When Woke Ate #MeToo

Deshaun Watson, it seems, has gone missing. While news of his sexual misconduct continues to gain steam, media outlets like Disney’s ESPN and the New York Times have buried the story.

I know because I follow their reporting daily.

To be clear: there are 22 lawsuits filed against the star Houston Texans QB, each one alleging sexual misconduct during separate massage sessions, in different locations on different dates. Two of those lawsuits also include claims of sexual assault.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (whose league is no stranger to its players’ offenses against women) first spoke on the matter April 29—one and a half months after the story broke. As the Watson story grew in March, ESPN on its website consistently prioritized the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments.

The Watson story, even as allegations mounted to notably high levels, was placed well below that, if it even appeared on the homepage. The Times has consistently kept Watson off its front page, moving stories like this in its print edition to pages like B13. B13 doesn’t sound like the front page of the sports pages, let alone of the B Section or the front page itself.

What’s powerful about the Watson story isn’t simply the facts. It’s that we have been given—at least according to the #MeToo standards adopted by most media—no real reasons to deny the claims of these women.

William C. Rhoden and the journalism activism of denial

Journalist William C. Rhoden, formerly of The Times, writes for The Undefeated, a race-peddling online magazine that appears on ESPN’s website. (ESPN is owned by Disney.) He asked a series of questions about Watson in a recent column:

Questions outweigh answers.

The most important question is whether the allegations are true. Did Watson abuse women he paid for massages? Were the relationships consensual and—even if they were—does consent offset charges of abuse?

More questions:  Is Watson the victim of an ambush?

Is this all a coincidence? Did the Texans know of the allegations all along? Did they know when they signed Watson to a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract?

Was the franchise blindsided by the allegations? Or were the Texans withholding the information as a trump card in case their star quarterback — or anyone else for that matter — got out of line?

 

Playing the race game

Anyone can play this game. But to what end? Mr. Rhoden writes for The Undefeated. Perhaps we’ll stay with those questions then that he so reveres.

Regarding the first set of questions—i.e., whether the allegations are true, whether the women were abused and whether the relationships (I’m going to add here interactions) were consensual—I would refer Rhoden to the allegations themselves.

Based on his questioning I myself must question whether he’s bothered to read them, or at the very least how it is is he’s failed to grasp their import. Otherwise, how could he possibly be penning an apologia for Watson rather than a column allowing these women to be heard?

“Is Watson the victim of an ambush?” he asks. Don’t just ask the question. Mr. Rhoden should show he has the journalistic integrity and the moral fortitude to grapple with it, to think critically about it.

He demonstrates none of that in his column.

One wonders whether it was this hard for Mr. Rhoden to believe the accusers of Al Franken, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.

Was he there to defend the accused in a similar manner?

At what point did he stop believing Bill Cosby and start believing his accusers? Did that too, after 20+ women accused him of wrongdoing (there’d be 60 total), feel like an ambush?

When the woke react—or don’t

We live in a world that has fed itself allegations like raw meat to pirrhanas, often in the name of self-satisfaction and absolution. Allegations, suspicions, even hunches, these have become enough, especially on racial matters. We could say it started with Ferguson, where the BLM movement started but where there is little if any credible evidence of racism.

Since then there’s even been a systemic push in newsrooms to make this a new norm, abandoning objectivity in the name of more race-based reporting. The kind of reporting that would advocate charges of racism whenever one’s race-o-meter, however tightly calibrated, detects racism via subtext and implication.

Think micro-aggressions. That, for an emerging group of racial activists calling themselves journalists, is closer to the “truth.”

And now on the crucial matter of Watson we’re talking about the importance of withholding judgment and asking questions?

This, I’m afraid, is a lousy moral compass, one prone to shifting with the prevailing winds. This isn’t journalism; it’s impulsive, reactionary activism posing as it.

And this problem will continue as long as we prioritize race over fundamental moral considerations.

The bottom line is this: ESPN’s coverage of Deshaun Watson was far more prevalent when he was demanding the release from his football team in the weeks prior to the allegations than when those allegations, one after the other, started pouring in.

The personal cost of woke

It must be hard being someone like Rhoden, having your worldview narrow and harden rather than expand and lighten. Guys like Rhoden move away from our better sense of humanity—the evolution of which he’s actually no doubt witnessed profoundly in his lifetime.^[1]His denial of this can be felt firsthand in his tellingly titled memoir Forty Million Dollar Slaves, about the ongoing oppression of wealthy black athletes. Watson, for his part, is worth more than … Continue reading

This evolution has occurred perhaps most poignantly in the world of sport, Rhoden’s area of expertise, which has, however imperfectly, served as a frontier and an incubator for racial equality. Instead of making space for this, and asking how we might continue this remarkable push, Rhoden moves toward a toxic cynicism, a righteous anger and a racial radicalism that is fashionable these days.

It’s a cocktail worthy of scrutiny.

But this isn’t just about Rhoden. To the extent that he identifies with hand-selected victims (or in his case black victims), we could say that he’s a victim—a shill for the racialized industrial complex that practices a selective ethics.

I know I’m not alone in expecting, and demanding, better. So I turn elsewhere.

Keep it simple

In turning elsewhere we would do well to consider a few things re the Watson case.

First, sexual morality actually matters. We pretend that it doesn’t. In the complacency of our post-60’s liberal order it’s taboo to say it does. But sexual morality matters.

One of the great lies of the ’60s (and there are many) is that it provided people, women especially, a kind of sexual “liberation.” The problem with this model is that it too often values the indiscriminate acting on pleasurable impulse over discipline and self-control. (It’s how, for example, the virtuous “prudence” gets replaced with pejorative “prude.”)

It has also led to a morality of convenience around sexual matters. It’s how the Left serves as apologist for Bill Clinton but chief prosecutor for Brett Kavanaugh.

It’s how far too many of our young men have grown up without proper guidance, and with a lot of confusion, around sex and what it’s supposed to mean, to represent.

And it’s also how we fail to ask basic moral questions around this case. Those questions, we’re told, are not supposed to be any of our business.

But let’s ask a few.

What is Deshaun Watson doing getting massages from all these different women in the first place? (Is he merely still searching for the perfect professional masseuse? If so, why not try another gender along the way? Maybe he has.)

Would I wish this practice, this habit, for my own boys? Would you for yours? And I ask, without judgment but merely as a point of inquiry: What, if anything, might we consider about the character of the person who engages in this kind of behavior?

None of the answers to any of these questions needs to be definitive, or even punitive. The questions just need to be asked.