worse. but players know not to cross the line. and there are certain teams that don t allow that at all. in tennessee, it wasn t allowed. in seattle, it wasn t allowed. it all depends on the leadership. and there ll be some coaches that say, you know what, this won t happen. and it doesn t matter if he s first round, fourth round, gay or straight. what about the hazing of the team? wlabt the image to have that team. how do you think he enhances or not the image of whatever team signs him. do day get the focus, oh, you re the team that has the gay guy on it. and what is the branding implication of that? there are definitely branding implications. back a decade ago when gay marriage was first being legalized, i was doing consulting work for mass equality, the organization behind it, and we did a series of focus groups. and one of the things we realized that was most striking we talked to a bunch of blue-collar guys, folks you might think, they might be uncomfortable with homosexualit
about what is required to actually have americans be able to really understand what is going on underneath those laws and have develop the will to take them down. can i add something really quickly? i think that it s important to recognize that when a prosecutor walks into prosecute a black defendant, they have the wind at their back. and you know, what i think is implicit here, in both the martin case and the davis case, that they do not have the same sort of capacity to utilize race when the defendant is a white person. well, i want to play just for a moment, and then get pedro s response to it. so this is state attorney john guy, did sort of try to make an argument that brings in some of the elements that we re talking about. he didn t explicitly say race, but let s just listen to part of the closing rebuttal and the way that john guy chose to frame the jordan davis versus michael dunn situation. gangsters.
and some of these initiatives on young men of color are driven with contradictions. right here in new york city, mayor bloomberg put together $127 million initiative to provide tutoring and support services and new employment opportunities to young men of color, even as he rabidly defended stop and frisk as a policy and practice of new york city. so it seems to me that one of the things the president could do is really help people understand that relationship between the individual and the system. and make sure that this particular initiative addresses the system, not just in government, but also in private practice. and i think, just a final thought there. are we putting so much of a burden on one person that we re letting a lot of the people downstream, in terms of local off the hook? well, i think that s an important point. that it s not simply the president, but the president is the leader of the country. so he has to set a tone. and hopefully it s a tone that
kind of formula, frankly, seemed to at least create a reasonable doubt in some jurors minds last night. and lisa, final thought to you. is there a risk that if prosecutors explicitly invoke race, that you will, potentially, get a backlash from white jurors who might resent that framing by the prosecutor. no, because it can be done properly. and i talk in my book about courts where race is talked about in a very effective manner. for example, judges who say during jury instructions, racial bias is a part of our culture. we don t like it, but most of us walk around with explicit racial biases, including me. and i ask you to put that aside during your jury instructions. do not consider that one person, because of the color of his skin, is more threatening and if you have any problem with this concept, consider switching the races of the two men involved here and see if you would come out with the same kind of verdict. this is done in doctor s office, when doctors treat black and whit
connly last week. we suspected that all the scouts knew, because i did make it public to my team, and once scouts came and asked about me, you know, they told about, like, michael sam is gay. but i didn t know how many media actually knew. and i was afraid that it would leak out, without me actually owning my truth. i wanted to let the world know and tell them that, hey, i m gay, let me tell my own story. so, wade, i want to ask you, because you ve had this experience. you came out publicly after your playing career was finished. but is that really the dynamic that you expect to go on with him and his team? when you came out, what was the reaction of your teammates and people you played football? i had so many players who were upset with me, but they were upset i didn t trust and believe in them enough that they would accept me. i had guys saying, man, wade, you could have told me earlier, like, i would have loved you, like, you re a part of my family, which is the nfl family. an