Accountability means correcting our mistakes: Letter from the Editor – oregonlive.com:
Sports columnist Bill Oram published a column earlier this week criticizing the Portland Trail Blazers’ trade for Ja Morant from the Memphis Grizzlies. Oram wrote that Morant, a superstar player who has also faced multiple game suspensions for flashing a gun on social media, was a poor strategic choice for a number of reasons. But in doing so, he used a now-controversial term, a play on the “Trail Blazers” name, which was used to describe the team of the late 1990s and early 2000s after numerous public controversies. The worst including two players who separately faced criminal charges involving animal abuse, assault and attempted rape, but agreed to plea deals for lesser charges.
After a series of conversations in recent years with Portland’s communities of color, we heard how painful and unfair they felt the reference was. We agreed.
That is insane. Everyone—and I mean everyone—back then called the Trail Blazers the “Jail Blazers” because that’s exactly who GM Bob Whittset brought in: A bunch of low character thugs who had frequent run-ins with the law. This had nothing to do with race, any more than the early ‘90s Blazers success of Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Jeremy Kersey, and so forth had anything to do with race. One of the great things about sports in fact is that race is an irrelevant metric to success or failure.
The Oregonian’s self-censorship in this regard is unwarranted and ill-advised. Other people don’t get to suddenly say, “Oh that’s racist now” when its never been. This is how the Oregon v. Oregon State football games lost the moniker of “The Civil War” and that wasn’t racist either. It’s performative, kowtowing, self-flagelating wokeness, and it’s incredibly off-putting to those of us who lived through the Jailblazers era and would never associate it with racism of any kind.
The only thing this accomplishes, besides, self-censorship, is to reduce my already fairly low opinion of The Oregonian editorial staff.