During an ESPN Radio Broadcast, Michael Irvin was asked to comment on the success of Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. Irvin, never at a loss for words, offered the following:

“Somewhere, there are some brothers in that line. I don’t know who saw what, where. His great, great, great, great grandma ran over in the hood, or something went down.”

Dan Patrick, clearly nervous about the direction that Irvin was taking, desperately tried to give Irvin an out: “That’s the only way to be a great athlete?”

“No,” Irvin replied, “that’s not the only way. But it’s certainly one way. Great, great, great, great grandma pulled one of them studs up outta the barn. ‘Come here for a second.’ You know, they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day. Something like that.”

Naturally, Irvin’s comments invoked memories of Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder’s famous comentary about Black athletes.Within hours, people all over the country were calling for Irvin’s head. “If he were White, he would have been fired,” was the most frequently articulated sentiment from the White mainstream. After all, Snyder was fired from CBS after suggested that the superiority of Black athletes was due to breeding practices during slavery. (”During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid—that’s where it all started.”) Thus, the prevailing logic is that Irvin’s relatively light punishment –he was given a verbal warning– was linked to “reverse racism.”

First, there is a huge difference between Irvin’s bad joke and Snyder’s quasi-historical analysis of racial genetics. This isn’t to excuse Irvin’s words, which were unprofessional and innappropriate, but to place them in their appropriate context. Also, even if they had said the exact same thing, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should receive the same punishment. The reality is that we live in a world that assigns value, meaning, power, and privilege differentially along racial lines. As such, there are certain things that Black people can and should say –in response to such inequality– that are nonetheless off-limits to White people.

That said, I don’t think Snyder or Irvin should have been fired for their comments. Although I don’t buy Irvin or Snyder’s simplistic analysis –which has been echoed in books like “Darwin’s Athletes”– they certainly have a right to express their opinions. If Irvin owes anyone an apology it should be Tony Romo for making potentially offensive and unsubstantiated statements about his particular ancestor. That said, African people were enslaved, raped, and bred in order to create more productive slave labor. Irvin’s allusion to this reality, however crude, shouldn’t be used as a red herring that distracts us from seriously confronting this historical truth.

There are plenty of reason to be mad at Michael Irvin. But forcing Americans to remember the legacy of White supremacy isn’t one of them.