“They’re his dog’s, he can do what he wants with them,” replied fellow National Football League player Clinton Portis when asked two years ago how he felt about the dog fighting allegations against Michael Vick.

While his statement isn’t going to rally an army of dog-fighting Vick supporters to march on Washington and demand the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback be reinstated as the starting quarterback for the Falcons, it does make one wonder if the culture gap between inner city African-Americans and their suburban counterparts is too wide to allow one to judge the other.

Too often in America we blindly weigh in on situations without taking the time to consider the cause, and effect, of the perceived actions.

After the April 25, 2007 raid on Michael Vick’s property found, amongst other things, 66 dogs (most of which were pit bulls), a dog-fighting pit, bloodstained carpets and equipment commonly associated with dog fighting, the rich, and mostly white men associated with Vick seemed to back away slowly as if he was showing symptoms of a contagious flesh-eating disease that could attack their pockets at any moment (I wonder how many of them bet on dogs at Mike‘s house).

After years of building Michael Vick into a walking, talking – better yet – scrambling, tossing, financial empire, they cut their losses and turned their backs on him faster than George Dubya turned on Rummy.

As soon as the PETA Moms and Paris Hilton wannabees became an Army of Darkness marching toward Falcon headquarters like Saruman himself was leading them into Middle Earth, Nike pulled his best-selling signature shoe from stores, the NFL yanked his best-selling No. 7 jersey, and the Falcons front office began litigation to recoup his signing bonus. 

Professional athletes make their bosses exponential amounts of money. Wouldn’t it have been refreshing if just one of the multi-billion dollar corporations previously invested in Vick owned a pair big enough to say “We will not live long enough to spend the amount of money we have made off of Michael Vick’s abilities to play football and no matter what he did we’re going to support him!”

Let’s picture a young project boy named Michael, growing up under the poverty level like so many of our inner city youth today. His prize possession, a dog given to him to raise. He feeds and cares for it with what little money he can scrape together and grows a bond with it like nothing he has experienced in his young life.

It’s a Pit Bull, a dog known to him and everyone around him in his city as a fighting dog. Mike spends all the time he can with the dog until it’s big and strong enough to take it to the local fights. Some older attendees see Mike’s dog and decide to bet large amounts of money on Mike’s dog to win. It does, and the older group who bet on Michael’s dog pay him tips from their winnings, perhaps the largest amount of money the child has seen thus far in his life. With the winnings he buys another dog to raise and the cycle starts again.

Now picture this same child as a grown man given millions of dollars for his ability to run with and throw a football, betrayed by the same company of people he kept at those dog fights while growing up.

They “snitched” on him to save themselves from prosecution, and Mike found himself being tried by a jury of his “peers.”

But they weren’t his peers and therein lied the problem. Was Michael judged by the neighbor who would let his mother bum ten bucks when she needed it? No. Was Michael prosecuted by the Boy’s and Girl’s Club staff where he spent so much time growing up? No. Was he judged by single mothers from the neighborhood he grew up in? No.

He was in the hands of the same hypocrites who made millions off him and then turned their backs, pockets still fat, and rode off into the sunset searching for the next Michael Vick.