On Jan. 19, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gave a post-game interview that lit up social media with a debate on the politics of respectability. I followed an interaction on Twitter between a local political reporter who's also a 30-year-old African-American man and the senior pastor of Louisville's largest black church and the city's second-largest megachurch, with 8,000 members.
The pastor's first tweet after Sherman's interview invoked Martin Luther King Jr., first saying Sherman's behavior dishonored King's memory and sacrifice, then adding, " 'Yet negroes must b honest...we r often 2 loud and boisterous' M.L. King, Stride toward freedom, p 99." (He shortened the quote to fit Twitter's 140-character limit, but yes, he really included a page number in the tweet.) Others joined the conversation or started conversations of their own by calling Sherman a "thug."
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