Cowboys’ tight end Martellus Bennett says the YouTube video he and his brother filmed about “Black Olympics” isn’t offensive and states that he and his sibling were “just having a little fun.”
Bennett drew scorn earlier this week from Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock for his video, in which he and his brother Michael, a rookie for the Seattle Seahawks, competed eating fried chicken and watermelon and drinking Kool-Aid.
Bennett told the Michael Irvin radio show on Monday that he didn’t intend to offend others, but doesn’t think the video was racially insensitive.
“I don’t really think it’s offensive,” Bennett told Irvin. “It depends on your sense of humor and how you look at things. We were just having fun and it was very funny for me and my brothers, when I look at it I just can’t stop laughing. If someone takes offense, I apologize. That wasn’t my intention. It was just us having fun.”
Bennett told Irvin he would not have a problem with a white person acting out something like the “Black Olympics.”
“There’s white comedians that do stuff like that all the time,” he said. “I think it’s funny to attack stereotypes. It’s funny how people just put people in a certain light and say that’s what all the people do of a certain race or particular person, so it’s fun to attack those stereotypes.”
Everyone has a different sense of humor and what Bennett should keep in mind is that we live in a day and age where people are hypersensitive about everything. He ran the risk of offending people when he shot this video and now he has to live with the attention and criticism it’s getting. That’s just the nature of the beast.
What he should be concerned with is how the video represents him as a person and how it makes the Cowboys and NFL look. Bennett isn’t Dave Chappelle, who makes a living off of offbeat sketches – he’s a football player. He should keep in mind that something like this brings negative attention to the Cowboys and to the NFL, and it could also set his career back because it shows immaturity on his part.
In the end, is doing a video like this (or any other video for that matter, seeing as how he also did a YouTube rap video before the “Black Olympics”) worth it?
