Deja vu all over again

Two things happened last week. First, New York Times columnist Charles Blow's son, Tahj, who fit the description of an intruder to a dorm at Yale, where Tahj is a student, was accosted by police at gunpoint -- he was leaving the library -- but eventually let go. Second, in a refrain all too familiar to football fans by now, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon flunked yet another drug test, this time forfeiting the entirety of his 2015-2016 campaign.

The elder Blow erupted on Twitter (I am not here to judge his indignation, just to point it out.) Blow mostly vented about his own ordeal, but his flurry of tweets also contained overt references to recent events in Ferguson, New York City, Cleveland -- wherever encounters between young black men and police have gone awry, sometimes fatally. He also mentions several times that his son studies chemistry -- no, biology, as Blow would later correct himself -- at Yale. This latter point he should have omitted.

It should not matter that Tahj attends Yale. If police encircle a putative criminal, guns blazing, and it turns out they have misidentified him, and if it is always wrong for police to brandish disproportionate firepower, then it should not matter where he goes to school or whether he does at all.

Yet I understand the motivation. It behooved Charles Blow, a black man well-versed in systemic racism, to assert his son's academic prowess as a counterpoint to his blackness. In doing so, he portrayed Tahj as the prototypical straight-A student, not as the stereotypical young black male. Why, after all, would the police ever treat a Yalie like that? The same would not be asked about a "thug," an uneducated young black male. It was about rerouting the discourse.

In the immediate wake of the incident, Blow must not have been concerned with myopia; surely he was preoccupied with consoling his son, and himself, and the rest of his family, not the black community at large. He penned an op-ed in the Times, in which he better articulated his pain, hours after the fact. Now that the dust has settled or is settling, however, it bears examining just how insidious his injection of Yaleness was.

Josh Gordon has been branded every epithet under the sun since he was dismissed from Baylor. Almost all have stuck, as one glance at the comments section of an ESPN article reveals. He is a football player, so we animalize him; he is black, so we dehumanize him; and he has a drug problem, so we insult his intelligence.

Gordon has never had Yale as a fallback, not like Ryan Fitzpatrick's Harvard pedigree or Andrew Luck's degree in architectural design from Stanford. He is triune -- a black, drug-addicted football player -- seemingly bereft of redeeming qualities. His blackness should suffice for us to acknowledge his humanity, but it isn't. Charles Blow unwittingly reinforced that paradigm, the one he has made a career out of excoriating, when he trumpeted that Tahj is an Ivy-Leaguer.

If Gordon's career did not end today, it suffered a major setback. The prognosis is not good. No team, save for the Jets, would gamble on a guy with his checkered past, no matter how enticing his talent. The litany of questions is endlessly long.

But he is not some violent criminal. He is a young black man whose Achilles' Heel is frighteningly prevalent across racial lines. What Josh Gordon is is sick. It's about time we treated his blackness as humanness and him like a patient.