Will Leitch Talks About That NPR Interview, and Why Only One Blog Seems to Call Him Out - FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

Last week Jason Whitlock noted that Deadspin's Will Leitch, in his recent book, God Save the Fan, "spends an inordinate amount of time telling prominent, successful, well-spoken African-Americans that they're not really black." Whitlock also referred to Leitch's NPR appearance some four months ago, where the same subject had come up.

I'm black, hardly prominent, debatably successful, and relatively well spoken. And I was dumbfounded when I heard the NPR interview. Not because of the sentiment, but because NPR's Scott Simon appeared to have exposed a blind spot in Leitch's thinking. It seemed upon listening that it had never occurred to Leitch that what he was writing might be problematic to some people.

I didn't write about the NPR show. In four years of blogging, I've never written about race and sports, because my focus has always been about the games, the players, the fans.

But I think race does belong in the discussion that's followed Leitch's appearance on Costas Now last week, because so far it seems Whitlock and one lonely blog are the only ones taking the lead. After reading Leitch's response to Whitlock's column, I e-mailed asking if he'd be willing to answer some questions. He agreed, and the short interview is after the jump.

In January NPR's Scott Simon, accused you of having "a problem." Specifically, he was referring to the "jokes" in your book where you questioned the "blackness" of various black sports figures. At the time, you didn't post a link to the interview on the site, and a quick search on Google shows only one blog, Can't Stop the Bleeding, referenced it. Why didn't you mention it on Deadspin?
Honestly? I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by how I handled the interview, sure, but mostly I was embarrassed that he'd called out something that hadn't even occurred to me and, upon retrospection, was absolutely justified. We did mention in the review of the book on the site, but I wasn't in the habit of linking to discussions of the book -- the one part of Whitlock's column I would take issue with was the overpromotion of the book; I thought I was pretty good about it, actually -- and certainly wasn't going to start with that. But mostly: I sounded like a moron. I've sounded like a moron in many interviews, but none worse than that one. I was stunned, and to this day have zero idea what I was trying to say.

You also wrote about the Whitlock column: "A nationally recognized sports columnist, on a widely read national Web site, calls us out [for the NPR interview], and we received a total of one email about it." Do you think that non-response the column generated had more to do with your readers than the author being black? Why do you think it got so little play in the blogosphere?
I'm not so sure that people are afraid of pissing off me, or Deadspin. I think I've been pretty level-headed in giving plenty of play for all viewpoints, even those that aren't fans of what we do (I've even linked to CSTB on occasion), and if anyone thinks I"m going to blackball someone because they criticize me, they are mistaken.

Last year, you had a post on ESPN Magazine GM Keith T. Clinkscales calling out Whitlock for calling out Scoop Jackson. In the last paragraph, you wrote, "We feel unqualified to take a side in this battle..." Are you saying, "I'm white, so when two black guys are arguing about race, I have nothing valuable to add"?
I meant that exactly as I wrote it: I felt unqualified in taking a side, and still do.

Whitlock, in his column, also wrote that he reads Deadspin less frequently after the whole Super Bowl/A.J. Daulerio/Stuart Scott post. Do you have any regrets about things you've posted in the past?
Well, Daulerio did the reporting on that one, so I'll leave that to him. But yes, there are things I have regrets about posting. Not many, but when you've been doing the site for three years like I have, and doing 30 posts a day, there will be the occasional post I wish I had back. Not many. But some.

... And that's where we left it. For my part, I think Leitch is wrong about why virtually no one beyond CSTB discussed the NPR interview, though I believe him that he would never blackball a site for criticism.

Leitch is, by all accounts, an extremely nice guy, and we respect him for being modest here. But.

Bloggers of every stripe go looking for links from the biggest sites, but traffic considerations don't come close to explaining Deadspin's place in the sports blogosphere. As the sphere has grown year after year, Leitch has remained the tastemaker. It wouldn't be in any blogger's interests to highlight anything that accused Leitch of racial insensitivity.

And that means blogs are just as guilty as the MSM echo chamber here. We're forever lamenting how the media play favorites, use sloppy logic, or arbitrarily choose which issues to ignore. Well, if we won't criticize the biggest name in the community, we're being half-assed ourselves.