Scribes Contemplate Kansas City Chiefs As Rough Racial Progress Metaphor

A local artsy mag features a drawn out and fanciful book review that argues on behalf of pro-football racial progress.

The analogy really only works in a black & white world ruled by progressive middle-class guilt. 

In fact . . . The allegory doesn't make a lot a sense when we think in terms of a complex consumerist system wherein TV ratings don't always facilitate a just society. Still . . . It's an art mag and not many people are going to be critical of silly ideas offered earnestly. 

The basics of the book and its review . . . Everybody who might disagree with overly dramatized ideas of "progress" is probably racist. 

Ironically, that kind of political tribalism is every bit as primitive as negative stereotypes associated with pre-Columbian savagery. 

More to the point . . . The book, the artsy mag and most of the topics covered don't accomplish much beyond reassuring middle-class progressive voters of their virtue.

In fairness, here's the word from a former KC Star editor now doing a bit of snooty moonlighting . . .

"None more wrenching, perhaps, than the reflection on the efforts by the Chiefs — yes, there’s a rather pat discussion of the lingering controversy over the team’s name — to integrate the team in the civil rights era of the 1960s. But when newcomer running back Mike Garrett arrived in town, he was unable to rent an apartment on the Nichols-built, no-Negroes Country Club Plaza. Fair-housing ordinances began to change the landscape. By 1968 teammate Bobby Bell, with the help of a white acquaintance, successfully broke the color barrier in the Nichols-developed suburb of Prairie Village.

"As we’ve seen with increasing alarm in recent years, the stain of racial segregation, suppression, and hate rhetoric remains all too present today, fanned by demagogues and wannabes in the halls of power, in the toxic shadows, and in the murky mediaverse."

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

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