Well, now that the dust has settled on the Great Julius Jones Debacle we figured it was time to stoke the embers again and create a wildfire worthy of a Michael Martin Murphy song. In case you happened to miss it last Thursday, Kissing Suzy Kolber featured our entry in the keeper league contest and it kinda got everyone riled up. (The comments have since been deleted, but you can still read the story that started it all.) The fracas then spread to the Nation of Islam Sportsblog, whose fanbase consists solely of Unsilent Majority (we guess it gives him street cred?), and the previously unheard of Liptstick Alley. Honestly, we're still not really sure what the hell Lipstick Alley is (other than a collective of idiot harpies who may or may not be black.) Oh, and it spread to the Deadspin comments too.

Anyways, what seemed to set everyone off was not the story itself, but the mention of the "Darks Mall" and the "grabbing our rape whistles and donning our kevlar" line. I guess this reference was just a little too local for most of our audience as it drew emails from Arlington locals laughing and sharing their horror stories, but just seemed to really piss off everybody else. So allow us to explain.

For some reason every scary local mall seems to have a nickname (like Gunspoint Mall in Houston) and our scary local mall just happens to be referred to as The Darks Mall. Yes, we admit that it is a racist name for a mall, but that is what it's often referred to around here. And not because its patronage consists of law abiding African American citizens, but because it is overrun with teenage black males who spend their time loitering, stealing and starting fights literally every weekend. Fights like this one. Go ahead, look through the slideshow. Let me know how many white people you see.

This is the same mall where women have been raped and/or beaten and mugged in the parking garages and where people have been shot and stores held up at gunpoint. So no, the rape whistles and kevlar weren't too far, they were actually too real. Trust me, I worked there for over a year during high school and college and it was a fucking scary place.

So, apologies if we genuinely offended anyone, but we both find it kinda funny that the people who were outraged by this story were the same ones laughing at things like the Negro Bowl.


As one astute commenter at KSK pointed out, you guys would've all been laughing if it was a gay jab, a sexist joke, an [insert any foreign countryman here] joke, a Jew joke, or all of the above. So chill out. The last thing that should ever be taken seriously is anything you read here or at KSK. For Chrissake look at the things we post on a daily basis. We offend ourselves and probably even humanity.

And as fresh and innovative as you think your Klan jokes and trailer park jokes are, they're not. At all. They just prompt people to respond with equally played out race jokes, because they're equally as preposterous and because they rile you up even further, which is funny because the entire thing is stupid in the first place. And for the record, as a former Catholic I can't join the Klan. Believe me, I've tried.

So in closing, get a sense of humor or get off the Internet.

And Big Daddy Drew - deleting the comments? seriously? Coming from you guys that reeks of hypocrisy on several different levels. The Internet is the last bastion of uncensored media, so don't be gay by censoring it. And don't be black either.

You take away our racial jokes and the next thing you know our porn is gone. And nobody wants that.

Labels: michael martin murphy references two posts in a row?, sorry we didn't get the memo that black jokes are no longer funny, we are being super cereal right now