It's funny how many sports officials keep getting deposed over racist and sexist remarks. It's not slowing down. People with well paying jobs, they worked all their lives to get, talk like this all the time as if it's completely normal. Which it obviously is. Then get fired.
It's so obvious how there's parallel worlds now. There's the media world of pretend speech where nobody says what they really are thinking. And the real world.
With the advent of the Internet normal people are training themselves to express themselves freely (like we're doing here). When normal people get catapulted into the world of fame and power they aren't always aware that now they need to stop talking like they normally talk.
I think it's absurd that we're demanding sports professionals to have gender and racial sensibilities that require a university degree to master. These are working class people who worked their way up in life. They're not academics. I think it's cruel and stupid to wreck their careers just because they make the mistake of just talking like normal people talk.
Whether or not the people who make these remarks are sexist or racist is anyone's guess. But I highly doubt working class people who use colorful language are literal at all times. Perhaps it's attempt at humour that fails. Or any other non-nefarious explanation. Or they really are racists and sexists? Is that so bad? It's just sports. If you are good at sports you do well. The racism of the organisers of competitions doesn't really matter. Does it? The Nazis failed to stop Jesse Owens from scoring big in 1936.
I think our insistence of ideologically perfect and pure speech is intellectual snobbery and contempt for the working class.
I don't like it. I don't think it's a good thing. I also don't think it will do much to stop racism or sexism. Can't sports be the one place in the world where we let people just be themselves in all their horrible glory? Just so we have one little zone where we get to hear what normal people really think.
What inspired this post? Is there a particular incident that you are thinking of?
I'm not really a sports fan myself, so what happens there is not of much consequence to me. But from what little I've seen, there doesn't seem to be much racism going on within a team or between teams. I see players of different races and backgrounds generally getting along, high fiving, hugging, patting each other on the back, celebrating victories together, consoling each other, etc. To me, sports seems to be more a positve example of how different people can get along. There are the occassional scuffles and fights, but those don't seem to be racially motivated. It used to be that being gay was something you had to hide (at least in male sports), but that seems to have gone by the wayside these days.
What pisses me off is woke shit getting interjected into sports (like it does with everything else). The woke media seems to be scrutinizing every little action to find something to be offended about, and then subsequently punish with reckless abandon. A good example is what happened to tennis commentator Doug Adler:
https://nypost.com/2020/01/25/espn-tennis-analyst-doug-adler-still-paying-for-absurd-racist-accusation/
You likely recall Adler, now 61, an ESPN tennis analyst, a walk-on All-American at USC, as the victim of ESPN’s and the New York Times’ preposterous prosecution of him as an unrestrained, on-air racist that led to his firing as he called the 2017 Australian Open.
That was the episode in which Adler complimented Venus Williams for her successful “guerilla” tactics in poaching the net. Guerilla-style tennis had become such a regularly spoken term that Nike starred Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras in a commercial playing “guerilla tennis.”
Just after Adler praised Williams’ guerilla tactics, Ben Rothenberg, a freelancer covering for the New York Times, recklessly tweeted that Adler had just racially slurred her as “a gorilla,” adding, “It’s horrifying that the Williams sisters have to be subjected to this in 2017.”
Its' one thing to basically upend someone's career, or life, because of a racist slur or a sexist comment... it's a punishment that doesn't fit the "crime". But it's a whole new level of absurdity and depravity when its done and the accuser is 100% in the wrong. And no one seems to care. Because social justice.