We Interrupt this Broadcast to Bring You This Senseless, Racist Bullshit NuDeadspin Allowed Rob Parker to Put On Their Formerly Good Website

It says a lot about how little I’ve gone to Deadspin since the last time I wrote about Deadspin that I hadn’t even noticed that Rob “RGIII is a cornball brother” Parker wrote what may be the worst, most inappropriately timed article in the history of the internet in this darkest timeline.

It goes without saying that, if Deadspin were still actually Deadspin, someone like Rob Parker wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near it. Actual Deadspin frequently targeted Rob Parker in the jobs as people who could actually be openly critical of other media corporations and members of the sports media. Parker has no clout, no standing, and zero authority to be writing about anything related to black people. Parker was, is, and will remain a neverwas.

In other words, he’s perfect fodder for NuDeadspin; Parker is a veritable hot take factory for a website that is also trumpeting a headline screaming “Tiger Woods Hates Being Black“. NuDeadspin has long since given up the pretense that it is anything other than a second rate Barstool, filtered through a left-ish lens. But ultimately, it’s hoping to cultivate the same sort of audience of disaffected white dudes who would much rather wonder why black quarterbacks aren’t saying more than wondering why they should have to say anything at all.

Rob Parker knows that it’s not the job of black people to explain why George Floyd’s lynching at the hands of a Minneapolis cop is bad. Black people have been screaming about police brutality since the first slave tried to runaway. We’ve protested. We’ve marched. We’ve rioted. We’ve gone to governments and asked for change, we’ve taken knees. We’ve watched too many black mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and childrens and aunts and uncles and nieces on television, crying out for justice. We’ve made music about it, and plays, and movies, written numerous books. 9 times out of 10 our calls are met with the resounding silence from white people, unwilling to look away from whatever has distracted them to the realities of the world.

This time is different. There is no question about whether or not Floyd deserved to be murdered by the police. There is very little white people can do but to take this latest lynching for what it is. People watched a man die in real time while he said “I can’t breathe” and people told the murderer to stop to no avail. The video is what it is.

What the fuck is DeShaun Watson making a statement going to do about it, Rob?

But that’s not really what the article’s purpose is. You don’t hire b-list former ESPNer Rob Parker because you want introspection and insight. You hire him because him writing this article might scrape and scrounge a few more clicks together from your deader than dead formerly decently profitable website. You hire him because you grew your leaves under the harsh light of mid-2000s content creation, where all it took to make money was saying enough dumb shit loud enough that even the angry, ravenous hordes would come to your site just to hate-read whatever garbage you had written.

But that’s not the internet as it exists today. Particularly in sports coverage, there are tons of compartmentalized sites that cater to one kind of reader and one kind of reader only. If you can’t narrow your focus to a certain kind of reader, it doesn’t matter how broad you’re being or how blatantly you try to court clicks; you end up deader than dead. People read what they’re going to read, and unless you have something new or insightful to bring to the conversation, you’re never going to be able to well and truly stand out from the crowd of sports focused verticals.

You can see what G/O Media thinks Deadspin was just by looking at their front page. As Black Rod pointed out, if you squint just right, you could be fooled into thinking that it was Deadspin; slightly worse Deadspin, but Deadspin nonetheless. It’s only once you read it’s hollow and frankly boring sports takes that you realize that what the Herbs who run the company think Deadspin was, was simply a more leftist Barstool.

It’s Deadspin from a person who only ever read the headlines.

It’s hired black writers, but those writers aren’t able to imbue their own perspectives as members of the community into their writing, to take a more nuanced approach to what being a black sports fan who’s a fan of black players in a society run almost exclusively by white ownership. They tell you what happened, but not why it’s happening, and what it means to them personally. And they turn off the comments section, to ensure it’s as impossible to engage with the content as possible. It’s boilerplate. You could train AI to write what Deadspin’s black writers have written.

And Rob Parker? Rob Parker has never been anything other than a B-level provocateur, a charisma-less Stephen A. Smith, a man who aspires to be Jason Whitlock but who’s too much a coward to forgo all of his shame. I’m sure G/O Media’s editorial director Jim Rich convinced his employers that bringing in someone like Parker, a man with a whole 55,400 Twitter followers and who regularly appears on a sports network that no one watched even before their were no sports to watch, was some sort of great get that would bring an air of legitimacy to the site.

Head Herb at G/O Media Jim Spanfeller took time out of his busy schedule of ruining all of your old favorite websites to send a statement to his many employees, one of whom already pointed out how fucking stupid this was:

To steal a phrase, the caucasity of Spanfeller’s words jump off the page. He, like many white people, has taken the brutal murder and death of a black man by a police state trained to view people of color as enemy combatants and made it all about him.

I’m not saying Jim Spanfeller supports All Lives Matter, but I am saying he’s All Lives Matter adjacent.

And while he pays lip service to supporting daring work, he allows Deadspin to traffic in cheap heat, denigrating black athletes for not doing the work that white people should have been doing for centuries. He hires garbage hot take artists and allows them to attack black people. He hires black writers but muzzles them. He takes a moment of black pain and tries to make it about white triumphant. (In a more perfect union, venture capitalist assholes wouldn’t be able to by good websites, saddle them debt, slap ads and autoplay videos on everything, and then make off with the profits before the site dies for good.)

Deadspin was a good website. It’s hard to imagine any of the previous writers this side of Clay Travis trafficking in the hateful bullshit that’s on display today. It’s harder still to imagine they’d even entertain the idea of hiring someone with the less-than-zero good takes of Rob Parker. And while Deadspin was heavy on a mostly white, mostly cisgendered, mostly straight, very New York centered view of liberalism, they nevertheless would have never breached this topic, even if one of their writers had wanted to. They would have had the good sense not to.

Because that same mostly white, mostly cisgendered, mostly straight, very New York group of people also intrinsically understood what white privilege was, what it meant, and that their arrows were better off being pointed at those in power than those suffering under oppression, whether the oppressed were athletes, black people, or both.

I have no doubts that NuDeadspin will continue to be horrible in ways that are yet to be conceived of by the two rich dickheads. I can only hope that it’s preventable-yet-inevitable death comes quickly, so shit like this never happens again.