Business…with thanks to Kevin Clark, who spawned this idea, I give you a look at Jason Taylor’s care package to Shawne Merriman.
Today would have been Martin Luther King’s 78th birthday.  One interesting thing about King’s birthday, as the years stack up, is that we’re no longer at a point where there’s anything to be gained from considering how things would have been like if King were still alive.  It’s less and less likely every year that he would have been with us now.  Seems a better question is what are we doing now that he would have been too old to lean on, anyway.
The answer?  I’m honestly not sure.
Anyway, the vaunted Cobb tagged me with the following blog question–what’s the most racist thing to ever happen to you?
Talk about a question that’s hard to answer.  I guess that’s mostly because I stopped keeping count of those things a long, long time ago.  Ran out of room to remember the stuff, and it just stopped being particularly noteworthy to me.  Hassled in hotels, press rooms, neighborhoods, driving, learning, teaching…pretty much anything else I can think of, I’ve encountered racism doing.  And I swear, I’ve heard a lot of things.
But picking out which was the most racist is like picking out the stinkiest turd.  After a while, they all just start to smell the same.
But I’ll hit you with a great story from when I was 14.  I went to high school in a small town, one of those towns surrounded by a bunch of other small towns.  Well, all those small towns got together every summer to have a SAT camp.  The ten sophomores at each school that scored the highest on the PSAT would get together and learn strategies for the test the next year.  Get some of them National Merit Scholars, yanno?
Well, I was invited.  My brother–all 6’3 1/2″, 225 of him–drove me up there, and we waited in line to get checked into the dorm and all of that.  Now, what we didn’t know at the time was there was also a basketball camp meeting at the same place during the same week.  But no big thing, yanno?
(Note–I’m 6’4″ now, but I was a late bloomer.  I think I was 5’7″ around that time, when I was heading to 11th grade.)
So me and the big brother were in the line behind a few cute lil’ white girls and some goofy looking white dudes who were there for the same reason I was.  The line proceeded forward, where a gentleman would direct people to the table that applied to them–scholars or basketball.
It went like this until I got to the front of the line.  You’ll be able to tell when it was me.
“Scholars?”
“yes.”
“Scholars?”
“Yes.”
“Scholars?”
“Yes.”
“Basketball?”
“No, scholars.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Sure he was sorry.  He knew why he assumed I was there for the basketball camp.  But no big thing.  I’d heard far worse.
So we’re in the scholars line for a while when some well-meaning parent came over and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Ummm, the basketball camp line is over there.”
It was then that my brother dropped the classic.
“Well, the next one’s gonna win the contest.”
I asked him what contest that was.
“Next person to come up to us with that bullshit is gonna win the honor of being the next person to get cussed out in front of all these people.”
No one else signed up, luckily.
But that’s just a story.  There are far worse, but I ain’t got the time to index ’em.  That would be a Top 25 list of its own.