There’s no escaping racism in America’s pastimes. (By that I meant pro sports—not lynching, invading, or any of its other hobbies.) There’s just no missing it.
Every year there’s a new negro (to use the preferred nomenclature set forth by King Beyoncé) that’s been tagged “it.” Just find them and you’ll hear it—the barely coded language, the double standards, the howls for blood. Even the little bit that filters into my non-sports-watchin’ field of vision makes me wanna flash.
How y’all can watch that shit and stay friends? How can something be so driven by Black bodies yet so anti-Black joy, so anti-Black? Celebrating while Black, and just celebrating Blackness, à la “Formation,” makes ’em wanna boycott and ban, because I guess the shooting, the drowning, and the poisoning ain’t cuttin’ it. (But I still love my Jackson 5 nostrils, and yours, to paraphrase the would-be mayor of Baltimore.)…