Former NBA player and current Showtime host Stephen Jackson backed DeSean Jackson’s anti-Semitic Instagram posts in problematic social media postings on Tuesday.
Stephen Jackson, 42, played in the NBA from 2000-2014 and launched a digital show on Showtime with fellow former NBA player Matt Barnes last year called “All the Smoke.”
In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Stephen called NFL owners “racist” and said that was a fact. He also lamented that you can’t say anything about Jews or white people because it gets called “hate”. He said DeSean shouldn’t have to apologize for anything (DeSean issued two apologies on Tuesday).
“NFL owners are racist. Just the facts. U speak on anything involving Jews or Whites is hate. That say s– about us it’s kool. Fu- dat. I wouldnt apologize for s—. I love every race and can’t nobody say or tell me…,” Stephen wrote in a Twitter post (profanity edited by LBS).
Stephen Jackson’s tweet is troubling for numerous reasons.
One, he groups all owners together and makes a sweeping categorization about them. Two, he cites zero proof and shares a harmful, defamatory accusation without a shred of evidence.
Then, he seems to be complaining about what he believes is a double-standard that white people can say things about black people without punishment, while if a black person says something bad about Jews or white people, the speech is considered “hate.” He must have missed this story last month.
Putting that aside, the list of troubling issues with Jackson’s line of thinking continues.
He is more concerned that DeSean didn’t escape accountability for spreading anti-Semitic messages than about the fact that DeSean was spreading anti-Semitic messages. And much like how DeSean behaved at first, Stephen seems to not recognize what about DeSean’s messages were problematic. Why is that? Probably because he is consuming the same type of Louis Farrakhan Nation of Islam content as DeSean has been, as evidenced by them posting the same image on Instagram and Stephen showing off a book from Farrakhan, whose Nation of Islam has been categorized as a hate group.
If Stephen loves every race as he claims to, why would he endorse DeSean smearing Jews and saying they blackmail and extort America? Why would he be cool with DeSean quoting what he thought was Adolf Hitler when talking about Jews? Hitler is responsible for leading the Holocaust, which killed an estimated six million Jews in Europe, and is quite likely the biggest crime in human history.
How can Stephen possibly defend DeSean for espousing what he thought were Hitler’s thoughts and then complain when people call the message hateful? Furthermore, how can someone like Stephen, who has been at the forefront of demanding equality, defend someone for spreading a harmful and hateful message about a different group of people, and then lament being called out for it as a bad double-standard?
Stephen later posted a note on Instagram that further magnified his ignorance on the matter.
Stephen seems to be … arguing that black people should have the right to be bigots and trash others?
Put aside the fallacy of arguing that Jews, who were enslaved in Egypt and mass exterminated in the Holocaust, have not endured the “devastating” “hardships”.
The notion that Stephen is striving for equality in the realm of bigotry misses the whole point of an equality movement. Those seeking equality should be striving for Americans to receive equal rights as listed in the Constitution, and humans to receive basic human rights. We should never be striving to spread hate and a desire to escape consequences for doing so.
