An Emotional Shannon Sharpe Rips The Dolphins Locker Room

On CBS's pregame show, Shannon Sharpe had some very strong words for the Dolphins, less about their handling of the Incognito-Martin fallout, and more about a locker room that let things get to the point where a white player can call a teammate a "half-nigger" and it's supposed to be taken in good humor.

Sharpe isn't as concise or as eloquent as Brandon Marshall was on the more general shortcomings of the NFL's tough-guy culture, but he more than makes up for it with obvious passion.

Sharpe:

I want to talk about a culture that was fostered in that locker room and was allowed to flourish. The Miami Dolphins locker room probably consists of 75, 80 percent blacks. If you allow Richie Incognito to walk around in an open locker room and to use a racial epithet that most black Americans—all black Americans know the stigma and the hate and the vitriol that comes with that word—if you allow him to do that, you are encouraging him to do that.

I read, and I don't know, it's alleged, that some black players said Richie Incognito was an honorary black. There's no such thing. This tells me everything I need to know about the Miami Dolphins locker room. How we got here, and why we got here.

If you don't understand it...just ask your parents, ask your grandparents, the mountain that they climbed so a black person in American can have respect, can have dignity, and you allow this in an open locker room, is unacceptable.

[...]

If he said that to Jonathan Martin, he didn't only say it to him. He's talking to you too. Because if you're black, you know what that word means.