What if Michael Vick was white? - ESPN reaches for new lows...

Man you are full of yourself.

What makes you do things the same way your parents did? Why do you do somethings like them and others not? Why do kids growing up with an alcoholic parent sometimes turn into an alcoholic themselves and sometimes not?

If you know those answers then you are the smartest man in the world because doctors have been trying to figure it out for years and years.

People can rise above their surroundings. Many do and many don't. People who don't deserve blame for their actions but they aren't 100 percent to blame. They can also turn their lives around once they see the stupidity of it. Maybe Vick has seen the light and maybe he hasn't. I personally think he has, others don't. He does deserve the chance to change his life though.

 

Exactly, which is why it's ridiculous that people are making excuses for Vick. He chose to take part in an illegal activity. He chose to torture and kill dogs. He knew what he was doing was wrong. Your environment doesn't define you; your choices do. Vick chose to be a bad person. Over and over and over again.

 

He chose to be a bad person.

He also did not look upon his transgression as being so heinous as those who were not raised in a society where that was more of a norm.

You can have it both ways.

 

No answer is absolute, which I'm certain you understand. But anecdotally, I can say that the influence of an adult male role model -- often times a coach, a teacher, a relative, a family friend -- makes the difference. If you talk to coaches or teachers who work a schools in urban areas, they'll often tell you they realize they cannot save every kid, but they can, and do, save some. Even if you believe Vick is a horrible person -- and this is inherent, not learned behavior -- it's still worth trying to understand just how terrible the public housing projects are in Newport News where he grew up. His mom was 16 when she had him. His father, a drunk and a cocaine user, supposedly taught him about dogfighting before he became completely estranged from the family. His cousins sold drugs.

This paragraph in Toure's essay is absolutely true from my experience of writing about kids from the inner city.

Some find a genuine and positive role model to cling to, and escape, and others gravitate toward enablers and don't. Or they do escape, because they're so talented athletically, but they never truly get free.

The question "What if Vick were white?" feels like a strawman, especially to white people. But it is something I've heard discussed plenty among some of my African American friends. Some of it is genuine frustration with the legal system, and some of it is just playing the culture game of "What if?" Toure's point is that it's an impossible question to answer, because you can't take a white Vick and still have him born to a 16-year-old woman and grow up in public house in Newport News surrounded by drugs and violence and simply put him on the same path simply so we can see how he might be viewed had his dogfighting empire been exposed. The economics and the culture he grew up in mean far more than his race if we're trying to understand why he did what he did and how we should now view him.

If -- as you insist -- that he chose to be a bad person, over and over and over again and nothing else matters, why can he not choose to be a good person now? You keep insisting his behavior was a choice, but that his current choice cannot be genuine. Is reform impossible then? At what age do our choices define us forever and there is no turning back to good from bad?

 

He can choose to be a better person, and maybe he has. But as MC said, there are certain things a person can do that cross my line. I'm not going to forgive him for that. I will hang on to my righteous anger when discussing him and be fine with it. For the sake of those around him, I hope he does change. But it won't change my overall opinion of him. I don't think his post-prison efforts, at least what I know of them, in any way make up for what he did. How do you clean that slate?

And there's no doubt environment influences us all. But you can't cherry pick which influences you use to shield yourself from personal responsibility, which is the reaction I'm pushing back against so snarkily.

 

I think, though, that there is a pretty big gap between "sheild yourself from responsibility" and "explain at least some of what led to your actions."

Vick doesn't seem to suggest -- at least anywhere I've seen -- that he should not have gone to prison. In fact, he seems to believe prison saved his life, and that it forced him to come to understand how casually he was throwing away his years on earth.

You have every right to hate Vick for the rest of his days. But Vick isn't giving the world a middle finger or talking about how he got screwed. He accepted, eventually (as is usually the case with people who feel time in prison is ultimately good for them, it didn't happen right away), that his decisions had consequences.

If torturing animals is your line that can never, ever be uncrossed, that's ok. Dick Cheney tortured PEOPLE and I could never, ever forgive him for that. Everyone chooses what makes up their own moral code. But even the way we judge others and choose to forgive or not forgive was probably shaped by our environment. Which brings us full circle. And that's why it's important to think about this stuff, even if it pisses us off.

 

Hit the nail on the head.

 

The same way you explain the actions of a person who witnesses a crime in a poor urban neighborhood and decides to testify in court instead of heeding a cultural code that equates "snitching" with dishonor. Chances are, that person came from a family environment that was stronger than the environment of the neighborhood. The problem is, many of our nation's urban poor grow up without that type of environment at home. And they grow up without that type of environment in school since we tie our educational funding to the value of local property (leading to a societal paradox in which the kids who are in greatest need of the nurturing that good schooling can provide receive it the least, and the kids who least need it receive it the most). Which essentially leaves church, sports and the street to provide the principles that guide their lives.

Voltaire said that "those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road." Unfortunately, the well-trodden path in economically-depressed areas is the one that leads to things like drugs and property crime and dog-fighting. A lot of kids like a young Mike Vick are born halfway submerged in a pit of quicksand without any vines dangling overhead. And even if they possess the wherewithal to escape, they must first overcome the guilt that equates escaping the quicksand with abandoning home.

Affirmation is one of the most powerful human desires. Most healthy neighborhoods offer plenty of opportunities to gain that affirmation, from the classroom to extracurricular activities to safe playgrounds. Kids from most unhealthy neighborhoods not only lack those options, but are surrounded by a physical environment of urban decay that implicitly says, "We don't care about you." So they seek affirmation from one of the few places that will provide it to them: the street. And when a guy like Mike Vick enters a new environment (a college campus, pro football organization) with a different definition of respectability (say the right things, don't do drugs, don't fight dogs), he can feel like he is forced to choose between the respect of people who only started offering it when they realized it could benefit them, or the respect of people who offered it even when he was not a household name. If you really want to delve deep into such a psyche, you might find some evidence of overcompensation in Vick's bankrolling of Bad Newz Kennels ("See how much I haven't changed? See how real I still am?").

If it still doesn't make sense, ask yourself this: If your family had adopted Mike Vick as a baby and raised him the same way they raised you -- same neighborhood, same school system, same church, same dinner table conversations -- do you think he would have ended up fighting dogs?

Answering "no" doesn't mean that you must excuse his behavior. As you pointed out, not every kid in his neighborhood ended up fighting dogs. But a lot of people seem to want to condemn Vick's behavior without understanding the sociological factors that may have contributed to it. And that makes sense. Because it is a lot more comforting to think about the faults of an individual than it is to think about the faults of our society. Still, if you had an orchard that routinely produced rotten apples, would you blame it on bad apples or would you blame it on bad trees?

Like I said before, the shame in all of this is that Vick's arrest has made opposition to dogfighting a cause celebre, when in reality dogfighting does far less harm to society than other aspects of street culture. Like, say, an NBA superstar appearing on a rap video that explicitly details the consequences of talking to cops about a crime (see: http://articles.philly.com/2011-08-04/news/29850985_1_snitching-hip-hop-culture-witness-intimidation).

Then again, middle-to-upper-class America seems to place a higher value on justice for domesticated animals than it does on justice for the urban poor (because unlike the kid who goes to the playground and catches a stray bullet meant for somebody else, a pit bull can't help himself?). Which, in the end, is the exact point I was trying to make about cultural morality. Except when you look at it that way, it could make you question which culture's values are more fucked up. . .

 

Another good post, dmurph, but ragu is getting upset that you're using up his bandwidth.

 

Damn good piece. And I think it underlines that at a certain point, the enormity of what had gone down suddenly hit Vick.

 

Toure and Chad Millman each offer a bit more commentary on how the piece, and the art that went with it, came about.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/27/toure.white.michael.vick/index.html?hpt=us_mid