Basseball and integrity: Curt Flood's stand on principle

It's a very rare thing when standing for principle is a nationally seismic thing, with ripples felt long after you're gone, everywhere in your profession, felt so long and deeply that newcomers to that profession almost take its fruits for granted.

Curt Flood took such a stand 40 years ago today, with a letter that amounted to pro sports' equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation, one man's statement of a singular and necessary self-possession. Others in the same era pursued the same or similar objectives, but Curt Flood's effort resonates in its solitariness, its sense of one man against the system that resonates emotionally, no matter how doomed or quixotic it's believed to be.

My take on this personal broadside on pro baseball's "reserve clause" runs in full in today's edition of theGrio. Here's part of the tribute:

While today's attention to the game of baseball is focused on off-season trades -- in this the time of the so-called hot stove league -- major league baseball marks a milestone on Dec. 24, one that may fly under the radar, but one that truly contributed to something in the DNA of professional sports.

Curtis Charles Flood, the stellar St. Louis Cardinals center fielder and seven-time Gold Glove winner, was to be traded with three other players to the Philadelphia Phillies at the end of the 1969 season. ...

Flood objected, citing personal and family reasons, as well as reasons pertaining to outside business interests. On Dec. 24, 1969, Flood sent Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn a simply worded letter making his desires clear. ...

The letter — a deft balance of emotion and devastating logic — was one of the first direct challenges of major league baseball's infamous reserve clause, by which a player was bound body and soul to a team regardless of the player's wishes ...

The era of free agency ushered in by Flood’s stand on principle was a confirmation of the national drive for progress, change and the power of the new.

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Image credit: Curt Flood: symonsez.files.wordpress.com. Excerpts © 2009 NBC Universal.

Algorithms and blues: HP, Google and people who don’t look like them

With a day left in the holiday shopping season, there’s just the thing for that last-minute stocking stuffer (or party gag gift, depending on your point of view) courtesy of no less than Hewlett-Packard, a company now in a defensive crouch over the workings of a product that stands in for human experience, maybe more comfortably than we might admit.

The Black Spin blog at AOL Black Voices announced recently that the new HP webcams, built into the latest generation of MediaSmart computers, have a little … bias problem. The cameras, which were intended to foster live online conversations, were supposedly designed to follow the movements of the camera subject.

But not for everyone. Earlier this month, the matter was widely publicized with a video posted to YouTube by two employees at an electronics store — a black man (“black Desi”) and a white woman (“white Wanda”) who tested the face-tracking technology with curious results.

The video showed the HP webcam working properly when "White Wanda" stepped in front of the camera, tracking her movements without fail. But not for black Desi. The camera, whose field of vision is the content of the video, doesn’t budge.



“I think my blackness is interfering with the computer's ability to follow me," Desi says in the clip.

"As you can see the camera is panning to show Wanda's face, it's following her around, but as soon as my blackness enters the frame ... it stops."

"I'm going on record, and I'm saying it: Hewlett-Packard computers are racist,” Desi says. “And the worst part is, I bought one for Christmas.”

HP performed timely, and seemingly sincere, damage control. Tony Welch, lead social media strategist in HP's PC division, said the company was investigating the issue. "The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose," Welch wrote on a company blog.

"We believe that the camera might have difficulty 'seeing' contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting."

To be fair, HP has tried to correct the problem, or at least illuminate people as to why it happens: Welch inserted a webpage with information “on the impact of lighting on facial tracking software, and how to optimize your webcam experience.”

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But there’s no escaping the echoes of events in the recent past, other instances of intolerance by algorithm. In early December, Google was under fire for a controversy that erupted when a racist image of First Lady Michelle Obama briefly led Google's image search results. The same thing happened a handful of years ago when people searching on Google for images of two prominent African Americans got pictures of animals instead.

Then and this time, Google gamely (and justifiably) defended the randomness of the search experience as fundamental to free expression. But still. There are other ways of seeing this. Joho, blogging at Hyperorg.com, poses one of the more solid arguments:

“Google’s algorithms are undoubtedly tuned by looking at the relevancy of the results. If they come up with a new wrinkle, they check it against the results it returns. So, the algorithms are already guided by Google’s own sense of what are good, useful and relevant results. If they tested a tweak of their ranking algorithm and it turned out always to put all the porn and pro-Nazi literature on top, Google would judge that algorithm as faulty.

“So, Google is already in the business of building algorithms that match its idea of what’s useful and relevant. When those algorithms occasionally turn up racist crap like that photo of Michelle, why not improve the algorithm’s results by intervening manually?”

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The HP and Google faux pas may be precursor evidence of what Ray Kurzweil calls “the singularity,” a fast-approaching and epochal transformation of the boundaries between biology and technology. Maybe they’re examples of technology doing what technology, what machines have always done: achieving in minutes then seconds then nanoseconds, becoming faster and more efficient at performing a given task. This is proof that they’re just faster in understanding human behavior — and its inherent biases — than we are in understanding them.

For people darker than a paper bag, what happened with HP’s product and Google’s service may or may not be racism, but it is evidence of consumer technology adopting a cultural meme of rendering people with dark skin as abstract, ahistoric, insubstantial. We have been here before: Ralph Ellison’s justly celebrated “Invisible Man” observes the pain and perils of a black man’s apparent invisibility to the wider world.

Homo ex machina: Today, that “peculiar disposition of the eyes” Ellison attributed to humans three generations ago may well be a camera lens or a passive-aggressive algorithm. The broad and longstanding cultural act of not seeing, not really seeing blacks and minorities outside the HTML governing one’s personal, inner software, has finally been distilled, albeit accidentally, in the functions of our technology.

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Image credits: HP camera: Via amazon.com. Google logo: © Google. Invisible Man cover: © Random House.

Tiger’s rough lie IV: Character assassinations

Longer than I’d have thought possible, the late-night crew has generated brutal laughs at the expense of Tiger Woods. The self-caged Tiger, now said to be staying at home eating cereal, watching cartoons and practicing his golf swing at night, remains behind the curve, the butt of too many jokes. A trip to France has reportedly been considered.

You can’t help but think of that legendary April 1968 Esquire cover that featured a full-body shot of an in-his-prime Muhammad Ali (the subject of public hatreds of a completely different kind), his body punctured with arrows a la St. Sebastian, patron saint of athletes. But the Tiger debacle has other dimensions. There’s been more than one kind of character assassination going on.

The waitresses union (if there is one) should sue for defamation of character; as the list of Tiger’s conquests has grown, we’ve come to hear their occupations in the service and leisure industries spoken of and written about in sordid, unflattering light.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post got it right on Sunday: “[T]he way in which jobs such as waitress and model have been tossed about in the Woods story, with a kind of wink and a nod, one would think there is something inherently tawdry about carting pancakes or martinis around on a tray.”

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One of the underexplored aspects of this rolling tragedy has been the reaction of black Americans, notably black women. For blacks, Tiger’s predicament has generated a barely submerged schadenfreude, a sense of serves-you-right-to-suffer that’s animated by the persistent sense of racial betrayal.

On Dec. 6, the New York Daily News explored the issue in a story that laid bare the hurt, and the willingness within the community to pile on.

On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week.

"Thankfully, Tiger, you didn't marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas," one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him.

"The Grinch's Theme Song" didn't stop there: "The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaant?" …

On the one hand, Ebonie Johnson Cooper doesn't care that Tiger Woods' wife and alleged mistresses are white because Woods is "quote-unquote not really black."

"But at the same time we still see him as a black man with a white woman, and it makes a difference," said Johnson Cooper, a 26-year-old African-American from New York City. "There's just this preservation thing we have among one another. We like to see each other with each other."

Black women have long felt slighted by the tendency of famous black men to pair with white women, and many have a list of current transgressors at the ready.

"We've discussed this for years among black women," said Denene Millner, author of several books on black relationships. "Why is it when they get to this level ... they tend to go directly for the nearest blonde?"

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Left unexplored in these ad hominem broadsides is any discussion of the broader social damages of Tiger’s civil transgressions, not just those ostensibly racial ones. The impact of the violation of his marital vows isn’t even discussed; the only unacceptable line Tiger’s crossed in their eyes is a racial one. Curiously, there’s no mention of the signal his marital infidelity sends to generations to young and impressionable Americans across the racial spectrum.

There’s a sense of possessiveness in these comments that suggests Tiger, and by extension all black people, are necessarily bound by the racial tradition of marrying within the race. There’s a dismissal here of Tiger’s civil responsibility as husband and father that’s all the more curious, given black America’s historically proven reverence for the traditions of marriage in general. Where’s the outrage about that?

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If Tiger is in fact hunkering down with the attorneys and the Cheerios, he's certainly planning how to dampen the trajectory of a scandal achieving a life of its own. But for the rest of us, the Tiger in the wild has been an inviting target. Sometimes too inviting.

For every label you can throw at him, justified and otherwise — philanderer, cheat, womanizer, racial traitor, ethical apostate, self-centered athlete for the ages — there’s another one available. And the willingness or unwillingness to apply it says as much about us as it says about him: the label of human being.

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Image credit: Esquire April 1968 cover: Esquire Magazine. Tiger: Public domain.

The change

As the nation gears up to mark another New Year’s Eve, more than a few million Americans are also putting big emotional energy into the “end” of the first decade of the 21st century. Which it’s not, of course, not for another year. But don’t tell them that. Custom and practice and The Way It’s Always Been have disabused them of the idea that maybe, just maybe, their longstanding certainties are wrong.

The National Journal gave us a proper launch into the new year with an exhaustive study of voter demographics in the United States — a report that overturns the lingering mostly conservative orthodoxies and assumptions about who and where the power blocs of voters in this country really are.

The Journal’s package — written by the reliable Ron Brownstein and graphically designed by Charlie Szymanski, in a display of maps, districts and stats that has to be seen to be believed — clearly documents the vast change that’s underway in the United States, change illustrated, but in way defined, by the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

“With Hispanics providing the principal engine, the nation's minority population is not only increasing but also dispersing beyond the big cities where it traditionally congregated. And as minorities enlarge their numbers in the suburbs and even the exurbs, the number of House members representing districts with heavily diverse populations is soaring -- probably to unprecedented heights.”

A quote from Simon Rosenberg, president of a Democratic group that monitors electoral trends, puts it in even clearer perspective. “We're entering a new era which is being defined to a great degree by the incredible explosion of the nonwhite electorate and its distribution around the country … The growth of this nonwhite population is creating a fundamentally new politics in the United States.”

Tiger’s rough lie III: A sand trap in the desert

It’s gotten so out of hand in the last week, it’s difficult to know where to start: the number of extramarital dalliances attributed truthfully or falsely to Tiger Woods has spiraled higher with (literally) every passing day. The latest number — 13? 14? 16? — doesn’t matter to Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren, who has reportedly set the machinery of divorce in motion. The lawyers are circling for the expected redistribution of wealth to come.

“It’s what you do next that counts,” the message of the Accenture Web site recently read — a message removed before Dec. 13, when Accenture dropped Tiger as its highest-profile endorsement action figure. Accenture is just one of the companies Rethinking Its Relationship with the world’s greatest golfer.

Last week, Gatorade dropped its Tiger Focus brand of theanine-and-electrolyte-laden flavored water, claiming that the move had been discussed internally well before the wheels fell off the Escalade in the driveway. Gillette, the epitome of a clean-shaven American brand, has also suspended its endorsement deal.

And announcing his intent to step away from the pro game for an indefinite period, Tiger issued a statement of full-on contrition. “I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children,” he said. “I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness. It may not be possible to repair the damage I've done, but I want to do my best to try.”

Then, just when it looked like things couldn’t get any worse, news came reflecting the irony of public recognition, something seemingly unlikely but true just the same: On Tuesday, Tiger was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Decade, in recognition of his posting 64 victories during the last 10 years, including 12 major tournaments. (Given what was happening in his private life over that time, and the prodigious energy those distractions must have demanded, his tour victories are even more impressive. When did this guy sleep?)

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Despite the flights to respectability that some companies have made, Nike is sticking with him — the company no stranger to the controversies of athletes and their various antics off the court or the field.

Nike Chairman and apparel emperor Phil Knight told SportsBusiness Journal last week: “When his career is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip, but the media is making a big deal out of it right now.”

But it’s more than the media making a big deal out of it. It’s a big deal for the companies considering walking away from Tiger and a scandal of a size we still can’t get dimensions for yet. It’s a big deal for the PGA Tour, as professional golf comes to grips with an immediate future without its most visible and bankable component. And it’s more quietly a big deal for African American men, forced to contend with another stain on their existential reputation (one that polite company would likely exclude from the current discussion, saying it’s not pertinent).

To this point, Tiger hasn’t been seen in public, apparently content to hunker down at his Florida Xanadu and plot his options. He’s still very much in the rough right now. It’s worse than that. Tiger’s in a sand trap of public perception and all he’s got is his Scotty Cameron putter.

We’re a forgiving nation — hell, look at the break we cut Richard Nixon. But Tiger’s got to stand trial in the court of public opinion. He’s called on to do the public stations of the cross he bears. It’s still what he does next that counts. Until the public hears from him again (not in dry, professionally bloodless statements, but from him directly); until he undertakes to move the media machinery with the consummate skill he’s shown before, the bunker he’s in will stretch from here to the clubhouse.

It’s time for Focus he can’t get out of a bottle.

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Image credits: Tiger: Associated Press. Gatorade Tiger Focus: Via ozbo.com

FutureNews at the FTC

Yeah, we missed it. There was just so much else going on. Tiger imploded, the health-care reform debate reached its latest fever pitch, and the death by a thousand cuts that is our economy kept doing what it’s doing.

So we almost forgot about a two-day panel discussion on Dec. 1 and 2, at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. This spirited discussion, "From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" focused on the future of news, a topic approached from a variety of perspectives that definitely represent where we’ve been coming from, and should represent where we’re going.

Bryan Monroe, former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, editorial director of Ebony Magazine (and a former colleague from the San Jose Mercury News), made some telling points about the persistence of old-media thinking in the new media age, especially as it relates to minorities cracking the industry’s various institutional ceilings.

“Firstly, I think it's important to acknowledge where we are today. Fresh exciting digital news initiatives are cropping up all over the country, but in most cases these new media ventures looking a whole lot like old media, only less diverse in more ways.

“Look no further than the 17 of 17 white staff members of Aol.'s new sphere.com, or the single African-American reporter at the Politico. Or the initial lack of diversity at Chicago's new co-op journalism venture. You know, we're starting off on the wrong foot. With the recent closures, bankruptcies, declining circulation, layoffs and the legacy media business, it's proven that cutting its way to success won't work. We know we can't grow from a crouched position. But journalism is not dead, by a long shot. It is, however, in the process of painfully shedding its old skin for a new one.

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“But in that battle for its soul between old media and new media, something important is being lost. We are now living [in] a new America. For the underlying DNA of journalism, accuracy, inclusion, clarity, storytelling, fairness and truth, to live on, it must find a new host. To succeed, we must make sure diverse voices, all voices, are represented in digital and on the web. It's time for media to start to play offense not just defense.

“Part of it is fundamentally that it's access to the circles where the money is happening, to the venture capitalists, to the angels, to the conversations when the deals get made or the ideas get floated. They're not just journalists of color, but entrepreneurs of color need to be in those rooms, need to be in those -- when you're at school you have your friends and your buddies that you come up with.

“The circle needs to be wider, and I think by that, you'll see more ideas go from just a back room thought to a full-fledged venture, and the closer they get to becoming a venture, the better the chance for their success will be.”

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Mark Contreras, E.W. Scripps senior vice president, picked up on a trend that’s becoming the norm in online editorial: an evolving paradigm that obeys the power of the headline — maybe even the primacy of the headline — as a way to reach the reader.

“[T]he consumption of headlines is much more prevalent than a deep vertical reading of a news story. So consumers are consuming much more horizontally. And by that I mean nuggets, headlines, even a word in a headline represents consumption, far less consumption deep and vertically, and that, to me, indicates that the headline is just as valuable, and the content that we originate and create is just as valuable for the Internet world as the depth of the reporting.

“Both are critical to what journalism is, but the consumption indicates that there's far more sporadic consumption than in the print product.”

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And leave it to the disturber in chief, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post and new-media firebrand, to impart the overall sense of where things are going. By way of going upside the head of media buccaneer Rupert Murdoch, Huffington set the table, if not the agenda, for the future of online editorial media:

“[T]his is inarguably a brave new media world and there's no use living in digital denial. The information superhighway is a busy thoroughfare, and there is going to be some roadkill along the way, but only among those who insist on merging into traffic riding a horse and buggy.”

“These contributions of citizen journalists, bloggers and others who are not paid to cover the news — it's constantly mocked and derided. It's as though people in the old media cannot really understand that technology has enabled millions of consumers to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation. From coach potato to self-expression. You know, writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook, editing photos, uploading videos and making music are just a few of the active entertainment options now available to people. But when they dare to begin to show a significant shift in consumer habits, traditional media responded by belittling web journalism.

“The same people who never question why consumers would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight, can't understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues great and small that interest — and even though this is not the way they make their living. They don't understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, they really don't. They don't understand the people who maintain their own blogs for free.

“They don't understand people who write blogs for The Huffington Post for free, we constantly get that. They don't understand people who Twitter for free, they constantly don't understand people who update their Facebook pages for free — who want to tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities for free.

“And they need to understand that, if they are to understand the future of journalism.”

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Image credits: Monroe: © Johnson Publishing Co. Sphere logo: © 2009 Aol. Inc. Contreras: Associated Press. Huffington: Associated Press via paidcontent.org