Philly Talk Show Host Calls White Eagles Center ‘House Negro’ for Team Loyalty

Jason Kelce AP
William Bigelow

On Tuesday, Josh Innes of Philadelphia’s 94.1 WIP, whose salacious and vulgar repartee has dumbed down the average verbiage of the city’s talk shows, reached a new nadir, calling Eagles center Jason Kelce, who is white, a “house Negro” for arriving early to a press conference introducing new head coach Doug Pederson.

The white talk-show host’s exchange with Hollis Thomas, who is black, went like this:

Innes: Jason Kelce’s already there, huh? That’s … uh … I’ll give Jason Kelce this, he’s always in character. He never breaks character. His character is: lapdog for whoever the hell the coach is. And he is always … He’s at the press conference, huh? Good for him, bless his heart.

Thomas: Actually I don’t really blame him because he’s a guy who wants a job.

Innes: Here’s the thing though, right, it’s like this. Let me find a good comparison here. I was watching Malcolm X yesterday, I was in the airport in Memphis watching Malcolm X, and there was a scene where Denzel’s doing the whole thing about the slave and the house negro? Right? And like, the house negro is the guy who’s gonna tell you like, oh he gets to live in the big house with the boss and every time he refers to something that happens in the house it’s ‘our house’ and ‘we’ and everything like that. And then there’s the actual slave that isn’t the house negro that’s just trying to run away. Essentially what you’re getting here is Jason Kelce is the house negro is what I’m trying to convey to you … That’s essentially Jason Kelce’s job: ‘Yessir. Yes boss. Absolutely boss. Yes, sir boss.’ That is Jason Kelce, he is, whoever the head coach is gonna be, he’s gonna be all over that head coach. There’s no arguing, there’s no fussing, there’s no fighting, he’s in with that guy.

Kelce responded on Twitter:

When outrage erupted over his comments, Innes apologized, “I’m the dumbest human being on the planet. I apologize for that, I truly do. I’m an idiot.”

Innes’ vulgarity has been displayed profusely before; some examples include his confession of sexual dysfunction: “Dude,I can’t get it on. I can’t get it up. She’s on a new birth control pill. She’s like the desert, and I have low testosterone. So there’s no chance.” Or his confession that he sent a woman a cell-phone picture of his genitals. “Like an acorn in a Brillo patch. It’s not attractive at all.”

Innes offered the best description of himself in an April 2015 tweet:

Innes pulls big ratings for WIP. But the comments put his job in peril.

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