It's Time to Stop Giving Charles Barkley a Free Pass Just Because He's Entertaining

Charisma and affability can go a hell of a long way in earning you the benefit of the doubt, especially if you're in *lively jazz music plays* SHOWBIZ, BABY, SHOWBIZ! We don't ever want to believe that the playful, viral oh-my-god-can-you-believe-what-he-said types out there are capable of any manner of consequential human error, much less malice.

And that's why we've spent years giving Charles Barkley a free pass. Because he isn't just a lovable goof; he's THE lovable goof. He's the clown prince of sports media, a folk hero whose persona transcends even his all-time great basketball career.

But after his latest display of what is unfortunately a brutal truth about the man's character, our days of lionizing the Chuckster without the necessary caveats absolutely need to be over.

This doesn't mean Turner Sports has to fire Barkley right this minute (though it's their prerogative either way), or that "Inside the NBA" should get axed for a midseason replacement starring John Stamos. It doesn't mean Barkley should be publicly shamed from every rooftop or expurgated from the pages of western cultural history. He's not "canceled," people.

It just means we have to recalibrate, in long-overdue fashion, his bafflingly bulletproof status in our consciousness -- a status he hasn't earned. In the big picture, in fact, Axios reporter Alexi McCammond's anecdote didn't come out of nowhere.

And further:

And further:

It must be noted that there's been a real backlash against McCammond for bringing this to light, and very little of it is due to the fact that Barkley's offending comment was meant to be off the record. Rather, the often-shouted refrain today has been that this woman simply can't take a joke (just take a quick look at the Twitter machine).

Well, allow Sir Charles to be the first to say that what he said wasn't funny, and should never have seen the light of day in the first place.

Sidebar: take all your lame, sneering "if women really want equality, then they need to be able to take this joke" arguments and shove 'em. For men to treat women exactly the way they might treat other men *to the letter* would be dangerous to the point of horror. As Margaret Atwood wrote, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

This ultimately isn't about Alexi McCammond's experience in a vaccum, and I don't anticipate her story being some kind of social tipping point. But if we can use this tasteless moment to chip away at America's gleefully uncritical celebrity hero worship, then we've made a little progress here.

Again, Barkely isn't canceled. We don't have to live in a world in which every person is either the GOAT or they're trash and there's zero room for nuance. Life itself contains far more room for evaluation than the reductiveness of, say, Twitter, can allow for.

But let's stop pretending that Chuck is anything more than a retired star athlete with a checkered history who gets paid to say funny and occasionally offensive things on camera.

To pretend otherwise with him or anyone else is dangerous, and in the worst of cases, will end up getting someone seriously hurt.