Hazing: Tradition or Bullying

While scrounging ESPN for interesting articles to read, I found yet another article about hazing. Hazing has been all over the sports news stations recently, so I decided to search the word hazing in the search box on ESPN. I found 13 articles written in the past week regarding hazing, 8 of them in response to the Miami Dolphins story.

In the past few weeks, the sports world has been deeply diagnosing the hazing charges of Miami Dolphins offensive guard Richie Incognito. Jonathan Martin, the victim,  released texts and voice mails left by Incognito on Martin's phone containing racial slurs, homophobic content, and slander of Martin's family. The Dolphins immediately suspended Incognito when the horrifying messages were leaked to the news. Incognito then argued that it was tradition to haze young players. Martin then retaliated by understanding the harassment during his rookie year, but he was no longer a first-year player, and felt he deserved his teammates respect. When the problem was reported to the rest of the Dolphins, the overwhelming majority took Incognito's side. They too argued that his incident was tradition, not bullying. While looking at some of the other articles on ESPN, and researching other cases, the argument of tradition vs. bullying almost always comes up. 

While reading all of these articles, I began to think about my older brother, who is currently in the fraternity Theta Chi and the University of Michigan. College fraternities are often associated with hazing as well. In an interview with an anonymous fraternity brother conducted by Cornell University, the tradition argument came up again. He says fraternities haze in order to "Mold good brothers", learn "responsibilities" and to "create links to past generations" (A defense of Hazing-Cornell). The student's entire interview can be found here.  If fraternities use it to create a sense of brotherhood, can sports teams use it for the same function?

I believe that hazing can be successfully incorporated into professional sports. Although some athletes cross the line between hazing and bullying, hazing is a tradition, and should continue to be allowed in sports. Do you agree?

Race implication

After we talked greatly about the racial conflicts in the 19th and 20th century, a news story I stumbled upon intrigued me. The story is that a White Republican won a seat on Houston's district two board of trustee's by misleading voters into believing he was black. Dave Wilson, a middle-aged white man, sent out campaign flyers depicting many African American people on them, and no pictures of himself. These flyers not only contained misleading pictures, but he wrote he was "endorsed by Ron Wilson". Ron is a long time state representative that happens to be black. Underneath this endorsement read the words "Don Wilson and Dave Wilson are cousins". The immediate thought is that this is slander, and Dave Wilson lied to a whole community of voters, but that is not completely true. Dave does have a cousin named Ron Wilson, who currently resides in Iowa. A local news station interviewed Dave about this topic and reported his response:  "He's a nice cousin," Wilson says, suppressing a laugh. "We played baseball in high school together. And he's endorsed me." (WFAA Report- Doug Miller) The rest of the article can be found here. Dave released many more flyers like the one below, in which never say that he is black, but one would immediately assume he was after reading the flyer. As an older White Republican living in an overwhelming black democratic district, it seemed as if he had little hope. He won the election by a mere 26 votes. Wilson even admitted after the fact he never thought he would actually win. After reading about this, I began to wonder if Dave Wilson is in the wrong in this scenario. Of course it doesn't seem very ethical to mislead innocent voters, but he technically did nothing illegal. There are most certainly better, and more fair ways to win an election, but in politics, anything is fair game. I do not believe Wilson did the "wrong" thing. He did what he needed to in order to win, which is the whole point of an election is it not?