According to Dallas hip hop radio station morning shows, Michael Vick’s prosecution is a racial issue. In no less than three days I’ve heard the following sentiments, which nearly made me rip out my radio on the tollway:

“Hey come on, everybody done run over a dog and drove away, right?”

“Well, all dogs go to heaven, don’t they?”

“White people go and kill deer and nobody says nothing.”

“Traditionally, rich white people hunt. Dog fighting is a poor man’s sport.”

First of all, there are white people who fight dogs and black people who hunt. If anything, hunting is traditionally a poor man’s sport. And did we forget Michael Vick is RICH?

Why is it that when an African American commits a crime, public voices of the African American community (in this case, hip hop DJs) throw up their hands and cry, “The man! The man is keeping us down! White people do this all the time and don’t go to jail!” I can’t help but feel that race relations are held back in our country by these ignorant DJs who feed racial division to an ignorant public who pass it on to their children.

What the DJs never mentioned is the fact that deer are raised in the wild, where the code is survival of the fittest. I am not a hunter or a proponent of hunting. But the simple fact is this: a deer isn’t generally an easy kill. They’re not going to walk up to you, wag their tail and allow you to hang them, drown them or electrocute them. It’s probably difficult to get a deer to even come near you unless you’ve covered yourself with its urine.

This is probably the saddest part of the entire story — that in being domesticated, dogs become a type of animal that wholly trusts its owner. I imagine that each one of Michael Vick’s dogs willingly walked to a human they felt safe with, hoping for comfort after a fight and were instead tortured and killed.

Now… torture? That’s a white man’s sport.