Extremely Medial

Having solved every problem in the U.S. legal system, the Justice Department will now mediate a dispute between two high school coaching staffs.

During a Sept. 19 game between Dunbar High in Washington, D.C. and Fort Hill High of eastern Maryland, Dunbar players and coaches stopped play and walked off the field following what they claimed was a stream of racial insults and epithets. Players and coaches from Fort Hill claim they never heard any such talk, and while referees say they didn't hear any, they noted that players may say things when in close contact that referees don't overhear.

My own opinion is that the Fort Hill claim of complete blamelessness is hooey. The use of derogatory racial terms as insults still exists, as do knuckle-draggers who feel they can properly express their enmity, disapproval or supposed superiority by using them. Again, my own opinion of people who do use these insults is that they exhaust all their available brainpower when they direct their bodies to perform the actions that make up speech -- like inhaling and exhaling, shaping the mouth, moving the tongue, etc. -- and they don't have any neurons left to do anything other than sling a racial taunt.

But even so, it's doubtful that there was some kind of systematic mass slandering going on, given that people who consider such behavior acceptable shrink in number every day. And given that four Fort Hill starters are African American.

As to walking off the field...well, I've never been an African American, so I can't say how I would react to hearing the taunts they say they heard. I think we'd all prefer a walkoff to a brawl, though, so the Dunbar players and coaches showed some character there. The Dunbar coach said a few things before the game about how he'd been told he wouldn't get a fair shake playing at Fort Hill, though, so he's got some ownership of the tension level as well.

Seriously, though -- the Justice Department of the United States? I grant that this is an impenetrable he said, he said situation, and that at this point it's impossible to know what happened. The Dunbar coaching staff believes their players were insulted because of their race, and the Fort Hill staff believes their team and town have been slandered by what was very probably said by a few doofuses. But I can't ever remember the Justice Department displaying Solomon's wisdom, and I doubt anything less would truly move through this maze.

The Department does have a division that handles civil rights issues and this definitely qualifies, but since the most likely result is a joint statement that says everybody's going to behave better next time and try to understand each other, why not just cut out the middleman and say that anyway?

After all, we're talking about two high schools whose seniors test hundreds of points below the national average on the SAT even while they boast championship football teams that can afford to travel far outside their districts to play other top teams in order to pocket a couple thousand dollars. I've never been to either school, but don't those kinds of things usually indicate an outsized emphasis on football over classroom? And given how few people play professional football judged against how many people might need to demonstrate some kind of smarts to get and keep a job, isn't there already a problem with these two schools thinking football is a lot more important than it really is?

I guess we're left saying to the government what we usually have to say to the government: You're doing it wrong.