Commentary; Race, Sex and Monday Night Football

Summary

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The brouhaha over actress Nicollette Sheridan, star of "Desperate Housewives," seducing Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in the locker room prior to a recent Monday Night Football game is taking on a life of its own. This uneasiness over the commercial for one of ABC's hottest shows extends beyond what is appropriate viewing on network television. It goes to the core of white supremacists' greatest fear--a sexual union between a Black man and a white woman.

Gunnar Myrdal, in his landmark study, "American Dilemma," published in 1944, wrote about the South's "fixation on the purity of white womanhood." He said, "The South has an obsession with sex which helps to make this region quite irrational in dealing with Negroes generally..."

Three years later, in Monroe, N.C., two Black boys--Fuzzy Simpson, 7, and Hanover Thompson, 9, were invited to join a group of five white children, including two girls. One of the girls remembered that she had played with Hanover when his mother worked as a maid in her family's house. Overjoyed at being reunited with her old playmate, she kissed him on the cheek. According to Randall Kennedy, who recounts the incident in his book, "Interracial Intimacies," when the girl innocently told her mother, the two boys were arrested and convicted of attempted rape. The Juvenile Court sentenced Fuzzy to 12 years in jail and Hanover to 14. Because of a public outcry, President Eisenhower persuaded the governor to intervene.

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Commentary; Race, Sex and Monday Night Football

The brouhaha over actress Nicollette Sheridan, star of "Desperate Housewives," seducing Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in the locker room prior to a recent Monday Night Football game is taking on a life of its own...

See the full content of this document

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