The Interviews: First up, Deadspin's Will Leitch

Being relative newcomers to the sports blogging world, we felt that as part of our goal of achieving world sports blog domination, it would be in our best interests to do a few important things:

i) Imitate other blogs that have made a name for themselves by interviewing sports journalists (ie, thebiglead and the big picture)

ii) Gain insight into the inner minds of some of the more relevent and successful sports bloggers out there; so we can measure the competition, find their weaknesses and exploit them for the benefit of the Nation.

With that in mind, we secured a short interview with Will Leitch.

Mr. Leitch is the man behind deadspin , one of the most successful sportsblogs out there. Additionally, he has supposedly authored a few books, although we could not locate any copies at the New Africa Store of Books and Culture, so we can not confirm the veracity of his claims to being published and will assume that such intimations are simply the self aggrandizing laudings of the over inflated ego of the white male.

The actual interview (email him if you don't believe us):

1) Prior to leaving Mattoon, IL, had you ever seen a live Negro?

I had heard rumors of a Negro family in Mattoon around the turn of the century, but that had never been confirmed. I thought I had seen one at an Illinois basketball game around 1983, but it turned out it was just Lou Henson.


2) Langston Hughes is considered to be one of the great Negro writers of the past century. How has his work influenced your blogging style?

One of the keys to Hughes' genius, often forgotten by the white media, was his innovative use of hyperlinks in his later work. At the time, hyperlinking was considered only the work of the uneducated Negro and frowned upon by much of the mainstream white poetry establishment. Robert Frost, most notoriously, avoided the use of hyperlinks, instead insisting on the long-since-discredited "look over there/over there is the other story" transition. So, in this way, we are all walking in brother Langston's footprints.

3) Do you prefer collard greens or mustard grass?

Wait ... which one is more like light mayonnaise? That one.

4) You made a post in January alerting the blogosphere to the founding of NOIS. During your coverage of the Super Bowl, one of your contributors submitted a series of postings entitled "Negro Bowl": Did you feel pressured into allowing The Assimilated Negro the space on your blog to post those entries because of your awareness of the presence of the NOIS and the possible repercussions of not providing your readers the opportunity to see the word "Negro" in multiple posts? (Be honest, it is no shame to cave to the pressure of NOIS)

It is no shame, and I will not deny capitulating to the quiet but firm demands of the NOIS movement. I went about it all wrong, however; it was not until the fourth installment of The Assimilated Negro's series for us that I learned he was, in fact, a Black Man. You can understand my confusion; he's a blogger, after all. I just assumed he was white.

5) Why do you hate Negroes?

Hate is such a strong word. We fear what we do not understand, fine sirs. I eagerly await my re-education.