phrase "Yo, dawg, look at me" and referred to Wall's fans as "the wrong people," and I swear, in the sneering way he said "the wrong people," in the little bit of English he put on that middle word, you could read the whole damn history of redlining in America, and then a little later he busted on the kid for not having a dad.
I don't believe Colin Cowherd is a racist. I think he is a radio huckster who understands that there is awesome profit in stopping just short of saying "nigger" on national radio, in letting his audience make all the foul connections for themselves. And because this is America — where Nothing Is Ever About Race, where anything can be justified so long as it moves the needle, and where our media culture operates on the premise that we are all slackjawed morons — he is absolutely untouchable. He is critic-proof. Just think about that: One of the foremost media personalities in one of the most tight-assed, image-conscious, PG-rated media companies in the land — an outfit that suspended Tony Kornheiser in part for talking about Hannah Storm's skirt, that went into spasms of pretend conscience over airing ads for a slasher movie during a college football game — goes on national radio and whispers "nigger" and no one in Bristol feels obliged to say anything. And of course no one does. Colin Cowherd moves the needle, they'd only point out. Colin Cowherd speaks his mind. Colin Cowherd gets people talking. (So did Ted Bundy. What's your point?)
The media marketplace will always find room for demagogues and controversialists and crypto-bigots, even for especially dumb ones likes Cowherd. They've been around for so long that hatred is virtually the grammar of radio. For many years, mass culture kept up an uneasy detente with these figures. They were given their margins, and they kept to them, and there was an understanding on both sides that they spoke to a very devoted fraction — a large one, in some instances, but a fraction nonetheless. I don't want to give Cowherd too much credit, because I think he's a stupid man, and I don't pretend that he's doing anything appreciably different from whatever goes down during Skippy and Goatface's Morning Sports Holocaust on your local FM dial, but Cowherd, to my mind, represents the collapse of that cultural consensus. Something in the culture is irreparably fucked when its purveyors of mass entertainment look at a guy whispering "nigger" on his margin and think he trades in common coin. That he's just like everyone else, an everyman with an everyman's frustrations about the world. Colin Cowherd has a CBS sitcom. Something is fucked.
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