The interesting question is – are racial barriers or gender barriers broken down faster with or without the free market?

touche. I wasn’t following the angle whereby Chapman dismissed the modern success of black quarterbacks as a consequence of the free market. I agree that this is a very wrong and pernicious message to convey if he did it intentionally. I mainly aimed to address the statement summarized in his concluding paragraph, which seems a more innocent point, although it now seems to be not the whole story.

p.s. — i’m dying to cut chapman some slack since he writes for my favorite newspaper and baseball team owning organization. So maybe it isn’t completely fair to associate him so closely with Nat’l Review. After all, he did come to Chicago from the New Republic, and writes for Slate as well, so he may not be totally without values

Chris, Chapman’s article argues that “sentiment” — which is an interesting category under which to include “racism,” when you think about it — “doesn’t count for much in the NFL,” and therefore that the media should quit whining about the unfair treatment of black quarterbacks. As if racism, which was perfectly obvious as little as ten or twenty years ago, had suddenly vanished to be replaced by a color-blind devotion to winning. And as if this vanishing were not due to the sacrifices and perseverance of people like Moon, but simply to the genius of the free market. Which seems awfully simplistic and inflammatory to me. I have never noticed any refusal to acknowledge when progress is being made, nor does it sound like a problem I’d be writing columns about if my magazine had stubbornly been denying the existence of any problem against which it was necessary to make progress in the first place.

jb, I use them when they were in the original article from which I cut and pasted the quote, and to which I linked. Nothing more delicate than that.

If you care to explain when & why you use them, I’d love to hear it.