Mississippi Basketball Coach Accused of Whipping Players with a Weight Belt

Indulge me as I paint a picture with fluttering electrons and steadfast pixels...

I was sitting in my reading chair and working through the second chapter of Daniel Walker Howe's magisterial book "What Hath God Wrought." As I sit, engrossed in the chapter on the rise of King Cotton in the decades prior to the Civil War, my computer chimes as I receive an email. The topic of said communication? Apparently, an African American basketball coach is spending his days beating the behinds of man-children, teenage, likely ign't ball dribblers with a weight belt. Of course, in our age of virtual celebrity this shameful episode is recorded and featured on CNN.

Talk about a coincidence in timing: I am envisioning overseers, Frederick Douglass fighting off Covey, and this black fucktardness stupidity comes across the screen. Once more, an epic face palm moment in the Age of Obama where the spirit of black respectability dies just a little bit more each and every day.

In fact, The Great Mississippi Basketball Gluteus Maximus Beating Debacle is so tragically funny that I give my white brothers and sisters permission to laugh. You don't have to hide behind a veneer of being good, tolerant, liberal minded folk that are afraid to judge others. Nope, these fools deserve to be laughed at, mocked, and run out of the public square on a rail.

But, this begs the question: Who is the bigger fool? The fool who beats his ballers with a belt? Or the knuckleheads (and their parents) who would submit to such a beating in order for a chance to play basketball?

Watch the video and count the pathologies. I see at least three or four--from a sick obsession with ball dribbling to compliant parents. How many do you count?

I would suggest aloud that perhaps Mr. Black Woodcock has stumbled upon a new approach to the successful mentoring of young black men.

If the youthocracy that has run amok in many an underclass community is in part encouraged by a "spare the rod, spoil the child" approach to parenting, in which "little men" are made the stand-in man of the house at age 8 in a sick dance of forced maturity and simultaneous infantilization by their often too young, unwedded, single mothers, where models of real manhood are on the street corner and not in the home, Coach Dorsey's intervention could actually be worthy of a MacArthur genius grant.

And yes, I did just say that.

Coach Dorsey's mantra deserves our full measure and meditation:

  

"I paddled my students... today, some of (sic) students have lost pride in their school and in their (sic) selves. Students are disrespecting teachers, administrators and other students by stealing cell phones, leaving off campus without permission, disrupting classroom teaching time, late for class and not following dress codes by wearing the pants on their butts and house shoes to school and on-court behavior. I took it upon myself to save these young men from the destruction of self and what society has accepted and become silent to the issues our students are facing on a daily basis."

What if these words were emblazoned on every billboard? Made a motto in the home? Is it so sick and twisted that I dare dream of a world in which people of conscience mobilize and lobby in order to secure Coach Dorsey a position as President Obama's Czar of Ign't Affairs?

I smile as I think of the possibilities. How great a world that would be. Would it not?