DeSean & color: Not about Eagles green

I'M NOT going to win any friends with this column. Some will doubt my sincerity, others will think I've gone over to the dark side (and no pun intended when you figure out where I'm heading).

In the past few weeks, we've lost two exceptional players from the team that - let's be honest - has the tightest hold on our civic hearts, the Eagles. One was a casualty of his aging body and free agency, and while it hurt some of us to see him go, the departure wasn't a sick-to-the-gut surprise. The other, though, was one of those flea-flicker laterals that seemingly come out of nowhere, enrage the spectator and never get you to glory.

When the rumors started spreading about a possible break with DeSean Jackson, I brushed it off as the annoying white noise generated by sports talk. No, I said to myself and the few Facebook friends awake at 2:30 a.m., no. Not to worry.

Then, as the prospect was bandied about in the mainstream press, I started putting together a voodoo doll and embroidered the initials "CK" on its end zone, next to the bullseye. It was still impossible to me that the team would deep-six D-Jax, but I wanted to be prepared.

Then came the wide receiver, smiling and reassuring me that he wasn't going anywhere. And away in a drawer went the doll, tucked in beside the one with "JL" embroidered over the place where the heart should have been, but wasn't (Wherefore art thou, B-Dawk?)

And then, perfidy. The Eagles announced that they were releasing DeSean Jackson, effective immediately. No trade. No draft pick. No bittersweet press release a la Michael Vick.

This was an unceremonious dumping, and the oily front men were keeping silent.

Except, they weren't. There are an awful lot of ways to get your message across, and speech is just the easiest. The Kelly/Lurie/Roseman troika weren't verbalizing, but they were communicating quite clearly by their rancid silence the following message: DeSean Jackson is poison, and we just bought the antidote.

Interestingly enough, they didn't say what brand of poison he presented. They didn't have to. Faster than you could say "grassy knoll," the conspiracy theorists jumped in to supply their own "single bulls---" theory - namely, that DeSean was probably a gangsta or, failing that, a gangsta wannabe. Never mind that the evidence would have made a prosecutor laugh. Apparently, in the court of public opinion, the rules of evidence are suspended.

And here is the part where I lose everyone, the fellow travelers who usually agree with me and the masochists who read me anyway:

This has a lot to do with color. I'm not talking Eagles green or money green. I'm talking black, as in DeSean is a young black man. So the likely answer to the unasked question is: Yeah, it's his "culture." We can't be surprised.

A lot of people will say this is ridiculous, that I, of all people, should know better than to play the race card when it's irrelevant. But, that's begging the question: Is it really irrelevant?

I don't think so. Maybe I've watched the videos too many times, the ones where Jackson single-handedly brings the team back from the brink of destruction at the Meadowlands. Maybe I don't think holding your hand in a suspect pose is particularly telling. (If hand gestures were a hanging offense, most of my Italian paisanos would be in the crypt.)

Maybe I remember that Riley Cooper was sent to the corner of the lunchroom for what was admittedly a stupid, Neanderthal incident which shouldn't have gotten him fired - or even suspended - but was a lot more offensive than shadow associations and a down-turned thumb.

I get that we are in the Age of Lost Innocence, where Rae Carruth puts a contract out on his girlfriend, Ray Lewis hoodwinks the justice system and is rewarded with two Super Bowl rings, Ray Rice allegedly assaults his fiancee and Aaron Hernandez is charged with murder. Aside from raising the existential issue - "What is it about the name Ray . . . however it's spelled?" - it is understandable that teams are skittish when it comes to criminals on the payroll.

But at the very least they should wait until a crime is actually committed. They shouldn't turn Amish and shun a family member on "suspicion" of misconduct. And when that suspicion is based on nothing more than lying down with the occasional dog (apologies to Vick), the fleas that they see swarming around the fella's head better be real, and not an impermissible inference drawn from an uncomfortable lifestyle.

I don't know if racism is the only reason DeSean was surgically removed like a diseased kidney from the gridiron body. But I am certain it would have been a different scenario had, say, a clean-cut, corn-fed sort like Brett Myers been hanging out with some Main Line druggies (or, perhaps, beaten his wife in a drunken brawl).

I, for one, will be sorry to see DeSean Jackson go. More important, I'm disappointed in the guilt-by-association engaged in by my team, a guilt that might not be so damning or definitive if it had a slightly lighter hue.

My heart is still invested in the Eagles. It has no other choice. But it's despite the fellows who call the shots.

Now where did I put those dolls?