They See Through a Glass Barkley

November 22, 2002

Here's what passes for telling irony in Slate:

In the notorious Sports Illustrated cover article last year, for which [Charles Barkley] posed breaking out of slave's chains, he said, "Sports are a detriment to blacks, not a positive. You have a society now where every black kid in the country thinks the only way he can be successful is through athletics." Yet he, of course, is one of the very most omnipresent commercials for this idea of success-through-sports.

These Slate reassessments of various pop figures tend to be tiresome, but this one is at its Slatiest when it concludes that since Barkley isn't a Republican or a Democrat, he must not have any political beliefs.