Here's an honest question for XXL Sexy. Not trying to be a smartaleck, but genuinely curious on the occasion of this column you posted. I ask because this column returns us yet again to the Barry Bonds issue.
Mr. XXL has two important themes, which recur again and again in his work.
The first is that Barry Bonds is only doing what the culture around him, baseball, calls upon him to do. He is not morally or ethically liable for his behavior - in fact he is powerless to change it - because that culture virtually insists a player cheat. All players cheat (Rogers, et al.) in the culture, therefore Mr. Bonds, helpless, is simply a prisoner and a product of the culture he inhabits.
The second recurrent theme in the Whitlock canon is this: As per Dr. Cosby, et al., all young black American men must be held responsible for their own outcomes. They must take responsibility for the decisions they make. They must act upon the world, rather than allowing the world to act upon them. They must rise above the failings of the culture they inhabit (including hiphop's denigration of women, and glorification of violence; drugs; the disregard for education; the abdication of personal responsibility in the face of fatherhood, etc.). Young African-American men must, in other words, transcend the culture they inhabit and take control of their own moral future by making the decision to rise above the corrupt state of moral relativism that the culture insists upon.
How can you reconcile these two arguments?
Barry Bonds, not held to account because he's merely a pawn in a corrupt system?
Or the mandatory moral and ethical self-determination of the individual, who must rise above his surroundings - or fails the Whitlock litmus test by not doing so?
Which is it XXL?
I don't think you can have it both ways.
