By DAVE KRIEGER
Thursday, January 04, 2007
We're going to look at the death of Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams today through the prism no one wants to use.
Unfortunately, it's the elephant in the room, and it's a pretty small room. So here goes.
We're going to talk about race. If you think talking about race is always "playing the race card," I suggest you turn the page. If you think no white man is qualified to talk about race, I suggest you turn the page.
If you think any white man who talks about race publicly is as dumb as former Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry, well, hey, when you're right, you're right.
The other day, writing about Williams' death, I said the shootings of Williams, Steelers linebacker Joey Porter and Nuggets guard Julius Hodge _ all in and around Denver since 2003 _ had at least three things in common.
I mentioned guns, pro athletes as victims and roughly 2 o'clock as the time of night. Several correspondents pointed out one of the other things they had in common: All three famous shooting victims were African-Americans.
Nor is that the end of the list. For example, all three athletes were coming from nightclubs when they were shot.
Which suggests yet another likely common element: alcohol.
Of course, talking about alcohol as a social ill is considered pointless and possibly Puritanical. After all, we tried Prohibition. Didn't work. So we're going to have a place to get slobbernockered on every corner. That's just the way it's going to be.
Now, people who get slobbernockered also tend to get irrationally angry and attack one another at a much higher rate than sober people. If they happen to be packing, someone is likely to be shot. That's just the way it's going to be.
So it's the packing part that escalates these things beyond the traditional barroom brawl, or post-barroom street brawl. Of course, the modern gangster has no corner on post-barroom stupidity, or even fatality. According to Canadian Press, a 35-year-old man was beaten to death on an Edmonton, Alberta, city bus after arguing with a group of teenagers about where Metallica stands on the all-time list of metal bands.
I am not making this up. The 35-year-old's blood alcohol level was twice the legal impairment level for driving in Alberta. At least he wasn't driving.
In other words, people kill one another for stupid reasons all the time and we never hear about most of them.
Nevertheless, when we contemplate the evident danger level for high-profile athletes out on the town, are we talking about John Lynch or Jason Elam or Jake Plummer or Jay Cutler (all white Broncos players)?
No, we're not. Anything is possible, of course, but Plummer got into a public altercation not long ago _ road rage seemed an overstatement; call it serious road aggravation _ and nobody ended up hurt. Certainly, nobody ended up shot.
When we contemplate the evident danger level for high-profile athletes out on the town, we are talking, in the main, about young African-American athletes.
And we are talking about a hip-hop culture that through music and movies and other media glorifies killing. Bustin' a cap is such a ubiquitous expression it is now part of the lexicon.
Hip-hop is also big business. Lots of people make lots of money in it, which gives lots of people a vested interest in keeping the invective flowing.
This is an issue raised regularly by black writers and social critics. Among them is Jason Whitlock, sports columnist for The Kansas City Star. Whitlock has coined the term "bojangling for dollars" to refer to black people who promote stereotypical, negative images of black people to get aboard the hip-hop gravy train.
This takes us to the doorstep of the larger debate about the effect of entertainment media on behavior. Steve Schweitzberger, the gadfly about town I first met when he ran for mayor of Denver in 1983, urged me again the other day to examine rap lyrics to understand the level of urban violence.
In fact, many young African-Americans don't need music or movies to teach them about violence. Many grew up around it in drug-infested urban neighborhoods.
And white people getting concerned only when the victim is a member of a team they follow is sadly typical.
The brutal truth is that if Darrent Williams weren't a Bronco but just another young black man, his shooting death early on New Year's morning would have been noted as the first homicide of 2007 and little more.
But the fact he was a Bronco, and an irrepressible, popular Bronco at that, presents us with an opportunity to harness all this grief and actually try to do something about the problem.
We can shrug our shoulders in horror at Williams' murder, call it one of those things and move on. Or we can look at it as the culmination of a message that began with the shootings of Porter and Hodge.
Darrent Williams was a young man who said he rubbed elbows with gangbangers growing up in Fort Worth but ultimately chose another path. The best way to honor his memory is to give other young African-Americans a chance to do the same.
