Yesterday, former and would-be future Sen. George Allen (R-Idealized Antebellum Old South) asked a tall black man, “What position did you play?” The man, TV reporter Craig Melvin, did not actually play sports. I suggested that Allen assumed Melvin played sports because Allen has a history of saying racist things. Allen apologized, and said he often asks people the “position” question, because he has a prop football lodged in the Wernicke’s area of his cerebral cortex, a childhood injury suffered shortly after the 1963 NFL championship.
And here’s proof! Here’s a 2009 clip of Allen asking “what position did you play” of Fox’s Charles Payne, who … oh, wait …
The “position” question comes up around three minutes in.
There is evidence that George Allen — a man without qualities besides “football” and “casual racism” — just asks all guys what position they played. Ryan Nobles, a big white reporter, said on Twitter yesterday that Allen “often asks me what position I played in sports as well.”
Perhaps it is unfair to lay the blame for this gaffe on Allen’s well-documented racial issues. It could just be that he is completely incapable of imagining a man who did not play football, at some point.
But there is one person whose athletic history George Allen has not inquired about. That man is Lee Fang, a reporter with Think Progress.
After speaking once with the senator during the question and answer period, I again raised my hand for a second question. For some reason, possibly because I was the only minority in an all-white audience, Allen dismissed my second question by asking if I understood what an “at-bat” meant:
DUNLOP: I think we have one more question here. [pointing to me]
ALLEN: This guy has a question. I’ll talk to you afterwards [inaudible] let everyone get a bat [makes baseball bat swinging motion]. You understand at-bats — right?
So George Allen just asks all sorts of men what position they played, unless the men are … Asian. Then he seems to think that they don’t understand the basics of sports in general. (Which, uh, George? I think you have your racial stereotypes mixed up, vis-à-vis Asians and baseball.)
