Where Are Tiger's 'Cablinasian' Backers?1920
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12/08/2009 4:07 PM ET By Terence Moore
Terence Moore
Terence Moore is a national columnist for FanHouse
The revelations went from every day to every hour after Eldrick Tont Woods slammed his Escalade into that fire hydrant and tree during Thanksgiving Weekend. Now there isn't a nanosecond that passes without something else happening in the suddenly endless soap opera called As The Tiger Goes From Roaring to Purring.
This feels like that O.J. thing.
Not only that, the coverage of Michael Vick's dogfighting issues was in the vicinity of white Broncos, bloody gloves and Johnny Cochran.
To a lesser extent, there were those controversies for the Keeping It Real King named Allen Iverson, otherwise known as A.I., or The Answer, or just plain trouble, especially since he wasn't practicing. There also was that other initials guy, T.O., and his messes, combined with those of other NFL knuckleheads of yore, ranging from Randy Moss to Chad Whatever He Wishes To Be Called These Days.
Oh, and Barry Bonds was heavily scrutinized after word surfaced that he ripped home runs by doing more than just eating all of his vegetables.
Here's my point: During the early and intense stretches when the media continued to spend every news cycle exposing the personal flaws of O.J., Vick, Iverson and the rest, there was a different response inside the African-American community to those athletes who happen to be black compared to its response to Woods who happens to be, well, I'll get to that in a moment.
Those other athletes had one of the world's most supportive casts. They had an overwhelming number of folks in the African-American community standing firmly and loudly behind them -- no matter what. They had Jesse and Al waiting to pounce in the background, if they hadn't done so already. They had black ministers across the country asking for special prayers in their name. They had folks in barbershops throughout African-American communities talking about conspiracies.
So, blacks don't care what the guy does; as long as he calls himself "black," they'll forgive any sin?
Mostly, despite everything those in black America had seen or heard about the events surrounding O.J., Vick, Iverson and the rest, they had unconditional love.
For Woods, not so much.
Actually, not at all, and Woods has nobody to blame but Woods.
It goes back to April 1997 when he famously took a nine-iron to the face of blacks by telling Oprah Winfrey on her couch that he wasn't black. He said he wasn't white, either. He said, given that his father is black and that his mother is Asian, he spent his youth inventing a word for himself called "Cablinasian."
Just like that, in the hearts of many African-Americans, Woods was on his own. They still cherished his splendid journey in search of becoming more prolific than Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. That's because they still viewed Tiger as black, whether he liked it or not. It's just that, despite O.J. and Bonds, for instance, who joined Woods in having mixed marriages to the chagrin of some, and despite O.J. and Bonds going to extremes to project colorless images throughout their careers, they never pushed away their African-American heritage in a dramatic way. So, blacks are against interracial marriages, but what desperately to claim the offspring of such marriages?
Tiger did. In fact, he did so by mentioning that Cablinasian silliness with his black father smiling by his side on national television.
I was among a slew of African-Americans who weren't amused back then, and I wrote as much as a sports columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Journal Constitution. The headline said everything you need to know about the tone of my column: "Wake up, Tiger. This is America and that means you're black." Tell that to the Hispanics; you're very docile when THEY reject hypodescent and the "black blood" nonsense.
Needless to say, television and radio airways sizzled over my Tiger comments deep in the heart of Dixie. This was before e-mail became popular, so the newspaper was flooded with phone messages, letters and faxes.
In the midst of it all, I got a call at home from Chicago.
Somebody named "Oprah" was on the other line.
"Yes, this really is Oprah," said THAT Oprah, adding that she was a frequent reader of my column. She wanted me to appear on her show the following week to discuss, not only what I wrote about Tiger's "Cablinasian" statement, but about Fuzzy Zoeller's remarks after Woods won the first of his four Masters that spring. Let's just say that Zoeller wasn't exactly gracious after he bombed in Augusta, Ga., back then while the upstart Woods crushed his competition.
As Zoeller headed for the clubhouse, somebody asked his opinion of Tiger's rout. "He's doing quite well, pretty impressive," Zoeller said. "That little boy is driving well, and he's putting well. He's doing everything it takes to win."
Then Zoeller thought about the Master's Club Championship Dinner that features the previous year's winner selecting the menu. Zoeller said, "So you know what you guys do when (Woods) gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year. Got it?"
Afterward, Zoeller smirked, snapped his fingers and added while walking away from the cameras, "Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve."
To translate: Zoeller thought Woods was black -- you know, whether Woods liked it or not, and that's what I said on Oprah's show. In addition, I repeated what I wrote for the Atlanta newspaper, "Tiger Woods is fooling himself to think that just because he's Tiger Woods, he has transcended everything else in society. This is the real world, and in the real world of America, the one-drop rule still applies.
If Zoeller says that blacks are genetically inferior, does that also make it true?
Any "white" who appears to put down uppity mixed-bloods who won't be "black" seems to become a hero to many AAs.
"In the old days, there used to be laws on the books that said, if you have one drop of black blood in you, you are black. Well, that's still unofficially the case in the minds of many in America. One drop of black blood, and you're black.
The great fear of blacks like Terence Moore seems to be that "whites" can't be depended on to put those uppity mixed-bloods down. False history, too. And he still carefully ignores the Latinos.
"Tiger, you're not green. You're not yellow. You're not purple. You're not Asian. You're not Cablinasian. You're black."
Now, 12 years after I delivered those remarks to Tiger, Oprah and the nation, Tiger still is black. That said, whether he views himself as black, Asian, Cablinasian or Martian, it doesn't matter. He is in trouble. He is getting pounded by legitimate and illegitimate reports about everything you can imagine. His slew of mistresses (almost exclusively blondes, just like his wife). The possibility that he was under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs when he crashed his SUV near his home nearly two weeks ago and several non-Tiger news conferences ago. The fact that the image that he carefully nurtured as Wally Cleaver was a fraud.
He really was Eddie Haskell.
It's all a shame, really. So is the fact that most of black couldn't care less, because that's the way Woods wanted it.
So, blacks don't mind serial adultery, as long as Tiger identifies with their "race"?
Gosh.Yeah, this article,opinion by Moore is true that some Black Amer. in power, those who have jobs in media and politics support Blacks no matter what if they are Black meaning going as Black ,supporting Black causes,etc.
Tiger, no, he is not getting any Black support.
My opinion, he should not get any Black, Swedish,Thai,no support. What this guy did,I am really saddened about because I really thought Tiger Woods was living a right life.
I really thought he had a handle on his fame and on his life.
Fooled everybody. It is really sad.
Last edited by Creole GAL on Thu 17 Dec 2009 06:31; edited 1 time in total
When a mixed person writes an opinion piece should we assume that this person speaks for a majority of mixed people? I know better than to even ask about Whites - apparently they only speak for themselves! All of the White columnists and blogger ripping Tiger a new one aren't falling all over each other to take the new celebrity target down?
When did Terence Moore become a spokesperson for the African American majority? Why are questions being posed about "Blacks" and to "Blacks" instead of to the columnist?
Tiger Woods’ Troubles Widen His Distance From Some Black Americans
By Associated Press December 7, 2009 10:14 am
Amid all the headlines generated by Tiger Woods’ troubles — the puzzling car accident, the suggestions of marital turmoil and multiple mistresses — little attention has been given to the race of the women linked with the world’s greatest golfer.
Except in the black community.
When three white women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods’ already tenuous standing among many blacks took a beating.
RELATED: Three More Alleged Tiger Woods Mistresses Go Public
On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week.
“Thankfully, Tiger, you didn’t marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas,” one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him.
“The Grinch’s Theme Song” didn’t stop there: “The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaant?”
As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: “If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great’s accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere.”
The darts reflect blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America’s whitest sports and assumed the mantle of the world’s most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.
But Woods has declined to identify himself as black, and famously chose the term “Cablinasian” (Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian) to describe the racial mixture he inherited from his African-American father and Thai mother.
This vexed some blacks, but it hasn’t stopped them from claiming Woods as one of their own. Or from disapproving of his marriage to Elin Nordegren, despite blacks’ historical fight against white racist opponents of mixed marriage.
On the one hand, Ebonie Johnson Cooper doesn’t care that Tiger Woods’ wife and alleged mistresses are white because Woods is “quote-unquote not really black.”
“But at the same time we still see him as a black man with a white woman, and it makes a difference,” said Johnson Cooper, a 26-year-old African-American from New York City. “There’s just this preservation thing we have among one another. We like to see each other with each other.”
Black women have long felt slighted by the tendency of famous black men to pair with white women, and many have a list of current transgressors at the ready.
“We’ve discussed this for years among black women,” said Denene Millner, author of several books on black relationships. “Why is it when they get to this level … they tend to go directly for the nearest blonde?”
This tendency may be more prominent due to a relative lack of interracial marriages among average blacks. Although a recent Pew poll showed that 94 percent of blacks say it’s all right for blacks and whites to date, a study published this year in Sociological Quarterly showed that blacks are less likely to actually date outside their race than are other groups.
RELATED: Woods Allegedly Paid Woman For Her Silence On Affair
“There is a call for loyalty that is stronger in some ways than in other racial communities,” said the author of the study, George Yancey, a sociology professor at the University of North Texas and author of the book “Just Don’t Marry One.”
The color of one’s companion has long been a major measure of “blackness” — which is a big reason why the biracial Barack Obama was able to fend off early questions about his black authenticity.
“Had Barack had a white wife, I would have thought twice about voting for him,” Johnson Cooper said.
So do Woods’ women say something about the intensely private golfer’s views on race?
“I would like to say no, but I think it garners a bit of a yes,” Johnson Cooper said.
Carmen Van Kerckhove, founder of the race-meets-pop-culture blog Racialicious, said there have been frequent discussions on her site about the fine line between preference and fetish.
“Is there any difference between a white guy with a thing for blondes, and a non-white guy with a thing for blondes?” asked Van Kerckhove, who has a Chinese mother, a Belgian father and a husband born in America to parents from Benin.
She claims that Asians don’t fully embrace Woods, either.
“There are two layers of suspicion toward him,” Van Kerkhove said. “One toward the apparent pattern in the race of his partners, and the second in the way he sees himself. … People have been giving him the side-eye for a while.”
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a mate who shares your culture, as long as it’s for the right reasons, the comedienne Sheryl Underwood said after unleashing a withering Woods monologue on Tom Joyner’s radio show.
“Would we question when a Jewish person wants to marry other Jewish people?” she said in an interview. “It’s not racist. It’s not bigotry. It’s cultural pride.”
“The issue comes in when you choose something white because you think it’s better,” Underwood said. “And then you never date a black woman or a woman of color or you never sample the greatness of the international buffet of human beings. If you never do that, we got a problem.”
Posted: Fri 11 Dec 2009 23:05 Post subject: Terence Moore
sagascend wrote:
When a mixed person writes an opinion piece should we assume that this person speaks for a majority of mixed people? I know better than to even ask about Whites - apparently they only speak for themselves! All of the White columnists and blogger ripping Tiger a new one aren't falling all over each other to take the new celebrity target down?
When did Terence Moore become a spokesperson for the African American majority? Why are questions being posed about "Blacks" and to "Blacks" instead of to the columnist?
The comments ARE directed at Moore, pointing out the illogic of his statements.
Posted: Sun 13 Dec 2009 14:46 Post subject: Re: Terence Moore
Powell wrote:
sagascend wrote:
When a mixed person writes an opinion piece should we assume that this person speaks for a majority of mixed people? I know better than to even ask about Whites - apparently they only speak for themselves! All of the White columnists and blogger ripping Tiger a new one aren't falling all over each other to take the new celebrity target down?
When did Terence Moore become a spokesperson for the African American majority? Why are questions being posed about "Blacks" and to "Blacks" instead of to the columnist?
The comments ARE directed at Moore, pointing out the illogic of his statements.
It reads more like Moore is used as a proxy to pose these questions to "Blacks." In fact, Moore is expressing his own beliefs and should not be held up as some sort of spokesperson. Why aggrandize this person and inflate his importance?
I'm white and I think Tiger Woods is a jerk who cheated on his wife and exposed her to STDs. I think golf is boring. Physically he looks pretty mixed to me, probably more Asian than anything else. The guy's half Thai and Chinese. It's arrogant for someone to demand that he identify as black alone or that he date or marry women he isn't attracted to, for whatever reason. He apparently likes blondes. So what? It wouldn't be anyone's business if he liked only black women or only Hispanic women or only Chinese women either. And people who support a creep like O.J. who probably murdered two people just for the sake of his race are pretty damned sad. A person's actions should count for a hell of a lot more than his having the same skin color as you. What Tiger Woods did to his wife and children is bad and would be no matter what race he identified as.
I'm moderating this forum in Frank's absence. I would ask all posters to remember that the historical fora are for scholarly discussions (rather than opining). Let's take care to keep this discussion to the historical significance of the U.S. color line rather than about Tiger Woods' marital indiscretions (however frequent) and advocating for a particular identity to which he should or should not ascribe. In fact, I'm doubtful that this topic can even help us meet the objective of discussing the U.S. color line from an academic perspective.
So let's tread carefully, otherwise I'll close it here and find a place to relocate.
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