Football Player Accused Of Harassment Says He "Doesn't Even Like Black Girls"

When a waitress at the W hotel accused him of fondling her breast after getting permission to stick his credit card in her blouse, Albert Haynesworth, a player for the Washington Redskins player, had to make a bad situation worse. He’s been indicted on one charge of sexual abuse, and the indictment contains the following:

Haynesworth told a security guard, “I didn’t touch her” and that the waitress was “a little black girl” and he “doesn’t even like black girls.” Later, according to the indictment, Hanyesworth told detectives “I know what this is about, she is just upset I have a white girlfriend. I couldn’t tell you the last time I dated a black girl. She was trying to get with me.”

Victim-blaming? Check. Internalized racism? Check times one thousand. DCentric points out that the idea of athletes dating women who are perceived as white, like the Kardashians, is a sensitive one. They also point out that,

If you look at the country as a whole, interracial dating and marriage is becoming more acceptable: a record 14.6 percent of new marriages in 2008 were interracial. But, 22 percent of black men married someone outside of their race, compared to 9 percent of black women who did so. And white-black pairings overall only made up 11 percent of those 2008 interracial marriages.

While individual dating choices are complex and by definition personal, in the aggregate those are striking numbers. And in particular Haynesworth sounds like he has a lot of self-critical thinking to do about absorbing cultural messages about the inferiority of black women, and sexist entitlement to boot.

Black Football Players And White Women: Albert Haynesworth’s Defense [DCentric via Ta-Nehisi Coates]
Related: Debuning Common Takes On The Albert Haynesworth Sex Abuse Allegations [TBD]