The interesting question is - are racial barriers or gender barriers broken down faster with or without the free market?

touche. I wasn’t following the angle whereby Chapman dismissed the modern success of black quarterbacks as a consequence of the free market. I agree that this is a very wrong and pernicious message to convey if he did it intentionally. I mainly aimed to address the statement summarized in his concluding paragraph, which seems a more innocent point, although it now seems to be not the whole story.

p.s. — i’m dying to cut chapman some slack since he writes for my favorite newspaper and baseball team owning organization. So maybe it isn’t completely fair to associate him so closely with Nat’l Review. After all, he did come to Chicago from the New Republic, and writes for Slate as well, so he may not be totally without values

Chris, Chapman’s article argues that “sentiment” — which is an interesting category under which to include “racism,” when you think about it — “doesn’t count for much in the NFL,” and therefore that the media should quit whining about the unfair treatment of black quarterbacks. As if racism, which was perfectly obvious as little as ten or twenty years ago, had suddenly vanished to be replaced by a color-blind devotion to winning. And as if this vanishing were not due to the sacrifices and perseverance of people like Moon, but simply to the genius of the free market. Which seems awfully simplistic and inflammatory to me. I have never noticed any refusal to acknowledge when progress is being made, nor does it sound like a problem I’d be writing columns about if my magazine had stubbornly been denying the existence of any problem against which it was necessary to make progress in the first place.

jb, I use them when they were in the original article from which I cut and pasted the quote, and to which I linked. Nothing more delicate than that.

If you care to explain when & why you use them, I’d love to hear it.

I would just point out that the point of Steve Chapman’s article you cited doesn’t appear to be as simplistic (or inflammatory) as you suggest. Rather than claiming that racism doesn’t exist, Chapman seems to be suggesting that in addition to the unconscious (and conscious as well, to be sure) racism that remains in our society, there is another, more subtle problem. This is the refusal of some to acknowledge when progress is being made, even if it does not represent a full solution to the problem.

Without such acknowledgement, one could argue that an atmosphere will develop in which battles against discrimination are not viewed as ones that can be won. Instead, as is not altogether uncommon today, folks will default to a mentality in which they point out all the problems due to racism, sexism, etc. in society without thinking constructively about solutions.

Of course, alternatively, if one only focuses on the progress being made, people may begin to take for granted the improvement in the social condition, maybe resulting in a reversal of progress. All of this is simply the statement that discrimination is a very difficult problem to deal with, especially in a society in which much of it has ben institutionalized! I may have gotten of topic, but I think the point (or at least A point) that Chapman makes that is particularly good is that there are a lot of people today who strive to find places in which they can lament the poor state of social equity without at least thinking about the progress that has been made and the progress that can be made.

There was also a great review/overview in the NYT here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/books/review/23goldstein.html?ex=1154491200&en=4bb494d5eaac478c&ei=5070

I do think somehow, humanity will never reach that point. if only we could!!