“HONOLULU - Golf Channel suspended anchor Kelly Tilghman for two weeks on Wednesday for saying last week that young players who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should “lynch him in a back alley.”
"Tilghman was laughing during the exchange Friday with analyst Nick Faldo at the Mercedes-Benz Championship, and Woods’ agent at IMG said he didn’t think there was any ill intent.”
“While we believe that Kelly’s choice of words was inadvertent and that she did not intend them in an offensive manner, the words were hurtful and grossly inappropriate,” Golf Channel said in its statement. “Consequently, we have decided to suspend Kelly for two weeks, effective immediately.”
“Tiger and Kelly are friends, and Tiger has a great deal of respect for Kelly,” Steinberg said Tuesday night in a statement released by Golf Channel. “Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill-intent in her comments.”
Our words define us, peg us politically, by gender, by age, by location, by race. They are also the largest instrument in our ideological and reasoning tool-kit. Some of us seek to be edgy, perhaps hip and most importantly relevant. It is when entering these waters that we encounter one of the last and greatest racial divides, for in the land I shall refer to as “urban” awaits many minefields for those of pale skin. With most other divides conquered and in the presence of our diverse field of friends we tip our spears of satire and blurb exchange with wondrous new verbiage like generations before us. After all who in today’s society knows or cares how words like; Klutz, Putz, Sqaw, Chinga, or Culo get into our conversations. We watch the Sopranos and before you know we are talking like patrons of Bada Bing, human see human do... to a certain extent, after all we are not monkey's. Lynching was about force and denial of freedom, a brute ignorant hatred and regardless to Al Sharpton claims, includes all races at the end of such rope. Like burning at the stake or crucifixion, lynching is more about those who have lost their humanity than the color of the victims skin. Beyond seeing things in such shades lays the return to humanity as after all even the poignant “Strange Fruit” took a Jew to write, and a Black to sing.
Black culture like any other has contributed to our language, they like racial identities before them have taken insults and turned them around. Many of my Jewish friends are quick to use a word for themselves I find as bad as the dreaded N word (after all institutional slavery like institutional genocide gives one pause). Carlos Mencia starts his show calling himself a "Beaner", and I have several Irish friends that greet each other as "freakin Micks". Overall, in the family of man we seem not all that different, one way or other we greet each other as follow SOB’s. As the family of man gathers it should be expected that at times, lines as long as they exist, will get crossed. Having witnessed more than one wife, husband, son or daughter say something they know will hurt the one the love the most, I can state that our communication delivery systems are much more advanced than our communication intent systems. If found one among us that has never said something they did not mean, bow down people for you have met a God.
However today the gods of political correctness still stuck in a "Whiteman’s Burden" mindset have created an atmosphere in which race hustlers flourish and free speech is stymied should any fuzzy thin web-like line be crossed. Like the South of the 1940's when we speak we have institutional separation. Listening to Hip Hop feeds us with urban images that some of us are free to repeat but others will be punished for, regardless to how much the artists promote such imagines. In Boston a long time ago I had friend who used the N word preceded by White to express his anthropologic thoughts on my race on many occasions... distilled his comments were you white N's are crazy and his conclusion like mine is regardless of the cultural differences, the similarities of the human condition hold the most weight. Working with Belarusian programmers in New York I was amused to discover that Gregory who was my age and grew up under the nightmare of nuclear oblivion and Soviet rule found solace in the music of the Beatles and to this day carts his large collection of classic rock, to stubborn to give up either his youth or vinyl. He refers to himself a "commie" at times as his love of socialism is another old cart his stubborn nature can’t let go of, but then in reality he differs little from other Democrats.
Maybe we are crazy, maybe we make mountains out of molehills and pay too much attention to the hypocritical. But then unlike others I can't see where Kelly commented a punishable race issue, rather I see that race baiting Inquisitors have become a fashionable frenzy. In the racks of the media they twist their victims till crucible like they have the proper gnashing of teeth as they burn their fires brightly into the night, lynching human expression on the rope of their self importance.
Regardless of race or color, and every group has a word for it, to be human means that at one time of another, anyone of us will spend time with our head up our arse... to use this fact to keep the cultural wall between the Black and White world's is frankly my given example.
