"If it’s an antagonistic fight between two blacks, it’s one thing. But if it’s an antagonistic fight between a white and a black, then you can play the race card tremendously and get an overwhelming return."

Said Don King, quoted in "Mayweather Sees a Racial Double Standard in Megafight vs. McGregor" (NYT).

Both fighters have flung racially tinged barbs at each other — McGregor told Mayweather to “dance for me, boy” and said he himself was half black “from the bellybutton down”; Mayweather said he was fighting “for all the blacks around the world.”...

McGregor has been criticized for some of his racial remarks during the promotion of the fight. He gyrated on stage during a promotional event, calling it “a little present for my beautiful, black female fans.” In an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” McGregor seemed to refer to black boxers in a scene from “Rocky III” as “dancing monkeys.”...

Well, that's all awfully crude. I guess people have a hankering to escape from the bonds of political correctness (which is what Trump perceived and exploited).

(I've been ignoring this thing all week and am just now seeing that it's a boxer boxing a mixed martial arts guy, and the mixed martial arts guy is boxing for the first time.)

The 3 top-rated comments at the NYT are:

1. Why is this even an article? As the article points out, "But one important difference between Mayweather and McGregor, Boyd noted, is that Mayweather has been in serious trouble with the law related to domestic violence and has served jail time." Mayweather says there is a racial double standard, but he has repeatedly beaten and battered women. It doesn't matter what race you are -- if you beat women, and especially when you are a champion boxer, you lose all respect of any decent person. End. Of. Story.

2. Mayweather is the greatest boxer of all time, with a 50-0 record when you include the time he beat the mother of his children in front of his children, leaving her bloody and screaming.

3. Mayweather, lets discuss a real issue. Your tendency to beat down women.

The 85-year-old boxing promotor Don King is going to speak the way he speaks — even in front of that other Don who speaks in his own way — -ald Trump.

Don King — standing in front of Donald Trump and wearing a jacket weirder than a Hillary-Clinton jacket — said:

America needs Donald Trump. We need Donald Trump, especially black people. Because you have got to understand, my black brothers and sisters, they told me, you've got to try to emulate and imitate the white man and then you will be successful. We tried that ... I told Michael Jackson, I said, if you are poor, you are a poor Negro. I would use the n-word. But, if you are rich you're a rich Negro. If you are intelligent, intellectual, you're intellectual Negro. If you are a dancing and sliding and gliding n------, I mean Negro, you're a dancing and sliding and gliding Negro. So dare not alienate because you cannot assimilate. You know, you're going to be a Negro till you die.

I know the mainstream news focused on King's saying of the epithet that's censored in the above transcription — the epithet and the fixed grin on Trump's face in the background, but the old man was making his point, and it's a significant idea that he must have wanted people to think about. Reading it, I think it's perfectly lucid, and I even think he deliberately said the n-word and then corrected it, and he did it to criticize white people, who, he seems to think, are racist even when they show respect to an accomplished black person, such as Michael Jackson.

I saw the clip on television, and it was edited to exclude the name of King's interlocutor, so I was left wondering why he was saying "sliding and gliding." It made King sound wacky and maybe senile. But with the name Michael Jackson in there, the language all fits together, including the challenging of the audience with that word, the word he wanted white people to know is the word he uses — "I would use the n-word" he says before he actually says it — as he imagines how white people are thinking.

My link goes to a Washington Post column — sorry to throw you at the pay wall again — by the "race, gender, immigration and inequality" reporter Janell Ross. Ross seems to credit King with saying something that makes sense, though after aptly paraphrasing it, she appends: "Or, at least, that's what King may have been saying, as best we can tell." Ross proceeds to describe the predictable "outrage and umbrage expressed about King's language and his use of the n-word in a church, of all places." But she's critical of that kind of superficial coverage of racial problems:

That's race coverage around the edges — racial-epithet scandal to possible ethnic- or religious-group uproar. And, it's this coverage that overtakes or actually stands in where a more thoughtful, substantive examination of the undeniable role that race continues to play in housing, lending, employment, health care, education and every other major feature of American life should probably be....