Free Michael Vick?

Here's the thing: I'm not much of a fan of Michael Vick as a football player. I don't care for his undisciplined approach to quarterbacking. He's clearly a brilliant talent but I cannot understand why in his five years as a pro he could not show greater skill development. Even before Vick's legal troubles arose many football analysts shared the view that his career was at something of a crossroads, wondering whether his overall play would ever live up to his awesome physical gifts. And after two years away from football while serving time in jail for running a dog fighting ring it isn't even clear he can return to the sport as a quarterback, let alone pick up where he left off as a star performer. Even so, I was all set to write an indignant post in support of him and decrying the recent decision by the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, that Vick must wait an indefinite time period before he can return to the playing field. Initially I thought the decision to be grossly discriminatory. After all, Vick served 23 months in jail and is a convicted felon with all the stigmatic accouterments that come from being released into American society as a felon. He's done his time and now wants to return to his chosen craft in order to make a living. He's estimated to have lost upwards of $100 million in salary and endorsement monies due to his conviction and has filed for bankruptcy. How much more punitive, I was ready to argue, should society be for his given crime? I was set to assert that for the NFL, or any other employer for that matter, to evaluate his employability based on his previous conviction was prejudicial and essentially un-american. Undoubtedly my thoughts are also influenced by an instinctive sense of empathy I feel towards Vick and other minority ex-cons. I happen to share an overarching conviction held by many in the African-American community that blacks are disproportionately jailed in America. The consequences on family structures and the larger community compound exponentially as released felons often have great difficulty assimilating back into society, creating a self perpetuating cycle of violence and disfunction.

However, I've come to believe that the commissioner has acted fairly towards Vick, perhaps just barely, but fair nonetheless. In reaching this conclusion I sought to generalize the circumstance and put in place of Vick any citizen, of any race or any profession. And contextualized thus it occurred to me that many, perhaps most, businesses given a similar set of particulars would be wary of allowing a felonious employee to resume a job where the employee is a public face of the brand. To be sure, Vick was at one point a major element in the NFL's branding and imaging as a league full of hip, cutting edge competitors. His transgressions at best re-cast him in the eyes of some of the public as the prototypical celebrity athlete who believes himself above the law and at worst a murderous villain. These perceptions may be slow to reverse if they ever do. Furthermore, and as aforementioned, Vick's legal troubles served to effectively veneer a career that had been at a crossroads in any case; his star may have been in descent. So, quite reasonably, the NFL wants to see how its consumer audience reacts and how Vick reacts to returning to the intense crucible that is professional sports celebrity in America. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with the NFL seeking to protect its brand in this way. Although the NFL is arguably the premier sports league in the US today, there are other professional and semi-professional sports leagues out there where Vick could ply his trade. He just may not make millions in those other leagues. I'm not prepared to support the notion that anyone, let alone someone who so callously and cavalierly threw away so much wealth and opportunity, ought to be guaranteed the right to by paid millions of dollars.

Its quite fascinating how two of the bigger new stories of the current cycle, the Vick ruling and the Gates/Crrowley incident, reflect upon our society's continuing struggles with race and class. And for arguments sake I'll throw the birther movement against Obama into the mix too. Perhaps upon first glance each of these stories seems to hinge mainly on endemic racial themes. However, when we look deeper I'd argue that in all three, respectively, raw capitalism, class values and politics play the predominant role with race but a secondary variable. Would Michael Vick have received further punishment from the NFL if he was not a minority? I hope I've successfully argued above that there's a strong possibility a white player would have received similar judgement by the league's marketing mavens. While race surely remains a factor in how the American public responds to a celebrity, it is no longer THE determining factor; for the most part we've evolved to become equal opportunity capitalists. If it had been a white male scholar who, while in his own home, verbally abused a patrolling officer would the officer have arrested him? I'm dubious but I'd still venture that the larger contributing factor to the arrest, infused by the notion that the officer in question was widely considered an 'expert' at racial profiling, was Gates lack of deference to the badge, which I'd suggest is largely a phenomenon of class. Finally, would fringe right-wingers be harassing a white democratic president about the validity of his birth certificate? Perhaps not but based on the manner in which the GOP went after Bill Clinton (but then again perhaps he was black too??!) throughout his presidency it's clear that certain republicans strongly dislike liberal presidents of all races and will be vociferous in their opposition to their legitimacy.

So I guess the moral/lesson implicit here is that we'd all do well to do a better job at working towards understanding opposing viewpoints. In today's America, complexity is the rule, simplicity the exception; that is, race is but one factor in a long list of rationalizations we'll use to screw each other... :) Sigh...alas, I couldn't keep a straight face long enough to let go without injecting a dose of law of the jungle aphorizing. Oh, and if you're maybe wondering why I chose not to equivocate the Sotomayer hearings alongside those other racially inflected news items, well, her treatment by the GOP was all about race, sorry can't be generous and magnanimous on that one.