The country flipped out. Blacks and women called for Imus to be suspended, and he eventually was. He also gave a half-apology, with the caveat that his comments were somehow a result of black culture.

"I know that that phrase [nappy-headed ho] didn't originate in the white community," he started. "That phrase originated in the black community. I'm not stupid. I may be a white man, but I know that these young women, and these young black women all through that society are demeaned and disparaged and disrespected by their own black men, and they are called that name."

Columnists lined up to write about the imbroglio, the signal difficulty being that there's really only so much to say about a white man calling young black women "nappy-headed hoes." Whitlock—now writing for AOL and the Star—managed to find a unique angle. It was a tour de force of shit-stirring.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it's 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

While we're fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I'm sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent's or Snoop Dogg's latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain't saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don't have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip-hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Where most writers were railing against Imus's open expressions of racism and sexism, and some were drawing a line between an irrelevant shock jock feeling free to use these kind of words and a culture of white supremacy, Whitlock saw the opportunity to separate himself. He didn't exactly defend Imus so much as write him out of the scandal, instead chastising blacks for "wallowing in victimhood." In just under 800 words, Whitlock found a way to berate 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Rutgers head coach Vivian Stringer, hip hop, athletes who listen to hip hop, prison culture, black self-hatred, Dave Chappelle, BET, MTV, black-owned radio stations, crack cocaine, black-on-black crime, absent fathers, and black school bullies.

It was a hit. Television producers flocked to Whitlock. He went on air with cartoonish conservative pundit Tucker Carlson to explain that the real problem here was black people:

We keep deluding ourselves and getting caught up in distractions that have nothing at all to do with what's really holding black people back, and it's our own self-hatred.

Don Imus is irrelevant to what's going on with black people. Don Imus is no threat to us. Don Imus will not shoot one of us in the street, he will not impregnate our daughter or our sister and abandon that kid and that woman.

Whitlock continued on, chiding Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for refusing to accept Imus's apology. This was fair enough, even though chiding the two had long ago become an empty ritual, a way of signalling one's "seriousness" about racial issues in the whiter, starchier precincts of the media. But then, later in the interview, he referred to them as terrorists.

"That's a very brave point of you to make," Carlson said, "particularly right now when almost nobody is saying that out loud."

Whitlock then hopped on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he railed against hip-hop culture before an audience of six million whites. "We've allowed our children to adopt a hip-hop culture that's been perverted and corrupted by prison values," he declared. "They are defining our women in pop culture as bitches and hoes. … We are defining ourselves. Then, we get upset and want to hold Don Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to. That is unacceptable."

Whitlock was paraded around the major networks; along with Oprah, he appeared on The Today Show and agreed to a sparring match on CNN with Al Sharpton, the whole while saying that the problem wasn't Imus, that black people were the reason white people were being racist.

Carlson called Whitlock brave, and it was a compliment that aligned with how Whitlock saw and sees himself. In truth, it was the opposite. Whitlock, in the name of "telling it like it is," was merely flattering the prerogatives of white people who preferred that any discussion of race begin with the pathologies of black people and their culture, not with the de jure and de facto system of oppression in America and its residue. Whitlock was chickenshit. He took the easy way out. He did what comes easiest to an American, even in the 21st century, even—especially—now in the age of Obama, himself no stranger to this sort of ahistorical rhetoric. He blamed the black folks.

It may not have been a cynical performance along the lines of the ones David Webb and Dinesh D'Souza give today when minorities dare to air racial grievances, but for white reactionaries Whitlock was offering the same sort of shallow expiation. He was the ever-valuable black friend, the Acceptable Negro.

Just days after turning up on Oprah, Whitlock again wrote cultural conservatives into orgasmics, penning another column in which he warned parents of the looming danger of pop culture as a whole. In July, Whitlock appeared on an episode of the The O'Reilly Factor talking about Michael Vick's dogfighting ring.

"It has made destructive behavior normal," Whitlock said, blaming Vick's torture and murder of dogs on hip hop. "This hip-hop culture is destructive to young people, and if you want to stay in that culture, it will lead you to a coffin, a jail cell or major embarrassment."

That was the year Whitlock became a phenomenon. He'd endeared himself to a certain kind of reader as black culture's starkest critic. He was the racist right's unwitting attack dog, here to explain how black people were the problem. He became a bona fide, nationwide cash cow, even as his credibility as a writer and a thinker was beginning to crumble.

The problem wasn't really that Whitlock was preaching social conservativism or criticizing blacks. His views weren't so far removed from W.E.B. Du Bois's "Talented Tenth" theory or even the Nation of Islam's "Do for self" tenet, and they lined up neatly with those of Bill Cosby, or The Boondocks's Uncle Ruckus, or your own uncle, sparring across the table with you at Thanksgiving dinner. They weren't all that crazy.

The difference between Whitlock and your uncle sitting next to you at Thanksgiving dinner, though, is that your uncle doesn't influence shit. He doesn't have so much as a megaphone to voice his opinions, let alone a website with national reach. And more important, your uncle isn't belting out his antiquated, inaccurate beliefs to a mostly white, mostly male audience of millions.

He isn't hanging out with Bill O'Reilly, talking about how records—not the legacy of slavery and terrorism and redlining, but pop records—are the real issue. He isn't getting patted on the head by Tucker Carlson for being brave enough to say that the problem with black people is black people. If he were, though, and if he were saying these things for the sake of going against the grain, he would be hurting the very same people to whom he claimed to be doling out some well-meaning tough love.

While Whitlock has lashed out at everyone over the years, his greatest hits have all had something in common: They involve him criticizing some combination of women, young black men, and black culture. There was the Serena Williams is fat column. There was the let's all leer at Erin Andrews and Elisabeth Hasselbeck "catfighting" column. There was the Serena Williams crip walked at Wimbledon because black people don't demand she act better column. There was the Jay-Z shouldn't be a sports agent because he is a rapper who says "nigga" column. There was the Lolo Jones needs to stop crying when she loses at the Olympics column. There was the Robert Griffin III needs a lesson in humility column. It's so routine that when Donald Sterling was caught on tape talking about how he didn't want his mistress bringing black people to Los Angeles Clippers games, blacks took to Twitter to speculate on just how Whitlock was going to use this opportunity to explain that black people are the problem.

They weren't even wrong. When Whitlock weighed in on Sterling, the piece was strong in places, and—perhaps because it came out not hours but days after the news broke—uncharacteristically measured. Whitlock was dead-on when he wrote this:

Sterling adheres to a pervasive culture, the hierarchy established by global white supremacy.

"I don't want to change the culture because I can't," Sterling says. "It's too big."

This was Sterling's one moment of clarity. The culture of white supremacy created Donald Sterling. He did not create the culture.

Even here, though, Whitlock couldn't help but explain how the real issue here was black pathology:

He is adhering to the standards of his peer group. He is adhering to the standards of the world he lives in. It's a world inhabited by all of us. It's a culture that shapes everyone's worldview on some level. It fuels the black self-hatred at the core of commercialized hip hop culture, and is at the root of the NAACP's initial plan to twice honor an unrepentant bigot with a lifetime achievement award.

Whitlock was writing about an evil and indefensible man—not some unfortunate nobody caught in a moment of oafish racism, but a powerful real estate baron expressing the logic of the plantation, of segregation, of redlining. These were beliefs Sterling had apparently acted on before, as a landlord who, as two multimillion-dollar housing discrimination lawsuits alleged, refused to rent to blacks and Latinos. And yet, in the midst of making a point about structural racism, Whitlock somehow found a way to bring the issue back to the depredations of hip-hop culture, of how hip hop is destroying blacks.

The problem with all this, of course, is that hip hop isn't destroying blacks any more than Hank Williams's songs about boozing and womanizing destroyed white people. An article on The Wire, published earlier this year, showed that as hip-hop music became more popular, more mainstream, overall and violent crime rates both dropped.

But who cares about evidence when there is a false equivalence to strike? On the one hand, he wrote, in effect, Donald Sterling looks at black men as cattle, as his personal property who can play for him and earn money for him, but who aren't worthy of coming to his games or living in his apartments. On the other, black self-hatred is why people curse and use misogyny in rap, and black self-hatred is why the NAACP took bribes from Sterling.

The two have nothing to do with one another. Blacks didn't enable Sterling, just like blacks didn't enable Imus. Still, when the devil himself was caught on tape, Whitlock looked at blacks and said, Something has to change.

There are two distinct readings of the history of blacks in America.

The first describes the United States of America as a nation that by design practices and profits from racial inequality. It traces the continuity between slavery and Jim Crow, and Jim Crow and redlining, and redlining and the drug war, and so sees a direct line between the original sin of slavery and the present condition of our worst-off black neighborhoods. It doesn't argue that the individual isn't responsible for the consequences of his actions, but rather that at the population level, black Americans are the victims of systemic racism—conscious public policy that has made black communities and institutions weaker and more vulnerable than those of other groups, and has so set black Americans up for failure. It recognizes that the history of blacks in this country is not a tangent from or parallel to the history of the United States, but the very reason why America is America.

The second locates the differences between blacks and other groups not in ongoing political violence, but in a unique black pathology. This is the ideology of the respectable center in American politics, offered in various guises by figures as different as Paul Ryan …

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

… and Barack Obama:

If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

This was essentially what Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait were wrestling over in their recent debate, with Chait siding with Ryan and Obama in claiming that the "cultural residue" of hundreds of years of oppression has become a self-sustaining and distinct impediment to black success for which black Americans need to take responsibility, and Coates more convincingly claiming that American democracy was and is designed to exclude blacks from the main line of public life.

Whitlock, unsurprisingly, sided with Chait, even bringing him on to his podcast to talk Michigan football.

He particularly enjoyed when Chait analogized black history and ongoing systemic racism to a basketball game, and then advised blacks how to deal:

A person worries about the things that he can control. If I'm watching a basketball game in which the officials are systematically favoring one team over another (let's call them Team A and Team Duke) as an analyst, the officiating bias may be my central concern. But if I'm coaching Team A, I'd tell my players to ignore the biased officiating. Indeed, I'd be concerned the bias would either discourage them or make them lash out, and would urge them to overcome it. That's not the same as denying bias. It's a sensible practice of encouraging people to concentrate on the things they can control.

This is a trivializing and worthless metaphor, and it commits the fundamental error of positioning the beneficiaries of systemic injustice (Team Duke) as distinct from its enforcers (the refs). But even on its own terms it falls apart. Chait was saying that the members of Team A—faced with referees who are knowingly, purposely cheating them out of a fair shot to succeed, and in this case for something as arbitrary and as capricious as the idea of race—should play on valiantly. Instead of despairing, or refusing to play altogether, Team A's players should keep their heads down, work hard, and play by a set of rules designed specifically to deny their team victory, hoping that a player or two will manage to fluke a double-double. Chait was underestimating and, more importantly, discounting the sheer amount of rage that Team A would experience every day and would have every right to experience. He was telling Team A's players to just get on with this sham, to ignore how fucked they are, how it's in the officials' interest to keep fucking them, and how this is why Team A will remain fucked as long as it agrees to play this game. In the face of blatant injustice, he was telling Team A to pretend it didn't exist.

It was fascinating to watch Chait stumble along blindly through his own fog of good intentions and unexamined privilege—proof that even among our most hardened liberal champions and leading political writers, white privilege endures. Team A's actions in this metaphor are the very definition of black respectability politics.

Many dismissed Chait after this, but Whitlock emerged as more or less the only prominent person who thought Chait had the better of the debate, because Chait was articulating Whitlock's fundamental beliefs.

On his podcast, Whitlock praised the writer, telling him, "the analogy you gave was beautiful."

Whitlock believes in the black version of the American dream, that if only African-Americans would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, educate themselves, and work hard, there would be equality in this country—that if only blacks were better, more worthy, their democracy would include them.

Respectability politics and claims about black pathology are at best well-intentioned racism, and bullshit besides. They're the basis of Whitlock's view of race relations, though, and they explain his sense of mission and self-appointed position as moral arbiter. He wants to change blacks, to civilize them, to save them from themselves.

The single most prominent black sportswriter in the country, then, is not only engaged in a campaign of denigration against African-Americans, but in a rewriting of knowable—and known—history. Every time he blames Jay Z for issues more properly attributed to governmental policies of housing discrimination, every time he claims that young black men using the word "nigga" are the functional equivalent of a mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, every time he treats alleged self-hatred as more consequential than a political system whose essence is the denial of equal opportunity, he is distorting the truth.

This isn't just a moral failure; it's a journalistic one. And when you look back over his past, it appears that one reason he's gotten away with it is that the writer who rose so quickly was answering to no one, all along.

"I don't think Jason Whitlock has ever had an editor who has ever pushed back and said, 'You can't say this, or you shouldn't say this,'" said one ESPNer.

A source inside Fox Sports went even further: "He was working with guys named Matt and Kyle and Bryan! The people at Fox Sports needed to edit him better, but no way people were going to touch his shit."

This is the source of the most severe charge leveled at Whitlock by his black colleagues: that he's an Uncle Tom—a black person who, by the strictest definition, wilfully takes damaging action against other African-Americans for personal gain and/or the approval of whites.

"I mean, I respect his hustle, I guess," one writer said, grudgingly. "But he's an Uncle Tom. The reason he's a notable writer is because of his ability to stir up things. He always talks about black apology."

"It's hard," another admitted, "to see him as anything but a race traitor."

I tend to subscribe to a different theory on Whitlock. What people see as his self-serving imposture is in fact little more than political and historical illiteracy, mingling with a hack columnist's instinct for provocation. (Whitlock essentially copped to it during the 2008 presidential election, when he wrote a guest column for The Huffington Post entitled "I Owe My Interest in American Politics to Sarah Palin." The piece isn't nearly as bad as the headline would indicate, but in it Whitlock comes off like your libertarian college friend explaining why he doesn't vote.)

Whitlock isn't a Tom; he's a low-information guy, infinitely suggestible, learning on the fly, joining in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning. After declaring Chait the winner in the Great American Black Pathology Debates, he turned around and praised Coates's epic case for reparations in the Atlantic, which relied on many of the same arguments he'd made with Chait. "Brought me to tears," Whitlock tweeted.

Given his lack of intellectual curiosity, the astonishing thing with Whitlock is that he's ever right at all. And yet he is, often. To explain this, we can look to the third of his journalistic heroes, the man who, along with Royko and Wiley, "most influenced my career and perspective," according to Whitlock: David Simon.

Simon is an author and journalist who started off as a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun, where he covered crime. He parlayed his reporting experience and expertise into The Wire, HBO's epic series about the decline of Baltimore in particular and the American city in general. The drug war, the police, the dockworkers, the schools, City Hall, the media—all were part of the same narrative about the way institutions, in their brute efforts to perpetuate themselves, fail the people they're intended to serve.

Whitlock looks as The Wire as a text—he's called it his Bible. He still references The Wire in his articles, and he sends fans entire boxed sets that he buys himself. The show changed how he sees the world. Growing up and through most of his adulthood, for example, Whitlock was a self-proclaimed homophobe, but on a 2012 podcast with Simon, the columnist revealed that Omar, a gay stickup man on the show, was what turned his bigotry on its ear.

"Nobody has more influenced me and brought me to a healthier understanding of homosexuality and just the character of homosexual people than the character Omar," Whitlock told Simon. "To me, he was just the highest-character person on the show, the person I would choose to be friends with from the show."

The Wire is all over Whitlock's smartest work, even when it's not explicitly referenced. It's there in his columns about the futility of our war on PEDs; it's there whenever he writes about the NCAA, the perfect illustration of David Simon's model of institutional failure; it was there when he wrote about ESPN and its opportunistic coverage of Bernie Fine.

And it was there in what one friend of Whitlock called "maybe the best piece he's ever written in his life." In 2008, Whitlock addressed himself at length to the drug war, the country's prison-industrial complex, and their effects on the country's black population. He worked on the story for months. He bled into it, ultimately producing 5,000 reported words on the subject for Playboy. The magazine ran it in its June issue, and teased it on the cover, and that's where things went to shit.

"The Black KKK," it read. Whitlock's name, in neon, was just beneath. Inside the magazine, a sub-headline read, "Thug life is killing black America. It's time to do something about it."

Whitlock was pissed. "The story isn't about the Black KKK," he wrote in the Star, before the magazine had hit newsstands. "The words do not appear in the 5,000-word column. None of the sources quoted in the story or spoken to on background ever heard those words come out of my mouth, and they never spoke them to me." He accused Playboy's editorial director, Chris Napolitano, of "stirring a racial controversy." Another betrayal.

He had a point. The story was about mass-incarceration approach to drug policy and its trickle-down effects on black people and their culture, and for the most part it was a good, holistic examination of an ongoing national scandal. But it was also a Jason Whitlock story. If there's one thing that consistently characterizes Whitlock's writing about race, it's his dumb and fundamentally patronizing insistence that pop culture is the governing force in the lives of black people, not the residue. The causations start running backward. And so, in the Playboy piece, there were the usual allusions to a "culture of self-hatred" and "gangsta rap and the glorification of prison values." Having correctly identified the violent imagery of certain kinds of hip hop as a symptom of the country's bad policy, he turned around and suggested that the music alone had the power to "define black people and black culture as criminal and worthy of mass incarceration."

Whitlock also wrote, in what was apparently a "spicier lead" than the one he'd originally filed, "How did black kids wearing white T-shirts learn to mimic the behavior of white men wearing white hoods?" He didn't quite say black KKK—a term he'd used before, in reference to Sean Taylor's killers, to the polite applause of conservative writers—but he came close enough that it's hard not to feel, perhaps a little unfairly, that the shit-stirrer got exactly the shitty headline he deserved.

The more people I spoke with for this story, the more I became convinced that the problem with black Grantland, the reason for its sluggish start, the reason it's talked about in some corners of ESPN as John Skipper's unaccountable folly, is the larger-than-life writer at the core of the project. I talked to a dozen writers and editors whom I'd heard were being recruited. Over and over they related the same story, of young talent having to decide between taking the opportunity and paycheck of a lifetime, and working for a man who made his bones disparaging people like them to an audience of approving racists.

That's the bitch of it for Whitlock. Only someone like him, a black pundit with acceptably heterodox views on race who prescribes a sort of cultural austerity program for his own people, thus telegraphing his seriousness on the issue, would have gotten an opportunity like this. He rose to a position where he gets to speak for black people largely by being the kind of commentator black people would never want speaking for them.

"Being a [minority] sportswriter sucks," said one writer. By hiring Whitlock to run his own site, the writer went on, "ESPN found a way to make it more demeaning."

This wasn't an easy story either to write or report. Few people were willing to talk on the record, partly out of a fear of antagonizing a famously vindictive man who now possesses hiring and firing power at one of the country's most powerful media companies. There is also an unspoken rule among blacks in media that you don't bag on one another in public, and it's certainly not lost on me that I'm now several thousands words deep on the wrong side of the taboo.

What I keep going back to, though, is those last couple of conversations with Whitlock, to the feeling he left me with. His first instinct, in trying to dope out a grand conspiracy against him, was to think I was merely a sockpuppet for my editors. He was disregarding or outright denying my own agency. Out of some personal insecurity, he was reducing me to a non-entity, to the sum of other people's dark self-interest, which I was apparently too stupid to see for myself. In the casual dehumanization of it all, in his eagerness to shrink me down to the size and shape of some stock character in the psychodrama in his head, it was a little like being trapped inside a Jason Whitlock column. You might also call it a betrayal.

It's almost certain I won't ever be a part of black Grantland, whatever form it takes. But I want the site to succeed. I want the site to become something like what Rembert Browne, a black writer at Grantland, described for me. "I would love if a site full of black people was writing about everything, writing about stuff that is not a pointedly black, race issue," he said. "That's new. That's not, 'Oh, this is a black site, black people.' It's not, 'Let's talk about rap. Let's talk about racial profiling.'

"Black people are interested in everything," he went on, laughing. "Real talk, we are so dynamic. We're interested in so much stuff."

I want a site that acknowledges that, one that offers a platform and the resources for black editors and black journalists to stretch out and exercise their own agency. I want a site that helps change the conditions that create and nurture and reward hacks like Whitlock. I want Whitlock to succeed so that one day, maybe, there will be no more Whitlocks.

Top image by Jim Cooke.