Harold Reynolds Fired From ESPN Baseball Analyst Job For Hugging A White Girl

You read that correctly. Harold Reynolds was fired from ESPN for, as Fox News reported "a hug." (I don't know if it's Amber from Clearbuck.com in this picture, but I doubt it unless she started working for ESPN.)

A hug.

Now, I don't have to know any more details from here, but they will come out. First, Harold Reynolds is black and a former baseball player. I'll bet the woman he hugged was white, or at least not black. But I'll go with white and for the simple reason of racial boundaries that are maintained primarily by European American women in today's culture and at times this practice takes on absurd proportions.

Why? Well in my view, and from observation and experience with a friend who I was able to sit down with and have a long talk -- we're still great friends -- I know this is the case.

See, some -- not all -- young white women grow up with a confusing message that on the one hand says "date and marry someone white" but on the other hand says "have all people of different colors as friends." And there's where that funny boundary is -- if you have a man as a friend, it's certain to have a chance to become romantic.

That's just a fact.

So for a white woman who feels like she's got to bind herself to an old "white's only" rule, life's hard, but what makes it even harder is when they take out their racial boundary frustration on men -- black men. It becomes even harder for that white woman to maintain her "white guy only" stance in a social sea of more and more white women with black men, and black women with white men. (Which, by the way, will continue as long as the pool of good available straight and employed black men is smaller than it should be. Personally, I think everyone should be forced to date everyone without the race boundary issues -- it makes you a smarter person because of the experience you gain.)

In my case, my friend and I ended up sharing a hotel room and one bed at the Super Bowl a few years ago and it was during that episode that I learned about her and racism and really how much of it was in her. She admittted to a boat load of problems and I was taken aback. But we talked it through and worked things out.

Harold Reynolds apparently didn't have that chance.

Harold Reynolds undoubtedly knew this woman and she had lunch with him. Did she have to be attracted to him? Heck, have fun. Who cares. But a white woman who has racist thoughts and ideas does care -- take a look at this article, or take a look at these exchanges on this message board. I'll bet if the guy at ESPN were white and someone she was attracted to and named Harold Reynolds, you wouldn't be reading this today.

Am I saying that the woman would put up with a sexy hug under those conditions -- well, I'll go a step beyond that and say that she'd initiate it. Think about it. How many office romances do we hear about? How many do you know about? They come about between two people who are attracted to each other in the workplace.

So what happens in the gray area, where the two people are of different colors and the man being the agressor makes an advance that's both kind of wanted, but really not totally wanted by the woman, and for a reason she can't admit -- race.

Think of the number of personal ads where supposedly non-racist women ask for a man of a specific color, rather than just picking "any?" Think about it. What does that woman do -- let's say she's white -- when they have a hard time meeting a straight white guy? Well she'll get angry and frustrated.

Ha. That's a conversation I had with a San Francisco white female friend who took off to Seattle -- which is only about six percent black -- to meet some guy. "See, I'm part of the Angry White Girls. I'm over 30 and I can't find a (white straight) guy here (in San Francisco)." It was another revealing look at how racism clashes with social morals to produce a negative attitude.

Or more to the point, let's say the woman's a young ESPN professional, star struck -- surrounded by all the greats like Chris Berman and Trey Wingo. But they won't ask her to lunch. So she goes to lunch with Harold Reynolds because he's an analyst and he's almost up there with them -- even though he's black. If she's got that kind of closet racist attitude, it's going to be activated and it will come out.

And spill all over Harold Reynolds.

Would it happen to any white male analyst at ESPN? Not as likely by -- a Barry Bonds home run shot.

You may not agree with this, and you'll come up with the usual attempts to explain away what happened, and all of them will avoid the matter of race.

And you would be wrong.