There really just isn’t a much better illustration of Utah’s insular, white-bread homogeneity than the sheer number of people who’ve taken to social media and comment boards in the last day or two to ask “Why is calling a black man ‘boy’ racist?”
Such are the effects of being born and raised in a culture bubble.
Turns out there is a reason diversity is good and useful — it can teach us all a thing or two.
The Utah Jazz, one can presume, would rather not have been in the news this past week for investigating multiple incidents of racial taunts lobbed by some of their fans at Oklahoma City Thunder point guard Russell Westbrook.
The same, undoubtedly, holds true of subsequently choosing to issue a pair of lifetime bans to those individuals.
Yet here they are.
And here we are, for matter. And maybe it’s not such a horrible thing, after all.
Don’t get me wrong — that we are in the year 2019 and still debating whether banning a fan who called a black basketball player “boy” multiple times is a draconian punishment is mind-bogglingly horrible in itself. And, in far more extreme circumstances, if you doubt the capacity of modern racism to wield incalculable destructive capability, maybe read again about what just took place in New Zealand.
So, then, what’s not so horrible about this? Well, simply enough, for far too long, any substantive examination about the intersection of race and sports has been limited to and obfuscated by the silly debate about whether whether Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem makes him more of an ungrateful, arrogant athlete demeaning the sacrifices of American troops or a civil rights activist of sorts, stoking an important dialogue.
“Important dialogue” is the operative phrase here. If nothing else, this situation has exposed some harsh truths, shone a bright and unforgiving light on the seedy underbelly of sports fandom.
Given that racism is not, sadly, something you read about only in history books, it is inevitable that there will be issues lurking within a sport in which predominantly black participants are competing in front of predominantly white audiences. They are now, at least, no longer out of sight, out of mind.
In the aftermath of Monday’s incident, the Jazz’s own Donovan Mitchell and Thabo Sefolosha publicly expressed their support for Westbrook. Players throughout the league have followed suit, including the likes of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving.
The common thread among their messages has been that such incidents are, unfortunately, neither uncommon nor unique. “But,” goes the automatic counterargument, “99 percent of our fans are good people who would never behave that way. It can’t be THAT big a problem, can it?”
Vivint Smart Home Arena has a listed capacity of 18,300; one percent of that figure is 183. Are you OK with 183 people a night yelling racial taunts, homophobic slurs — whatever — at players? At opposing fans? At fellow Jazz fans they simply disagree with?
What number would constitute too many for you? At what point would the threshold tip from acceptable to intolerable?
To its credit, the Jazz organization has decided that number is one. Sadly, two Jazz fans have been deemed to have violated the team’s “Code of Conduct” — to say nothing of standards of basic human decency. But those two fans also have been swiftly handed lifetime bans. Rather than continuing to pretend this is not a substantive, widespread, and pervasive issue, there is, instead, meaningful action being taken.
For far too long, many fans have operated under the standard of “I bought a ticket, so I can say what I want,” with impunity. Sorry, folks, but those days must end. Purchasing a ticket does not and should not give you carte blanche to behave in despicable fashion.
You should know this already. But if you don’t, teams finally now seem willing and able to remind you.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/2TEWvnx
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