Baffoe: To Tweet Or Not To Tweet? That Is The Question For Athletes

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) To tweet or not to tweet?

For me, it's not much of a question. I'm addicted to the self-serving mini-rushes of people paying attention to my highly suspect opinions.

But I'm also a columnist. Opinions, be they firing a coach or hot dog/sandwich politics, are my milieu.

With athletes, there's a conundrum. Some people fall into the camp of wanting athletes to just #sticktosports. Play the game, talk in cliches about the game, rinse, repeat.

Others, like myself, genuinely appreciate a player who breaks from the robotics. Speak your mind. Stretch comedic chops like Brandon McCarthy. Refuse to suffer media fools like Russell Westbrook. Be a damn human beyond weekend national TV feature pieces about your dead mentor or disabled sibling.

But if I'm asking for humanity, I'm asking for flaws. And if I'm asking for flaws, I'm going to get words from athletes -- people who have often had significant portions of their lives and worldviews cultivated in certain bubbles -- that make me regress to Erik Malinowski's memic Twitter advice.

With a demand for "keeping it real," I get Curt Schilling (if he hadn't blocked me, I mean). I get Marcus Vick. And I get many shades of gray of political incorrectness in between.

So when I saw White Sox outfielder Adam Eaton delving into sociopolitical commentary on the hot button Oscars on Sunday night, I cringed and then dealt with uncomfortableness the only way I know how -- sarcasm.

The now-deleted tweet from Spanky was bad, dumb, endemic of privileged white athletes, whatever admonishment you wish to apply. It wasn't overtly racist, and I assume Eaton isn't a bad person. He had a very human moment -- a very white human moment -- on Twitter. He still has certain societal responsibilities he didn't live up to, though. Ignorance isn't your fault until you choose it willfully.

I've been there. Not "there" there. Not "Hey, black people, why are you doing this stuff?" there. But I've been there.

You hit "Tweet" with a bit of self-satisfaction that you've added productively to the collective dialogue about something, but you almost immediately hear a record skip and the Twitterverse room's heads all turn sternly toward you. Everyone asks "What the hell, dude?" or starts making jokes at your expense. Your pride is struck a blow of rejection, which leads to panic. Panic leads to a sudden struggle to save yourself instead of considering why the blowback is happening.

In Eaton's case, he couldn't understand why people -- predominantly those whose entire lives are lived through a lens of race and whose very being is systematically (de)valued based on race -- were taking issue with a systematic problem in an industry.

That right there is the very essence of privilege. There's no malice in Eaton's thoughts, but he's a product of never having to deal with large-scale discrimination, and when observing a protest about it from afar, he expresses confusion. That confusion isn't his fault, per se, but the sense of entitlement he feels that he can dismiss such an important sociopolitical topic with the overly simplified solution of "Let's just all get along, right?" is a problem he and many others with a smaller Twitter following need to understand.

To Eaton's credit, he didn't take up arms against a sea of troubles and go a typical social media route of insulting critics and being standoffish and refusing to dialogue. He met with media Monday and explained himself.

"Talking to the guys in the clubhouse," Eaton said in a video posted by the Tribune, "may be African American, Latin American, of all descent … they didn't see any problem with the tweet. I asked them all, and they laughed about it and said it's one of those things that could get traction either way."

"I apologize wholeheartedly," Eaton said. "I didn't mean anything by it."

Again, this doesn't seem to be a John Rocker situation, and Eaton seems genuinely curious and willing to learn.

"It questions my role on there for sure," he said about how he'd approach social media going forward. "I may stay back a bit or give it to somebody else."

To tweet or not to tweet? Not to tweet then. But is that a proper solution to something like this? Shutting up and listening is important. Shutting down is counterproductive.

In doing my best to not apologize for a wealthy tone-deaf white guy, what's left of the shreds of idealism in me -- perhaps that same dangerous oblivious idealism that got Eaton here in the first place -- thinks this can be a teaching moment from him and the rest of us privileged folk (and you are privileged, person who shares certain traits with Adam Eaton).

So then I guess that such a teachable moment is a flower that can grow from the manure of sports figures keeping it just a bit too real. And to answer the original question then, tweet, sports figures.

Don't always tweet, and give some pause before you're forcibly shuffled off the Twitter coil. But don't never tweet.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.