If you’ve been even vaguely following the news lately, you might have heard that statues are racist, everyone hates each other, and black people are literally being lynched by “the man.” It’s horrifying to see just how much the populace has become divided and polarized. We can’t even agree if Slots Play casinos are great or not. It seems we can’t go five minutes without being reminded about how terrible we are, how terrible the government is, and how terrible all of western history is.
However, this divide, or “culture war,” that is currently slicing the US down the middle is currently being drawn along ideological lines rather than racial. Why? Because all of these terrible things that we’re being told about ourselves just isn’t true. While one side argues that we have some black stains in our history, the other claims that we have nothing BUT stains in our history, and that everything we stand for is evil and has to be torn down and replaced! In fact, it seems more and more common for a particular side of the political spectrum to resort to inventing new problems to justify their antagonism.
Don’t believe me? Then let me tell you about a certain NASCAR driver named Bubba Wallace…
The Story
If you haven’t heard, relatively recently, a NASCAR race driver named Bubba Wallace reported that he had found a noose in his garage. Bubba said that he believed the noose was placed there because he was black, as a threat of some kind from a white supremacist.
NASCAR immediately fell head over heel to assure Bubba that racism was absolutely unacceptable in their eyes. Bubba’s fellow drivers escorted Bubba in his car in a symbolic march of solidarity. The mainstream media immediately jumped on the story, and Bubba had national coverage.
The Suspicion
Of course, if you’ve been following politics for the past couple of years, you might have noticed a certain similarity with another hate crime that blew up: Jussie Smollett.
Last year, Jussie Smollett reported to the Chicago Police that two white men had attacked him in the middle of the night who had attempted to tie a rope around his neck while shouting racial and homophobic slurs. The case got all sorts of attention. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both referred to it as a modern-day lynching. Overnight, Smollett became a national victim of right-wing racism and hatred.
The only problem was that none of it was true.
The police uncovered that Smollett himself paid $3,500 for two Nigerian men to “attack” him. Smollett was charged with disorderly conduct in 2019, and then six counts of filing false police reports in 2020.
The Truth
Do you see the parallels with Bubba Wallace? The noose, the victimhood, the national fame, etcetera. On The Don Lemon Show, he spoke at length about how saddened he was by all the people who didn’t believe his story. A headline from the Guardian reads, “Love over hate: Bubba Wallace Responds to Trump’s Baseless Attack Over Noose.”
Meanwhile, NASCAR quietly published this, after fifteen(!) FBI agents finished their investigation:
“The FBI has completed its investigation at Talladega Superspeedway and determined that Bubba Wallace was not the target of a hate crime,” NASCAR said in a release after the findings. “The FBI report concludes, and photographic evidence confirms, that the garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose had been positioned there since as early as last fall.”
Wah-wah.
It was all bogus. You see, THIS is the kind of thing that divides people. You pull just about anyone off the street, and it doesn’t matter who or where, and ask them whether or not they’re racist, they’ll say no. All of us will disavow racism because the only real racists are a tiny minority of people that live on 4Chan.
Unless people like Wallace and Smollett keep crying wolf. We’ve already gotten to the point where being called “Racist” doesn’t mean anything. If we keep going down this path, instead of people looking at stories like this and going, “Huh, I guess that’s one bad NASCAR driver in the bunch,” people will start to make more sweeping generalizations.
And I don’t just mean about racing drivers.
