In perusing my Google Account’s Italian-American settings the other day, I found an article by Jeff Pearlman entitled “Turning a critical eye to the ol’ alma mater” (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/ story?page=pearlman/070810). In that piece he included the following paragraph:

But I also saw the darker side of my hometown — a gritty, blue-collar Manhattan suburb with a predominantly Irish-American and Italian-American makeup. I still remember the kids who threw pennies at my brother and I because we were Jews; still remember the two crosses that were set aflame in my African-American friend's yard; still remember my eighth-grade teacher instructing us on how "blacks can't ski — they just can't." Mostly, I remember the n-word being dropped left and right without punishment. "I love Whitney Houston," my across-the-way neighbor once told me, "but I hate the color of her skin."

This surely makes one wonder why Pearlman, a Jew writing in 2007 (which means, to some extent, that he should be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes as things now presently stand), would engage in such seemingly pre-conceived generalizations about the two “white,” United States Catholic groups par excellence. To impugn anti-Semitism, racism, and violence tout court is, simply stated, a gross misjudgment in human characterization and surely beneath someone engaged in a public discourse that is journalism and popular book-writing, two discursive activities in which Pearlman has professionally engaged.

The irony in all of this is that Pearlman is ostracizing what he considers the continued, “offensive” practice of knick names for sports teams that refer to Native Americans. To decry bigotry aimed at one group by willy-nilly impugning bigotry to others seems, simply stated, offensive, wrongheaded, and embarrassing to all who are engaged in the enterprise of eliminating such prejudice.