Wrongly shaming a kid for ‘blackface’ is a gross virtue signal
Reality has put a big old Arrowhead Chop into a cheaply manufactured NFL racism scandal.
In perhaps the laziest Monday-morning quarterbacking performance ever, Deadspin writer Carron Phillips smeared a pint-size Kansas City Chiefs fan as a blackface-wearing bigot — and accused the NFL and CBS of aiding and abetting such abhorrent behavior.
Phillips — hungry for an excuse to rant about what he sees as the league’s unrepentant racism — fixed his gaze on a still image of 9-year-old Holden Armenta, who had been featured on the CBS broadcast of the Chiefs-Raiders game.
Half of Holden’s face was painted black. He was also wearing an elaborate Native American headdress.
Despite the fact that Holden looks like he’s in prime “Paw Patrol” demo, Phillips saw the little guy as his perfect passageway into meandering thoughts on prejudice in pro pigskin.
The headline read: “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress.” And the piece blasted Holden for doubling down on racism, marveling that he “found a way to hate Black people and Native Americans at the same time.”
Phillips wondered, “Despite their age, who taught that person that what they were wearing was appropriate?”
Within 48 hours, Phillips received an answer — and it was a plot twist so delirious, it was almost “Seinfeld”-ian.
“He is Native American,” the boy’s mother, Shannon Armenta, wrote on Facebook. “This has nothing to do with the NFL … Just stop already.”
In addition, Holden’s grandfather Raul Armenta is reportedly on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez.
(Despite calls to Raul Armenta, I haven’t yet confirmed his family tree. But I’m not accusing Holden of being the grand wizard of the National Football League.)
Another hole in Phillips’ case? Holden’s other cheek was painted red — just a fan wearing his team’s colors.
Yet devious Deadspin chose to only show one side of Holden’s face, not the full picture, which was readily available. A metaphor for our times.
Phillips, meanwhile, was left with a full face of egg — appropriate since he was slinging the stinky stuff that comes out of the chicken coop.
In a now-deleted tweet, he bizarrely claimed the kid’s red cheek was further proof of his convoluted thesis.
“For the idiots in my mentions who are treating this as some harmless act because the other side of his face was painted red, I could make the argument that it makes it even worse,” he wrote. “Y’all are the ones who hate Mexicans but wear sombreros on Cinco [de Mayo].”
Sounds pretty racist to distill Mexicans down to a sombrero, but OK, sir.
Phillips wasn’t the only one. Former ESPN personality Dan Le Batard said the kid’s red cheek was most offensive.
“The only part of him that’s not intentionally kind of racist is the Black part,” Le Batard said.
But it’s pretty pathetic for the virtuous Phillips to hold up Holden as proof of the league’s bigotry — infusing a single image with his own cynical worldview — and projecting it to the masses as hard evidence of white supremacy.
Did we not learn anything from Covington Catholic’s Nicholas Sandmann? The teen, in edited viral social media clips, was painted as a privileged white boy harassing a Native American man at a Washington, DC, rally. His real transgression, it turned out, was smirking while wearing a MAGA hat — and he settled with various media outlets, including CNN and the Washington Post, because of their smear job.
Or how about the 2022 Little League World Series, when ESPN showed white kids from the Iowa team putting the fluffy innards of a stuffed animal on their black teammate’s head in a mohawk formation?
That blip of coverage sent the Twitterverse into fits as the media commissioned think pieces about the trauma handed down by the heartless white boys.
But then more images emerged showing a white teammate who also had the cotton in his hair. Turns out the kids were simply — and happily — mimicking Hawaii pitcher Jarron Lancaster, who sported a flamboyant platinum mohawk.
Earlier this month, a student from Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, Calif., was suspended and barred from sporting events because he wore eye black on parts of his cheeks and chin. The administration accused him of wearing blackface.
What a heavy, unfair burden to put on children: a hard lesson that everything, no matter how pure, is seen through the lens of race.
Phillips blamed book bans and criticism of critical race theory for people like Holden.
Who appointed Phillips the identity warden of the Native American people and how they choose to express themselves and celebrate themselves?
Phillips and I do agree on one point: The league’s kumbaya end zone slogans are empty — and pandering. Corporate atonement for whatever sins, real or imagined.
If he truly thinks the NFL is a bastion of discrimination, then that’s his opinion.
But if evidence were widely available, you wouldn’t need to build your entire argument on an innocent Native American child dressed up to watch his favorite football team.
