About a week after its launch, The Undefeated, ESPN’s new site on the intersection between sports, race, and culture, published a piece from renowned columnist Michael Wilbon titled, “Mission Impossible: African-American & analytics.” The column’s sub-title — “Why blacks are not feeling the sports metrics movement” — gets closer to the topic of the column itself.
The column stirred up the Twittersphere and prompted negative responses from Deadspin, Sporting News, The Guardian, and SBNation, to name a few sites. But it seems, by creating a discussion and defying the outside media’s expectations, The Undefeated has done exactly what it set out to do with the column. At least, that’s the way Rhiannon Walker, an associate editor at The Undefeated, put it when she met with the class.
“I think they expected people to disagree with it,” said Walker, who said the column was opinion, and not to be taken as fact. “The point of The Undefeated is to challenge the public, and it did that.”
Many people may have aired their concerns with Wilbon’s column over the last week since its publication, but The Undefeated, as Walker put it, as remained at ease about it. If nothing else, The Undefeated will have opened an important dialogue and discussion about race and sports that have before been difficult for people to talk about, and maybe that’s exactly the role it’s supposed to serve. -- Christian Hardy
No comments:
Post a Comment