RGIII Says Rob Parker, Black Community Ruined His Reputation Because He Married A White Woman

In 2012, a then-ESPN commentator named Rob Parker called Robert Griffin III a "cornball brother" in a segment on "First Take" with Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless. Parker added that the then-rookie quarterback was "not one of us," a clear nod to questions about his blackness.

Griffin says that segment was the root of his remarks last week about "keeping politics out of sports," to which fellow sports commentators took offense. He claims Parker's comments were in reference to Griffin having a white fiancée, a frequent point of contention among the black community online.

"Do you know what [Parker's] point was for asking that question? It had nothing to do with sports. It had nothing to do with my performance on the field. It was because my fiancée was white," Griffin told Stephen A. Smith on the latter's podcast.

"When people in the black community disagree with me, what do they do? They start posting Rob Parker memes. That’s why I feel sports shows on television should be about sports and not made political."

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There is a lot here. Let's take it in steps.

Griffin posted on X that "Sports shows on TV should be about sports not politics" after several ESPN shows feigned fierce outrage over the Department of Defense accidentally removing an article about Jackie Robinson during a rushed purge of all DEI-related content. More on that here.

So, while Griffin is right – sports shows should focus on sports, not politics – no one honest person believes his criticism was in reference to comments Rob Parker made 13 years ago.

RGIII badly wants to be among the cool kids of sports media. He wants to be named alongside Mina Kimes as one of Awful Announcing's year-end winners in sports media. And seeing those cool kids criticize him last week had to sting. Hence, playing the victim card by bringing up Parker calling him a "cornball" brother over a decade ago.

That said, there's a lengthy track record of the online black community disowning black sports commentators for daring to have romantic relationships with white people. It happened to Sage Steele, Malika Andrews, Rashard Mendenhall, and Mark Jones as well.

(Note: Mark Jones, Griffin's former college football broadcast partner, has spent the past five years trying to make up for marrying a white woman by posting openly racist tweets about white people.)

Belittling a black person for marrying a white person is obviously wrong and, by definition, racist. The real kind of racism, that is. Not the kind Griffin continues to pretend exists against Lamar Jackson, with whom he is weirdly infatuated.

It also goes without saying that Rob Parker is a buffoon. Luckily, his questioning of Griffin's blackness effectively ended his career in sports media. (He now runs a racially obsessive baseball blog called MLBbro. He's irrelevant. 

In fact, anyone who polices "blackness" should be rendered irrelevant.

As Stacy Washington of SiriusXM explains, "blackness" is not real. It is a made-up term to control black people by pressuring them to act and think a certain way. Pressure to succumb to "blackness" leads black Americans to isolate themselves and further divides society across racial lines.

"You can’t find a single instance of someone questioning my blackness before that conversation happened on First Take," Griffin concluded in the interview with Smith. 

Along with politics, questioning "blackness" has no place on sports-talk television.