Ben McLemore is a 6-foot-5 inch phenom, a 20-year-old redshirt freshman who leads one of college basketball’s best teams in scoring, has the Kansas Jayhawks on the verge of another deep run into the NCAA Tournament, and could be the first overall pick in June’s National Basketball Association Draft. McLemore is a contender for the national Freshman of the Year award and is a finalist for national Player of the Year awards too.

He is also a product of the extreme poverty that grips millions of families across this country, a child whose mother worked multiple jobs in a vain attempt to make ends meet, a kid who often went days without food and found it “hard to play basketball when nothing is inside of you.” McLemore’s family often had to choose between food and electricity, as USA Today’s Eric Prisbell detailed in a profile of the Kansas star last week:

McLemore says the only meals he sometimes had were the free ones at school. His mother, he recalled, sometimes made the difficult decision to sell food stamps in order to pay bills.

“Sometimes we would not have food so we could keep our lights on and have hot water,” he says. “She had to sacrifice for that.”

When the family did not have hot water, McLemore remembers one nightly routine: Fill the bathtub with cold water. Heat up bowls of water in the microwave, then run them to the bathtub to make the tub water lukewarm for baths. The warmth never lasted, he says.

McLemore is months from being able to fully leave that past behind, a from-the-gutters-to-greatness success story that is so often repeated in sports. But the fact that McLemore’s family had to sell food stamps to afford light and heat, that they had to shuttle microwaved water to the tub for a warm bath, that they went days without food and slept huddled in the living room to avoid the bitter cold, is more a story of America’s failure than it is of McLemore’s success.

Our social safety net keeps millions of people out of poverty each year. It includes programs that help low-income families afford food, that helps poor children get breakfast and lunch at school. It also includes programs that help low-income families heat their homes, that help working mothers like McLemore’s afford child care, that help poor children get a better education. It includes programs that all Americans have heard of, like food stamps and welfare, and many, like WIC and LIHEAP, that go mostly unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t use them. Together, the programs form one of the stingiest social safety nets in the industrial world, and yet, it is these programs that have repeatedly faced the budget axe as American politicians keep cutting spending.

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In case you didn’t know already, Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones’ movie critic and I, do a semi-regular podcast, A Movie And An Argument. Our latest, and most depressing edition, discussing the Oscars, Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea, and human rights violations in movie-making, is up now!

And on that note, have a great weekend!

LeBron James tweets this powerful picture of the Miami Heat donning hoodies in memory of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin:

And with it, the precise, efficient, and very sad phrases: #WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.

Last weekend, after a comedown in Knicks guard Jeremy Lin’s performance after a spectacular series of breakout games, Anthony Federico, an editor for ESPN’s mobile site, working a late shift, published a headline about the game that included the phrase “chink in the armor.” Shortly thereafter, ESPN pulled the headline, and Federico was dismissed. He’s since issued a pained apology. A week earlier, in reference to Lin’s strong performance, Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock (who is African-American), tweeted “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight,” a crude joke that played on stereotypes about Asians and penis size. He’s since apologized, saying:

I’ve cried watching Tiger Woods win a major golf championship. Jeremy Lin, for now, is the Tiger Woods of the NBA. I suspect Lin makes Asian Americans feel the way I feel when I watch Tiger play golf. I should’ve realized that Friday night when I watched Lin torch the Lakers. For Asian Americans and a lot of sports fans, his nationally televised 38-point outburst was the equivalent of Tiger’s first victory in The Masters. I got caught up in the excitement. I tweeted about what a great story Lin is and how he could rival Tim Tebow. I then gave in to another part of my personality — my immature, sophomoric, comedic nature.

But Fox hasn’t suspended or censured him.

To an extent, the difference between Federico’s punishment and Whitlock’s lack thereof makes sense. Federico was an editor writing headlines that spoke for the entire ESPN team, while Whitlock is an analyst who was speaking only for himself. Federico’s error called into question both ESPN procedures and his own ability to follow them, and it was in contravention of a memo ESPN had sent out earlier asking staff to be considerate of how Lin was portrayed. Fox may have internal Twitter policies, but staff feeds are outside of the Fox editorial process.

But I tend to think Whitlock’s sin is worse. Federico was using a common phrase that would have been appropriate, if cliche, in other circumstances, but happens, when applied to Lin, to be racist. It’s bewildering to me that in this day and age that anyone wouldn’t know that “chink” is a racist epithet for Asian people, but if the term is really so uncommon that it’s new to folks, that’s a good thing. Whitlock, on the other hand, reached for one of the stupider, more immature things he could possibly say in the course of providing analysis, the thing he is theoretically paid to do. If we’re going to condemn people for being cliche as well as racist, Whitlock’s sins on both counts seem graver. But brand name commentators will always be harder to remove than editors working the late shift.