Friday, January 28, 2011

Samoans in the NFL: How Mainstream Media Hurts our Community

By Silicon Valley Debug, Jan 21, 2010 12:57 PM

Editor's note: This piece by Val LiHang Jacobo originally appeared on Silicon Valley De-Bug.

Long Beach, CA - On Sunday, Jan 17, in the height of the NFL Playoffs, 60 Minutes, a CBS evening news show, aired a segment titled "American Samoa: a football island."
  nflsamoa.jpgReporting from American Samoa, 60 Minutes news correspondent Scott Pelley profiled American Samoans, current and past high school football stars, to include the famous Pittsburg Steelers safety, Troy Polomalu. Throughout the segment, Pelley used the growing number of Samoan athletes in the NFL to surmise an argument favoring a Samoan boy over any other "American" boy by an estimated 56%.

This speculation presupposes that Samoan boys born in American Samoa are not American, in spite of their status as U.S. nationals; it also purports a highly divisive narrative against Samoans in the NFL and in general. Pelley employs rather bland centrist tactics by attempting to profile the Samoan race as a biological framework for football players. He points out every obvious disadvantage he could muster against a people from impoverished communities on a small island and further describes young Samoan athletes as having some kind of physiological advantage.
http://ethnoblog.newamericamedia.org/2010/01/samoans-in-the-nfl-how-mainstream-media-hurts-our-community.php

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