Sports radio is full of terrible morons who use their short tempers to draw out a two-minute topic into a 10-minute segment. (Examples can be found here, here, here, and here.) The only acceptable sports radio is Mike Francesa taking 40 minutes to name all the stops on the 7 train, and presumably three or four programs in the country that haven’t made the news because they don’t say anything astronomically stupid. Today, WIP’s Josh Innes called Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman Jason Kelce a “house Negro.”
In this instance, is context necessary? Sure, here’s context: Innes thought that Kelce was sucking up to new Eagles head coach Doug Pederson because he attended Pederson’s presser. Crossing Broad has the audio of Innes talking to his cohost, Hollis Thomas. Innes’s thought begins with how he was watching Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X on Monday, which is an indicator that you’re about to get the pure, uncut shit:
Here’s the thing though, right, it’s like this. Let me find a good comparison here. I was watching Malcolm X yesterday, I was in the airport in Memphis watching Malcolm X, and there was a scene where Denzel’s doing the whole thing about the slave and the house Negro? Right? And like, the house Negro is the guy who’s gonna tell you like, oh he gets to live in the big house with the boss and every time he refers to something that happens in the house it’s ‘our house’ and ‘we’ and everything like that. And then there’s the actual slave [who’s not] the house Negro that’s just trying to run away. Essentially what you’re getting here is Jason Kelce is the house Negro is what I’m trying to convey to you.
Kelce is white. This is probably the least serious problem with Innes’s analogy.
Update (8:03 p.m.): Kelce has responded to Innes’s comments:
Update (8:16 p.m.): We missed Josh Innes apologizing and calling himself an idiot—while still somewhat trying to defend what he said—later on in today’s show (h/t Dustin):
Top image via YouTube
H/t to Josh
Contact the author at samer@deadspin.com.