Monday, August 29, 2022

Attention, unpaid

 The world is over-served with racist idiots. This is not an observation born of Critical Race Theory, which certain political creatures think is going to Corrupt Our Youth. This is simply a matter of paying attention.

Brigham Young University did not do that the other day, unfortunately. And a young woman of color named Rachel Richardson paid the price.

Richardson is a volleyball player for Duke, and during a road game at BYU Saturday, one of the aforementioned racist idiots carpet-bombed her with the N-word every time she served. This racist idiot was not a BYU student, but he was sitting in the BYU student section. Why he was allowed to remain there is a question worth asking.

Did BYU officials not hear him?

Yes, they did, because at one point they stationed a police officer by the Duke bench.

Did the actual students in the student section not hear him?

You have to figure they did, but by all accounts none of them said or did anything about him.

Did BYU's successful coach, Heather Olmstead, call time, grab the PA mic and tell him to knock that s*** off, as Bob Knight famously did one night in Assembly Hall?

She did not.

In fact, BYU desperately tried to ignore the entire thing until Richardson's godmother, who lives in Texas, went on the Magic Twitter Thingy to tell the world about it. Only after the Twitterverse found out about it did school officials retroactively ban the racist idiot from all future BYU athletic events.

Which is nice and all, of course. But it leaves open the question of what they would have done had Richardson's godmother not gone public.

The Blob's money is on "nothing."

This does not mean BYU officials are racist idiots themselves, mind you. It's likely more that either they, or perhaps the school's culture in general, are not inclined to confrontation. That's an exceedingly generous benefit of the doubt, I realize. But I'll stand by it.

In any event, Racist Idiot was allowed to spew the N-word to his heart's content. And no one apparently uttered a discouraging word in response. 

Perhaps if he'd have been black and had kneeled for the national anthem, he'd have at least drawn a healthy chorus of boos. Apparently that's more objectionable now in America.

In any event, the questions remain.

Why did the students in the student section not physically get in this dude's face and tell him to shut the hell up? Or better yet, just start whaling on him?

At least that would have gotten security involved. And perhaps shaken the BYU officials present from their lethargy.

Instead, they stood by and let Richardson take it. Not that the young woman wasn't up to the job.

"I refused to allow those racist bigots to feel any degree of satisfaction from thinking that their comments had 'gotten to me'," she said Sunday on her Twitter account. "So, I pushed through and finished the game.

"I refused to allow it to stop me from doing what I love to do and what I came to BYU to do, which was to play volleyball."

They call that gumption, in some circles.

The folks at BYU might want to look it up in the dictionary.

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