With the end of the year approaching, Grantland, along with basically every other publication out there, has started to run some reflections on the past eleven months. That’s fortuitous timing for a reflection on the Ray Rice domestic violence story that has spanned almost all of 2014. The story is ongoing; Rice was just reinstated after winning an appeal of the NFL’s attempt to suspend him indefinitely. He won’t return to the playing field immediately or perhaps ever because his former team cut him while he was suspended, but there’s a good chance that some team will hire him again. Following the ruling on Rice’s suspension, the majority of the stories were about how poor NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, was made to look by having his suspension overturned. Brian Phillips, one of my favorite writers, argues a different case in this look back on the Ray Rice story. It’s not just Goodell who should be ashamed, it’s all of us who were only outraged once we saw the infamous video of Rice assaulting his then fiancee in an elevator.
The Dark Room
by Brian Phillips for Grantland
For the Rice tape to help you understand the extent of the domestic-violence problem in the United States, you have to imagine that TMZ kept posting videos — that it posted one two seconds later, in fact, and another one three seconds after that. It started throwing up 24 videos a minute, faster than you could play them, too fast for you to keep up. In three of these videos during the first day, you could watch a woman being murdered by her partner. Then three more on the second day. And so on. You kept playing them; TMZ kept churning out GIFs. You watched a million videos a month. Twelve million in the first year. And the videos kept coming.
Roger Goodell should lose his job. But if you’re angry enough to want Goodell fired, shouldn’t you be angry enough to think about the other victims of violence? To talk about them?