Marvin Harrison Was Asking for Trouble

I finally got a chance to read Jason Fagone’s piece on Marvin Harrison in GQ. It’s quite excellent, full of new facts that may lead to Harrison’s eventual arrest. Harrison, you may remember, ran into a spot of legal trouble regarding a shooting that may or may not have been linked to one of the businesses he runs in a shadier portion of Philadelphia. The one-time Colts receiver — one of the all-time greats, mind you, arguably second all time behind Jerry Rice — owns a bar, car wash and restaurant in a zone that is, shall we say, economically depressed. The shooting happened near these businesses

And here’s where Fagone runs into trouble. I have a huge problem with this paragraph:

Say this for Marvin Harrison: He tried to be his own person. He succeeded on a level that most of us can only dream of reaching. But he either never realized or flat-out denied the destabilizing effect of his presence in a poor and desperate part of the city. Much as he insisted that he was a normal working person like any other, he was never going to be seen that way. He was always going to be a target for the hopes, resentments, and ambitions of other people, a reality that rippled and swirled around him in unpredictable ways. And the proof is still there, scattered across the city, for anyone who cares enough to look.

Emphasis mine. Now. This is probably going to come out the wrong way, since the rest of Fagone’s (again, excellent) piece is about the very real possibility that Marvin Harrison shot a man and might have later had him killed. But Fagone’s tone here is one you hear in anti-gentrification circles. “Well, what did they expect when kids threw bricks at those bicyclists/some junkie broke into their house/some panhandler got a little too aggressive with them? They knew what the neighborhood was like when they moved in: No use crying about it now.” It’s kind of like saying “Well, she was wearing a pretty short skirt when she walked down that alley.”

Harrison’s destabilizing effect was not Harrison’s fault. Let’s say the worst is true* and Harrison did indeed open fire on a 300 lb. drug dealer who had come to his place of business to intimidate him, a 300 lb drug dealer who, in all likelihood, pulled a gun and either fired at Harrison first or returned fire after Harrison opened up. Who is to blame here: The businessman defending himself and his place of business from a well-known thug who thought that Harrison had “disrespected” him for denying him entry to his bar when he was strapped, or the thug who made a point of trying to intimidate Harrison? Trying to paint Harrison as either wrong or hopelessly naive for attempting to improve a neighborhood he loved through its redevelopment is, at best, callous, and, at worst, hopelessly irresponsible. Economic redevelopment is the surest way to help a bad part of town become less bad. It’s a way to bring jobs to the unemployed and a better way of life to entire swathes of the city. We shouldn’t try to dissuade men like Harrison from creating economic hope in depressed areas simply because they’re wealthy.

*When I say “the worst,” I’m going to leave aside the possibility that Harrison had one of his minions gun down the drug dealer about to be mentioned because I don’t buy it. Not saying it didn’t happen, just saying that there’s not enough evidence in this piece that he ordered an execution.