Tiger Woods and Blackness

The Associated Press has published an article titled "Tiger's Troubles Widen His Distance From Blacks." The article goes on to detail perceived problems that Tiger Woods has had with the black community. In particular, the article points out what seem to be two troubling points for blacks: Tiger's self-image, and Tiger's choice in women.

Never mind the fact that the author wholeheartedly buys into the most horrific myth of the last half-millenium: race. Never mind that race does not exist in any way, shape, or form. As long as otherwise responsible news organizations continue to promote and report this heinous lie, live it will and matter it shall.

How Tiger Woods chooses to identify himself is his business, period. Since the color of his skin is a morphological characteristic, he is not bound to identify himself thus, no matter what any number of similarly-colored people might think.

Think of it this way: how stupid would it sound if one were to suggest that the "blonde community" was upset at Tiger Woods for his apparent choice in brunettes?

We live in a society in which the content of a man's character has finally come to mean more than the color of his skin. Were that not true, a brown-skinned man with a name that is not found within the Judeo-Christian tradition would not currently be the president of the United States. In business, in sports, in film, in every aspect of society, traditionally negative racial stereotypes have finally fallen prey to truth. Human beings are simply that, regardless of our many varied hues.

Yet Tiger Woods, who has no reason to buy into the myth of race, is being taken to task by an imaginary community for failing to do exactly that. The reason why there seems to be so much noise is because this is a fairly large imaginary community (around 12% of the overall U.S. population), but imaginary nonetheless. I can go to Chicago and find defined city limits. I can find a mayor there and a city government. I can find residents that pay taxes for civil services like policemen and street sweepers, and everyone in Chicago can agree that there is such a thing as Lake Shore Drive. I can't go to The Black Community. There is no boundary. There is no central spokesperson. The residents may be found anywhere in the U.S., and none of them can agree about what to do with Eminem...but that's not the worst of it.

Quoting the article's author, Jesse Washington, "The color of one's companion has long been a major measure of "blackness" - which is a big reason why the biracial Barack Obama was able to fend off early questions about his black authenticity."

What?

Seriously. What?

Would someone like to explain exactly what the hell "black authenticity" is? Who determines who is "authentically black"? Who determines what actions are "authentically black?" Can this right be earned, or is it given at birth? Is being "authentically black" like having a Costco membership, but without any perceived benefits?

This isn't just racism, this is the kind of virulent ignorance that men like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. campaigned against. "Black authenticity" is nothing more than racism in a dashiki...or, in this case, a FUBU triple-X large tee shirt. Apparently, Obama wasn't black enough by himself; he needed his "black-er" wife to appropriately darken him for the dark-skinned "community." Nice.

Never mind that Obama was once the president the Harvard Law Review and that there ain't enough brown-skinned men of similar accomplishment to field a basketball team, he is "one of us" because he married a woman with dark-colored skin...thus making Tiger Woods that much more "un-authentic" for his choice of wife and dalliances.

By the way, how dare comedienne Sheryl Underwood, also quoted in Washington's article, question who Woods chooses to date. The color of his skin does not place a mandate upon him to date anyone of a similar color, not even if this were the Jim Crow south of the late 19th century. It would be out of place for me to ask if Underwood has been sure to date a man (or woman) from every particular shade of human being available, but that's essentially what she is saying: that Woods is wrong for whatever his preference is, because it doesn't include "black" women.

In a snide little aside, the article also quotes Carmen Van Kerckhove, who claims to speak for all Asians when she says that "Asians don't fully embrace Woods either." Holy 38th parallel, why would they? If he were to claim any ethnicity at all, it would be Vietnamese, which automatically puts him outside of the Thai community, the Chinese community, the Japanese community, and the Korean communities, and I know I'm leaving some out. Koreans don't really care who Hines Ward dates or marries, and his mother is Korean, so you can be certain that Tiger Woods' affairs are pretty low on their list of priorities.

I have deliberately ignored the "CULTURE!!!" argument that some of you may have been shouting for most of this article for one simple reason: one's skin color is no barrier to culture. In fact, the very crime that Tiger Woods is being pilloried for in this rather jejune article is that he has assimilated "white" culture to the point that he prefers "white" women.

But, since the culture argument must also be beaten down with the club of reason, let's go there. What, exactly, about Tiger Woods screamed "black man" apart, of course, from that famous skin of his? He doesn't talk like a majority of blacks. He doesn't dress like a majority of blacks. Most blacks don't have a college education, and he went to Stanford. He plays a game with which most blacks are unfamiliar, to paraphrase golf legend Bobby Jones. Moreover, unlike 99% of all similarly-colored persons on this planet, Woods is richer than Croesus.

The aforementioned Eminem comes to bear here, because he's so white-skinned that he's nearly invisible, yet culturally he is very nearly Malcolm X to Woods' apparent Bryant Gumbel. However, even though Marshall Mathers has managed to get a James Brown Exemption Pass into the mythical black community, he'd be out on his ear tomorrow if he were ever to drop the "N" word in public or on a record, something that Jay-Z is allowed to do with impunity because, well, check the melanin level. Woods, about as black as Ward Cleaver, would get a pass for the "N" word that Mathers will never get, and Mathers is virtually the ace of spades compared to Woods.

The truth is that Woods is only a human being. The truth is that America is a land of many cultures, religions, creeds, and beliefs. We are supposed to be a nation of free-thinking individuals who support the right of others to live peaceably and individually. There is supposed to be room for people who vote Democratic, Republican, Independent, or Mickey Mouse. A person's choices are supposed to be his and his alone, as long as those choices do not infringe upon the choices of others.

Attacking Woods for the skin color of his wife or girlfriends is, if you'll pardon me, ghetto and triflin', and it makes me ashamed to be a brown-skinned man today.