Last week, Oklahoma sports announcer Matt Rowan called a girls’ high school basketball team the n-word because they kneeled during the national anthem.
“I hope Norman gets their a** kicked,” Rowan said. “F***ing n******.”
Instead of taking full accountability for the incident, he blamed his behavior on his type 1 diabetes.
“I will state that I suffer type 1 diabetes and during the game my sugar was spiking,” Rowan said. “While not excusing my remarks it is not unusual when my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and often say things that are not appropriate as well as hurtful. I do not believe that I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.”
Rowan’s comment is only a recent incident of racism within the basketball world across high school, collegiate, and professional divisions and it just happened to be one that was caught on tape. According to a report from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES), there are two-dozen or more instances of racist harassment in sports each year; in these instances, the burden of proof often falls onto the victims and accountability for perpetrators is rare.
At the collegiate level, William Peace University women’s basketball team forfeited its chances at winning a conference title in solidarity with point-guard Lauryn Cross, a 20-year-old Black woman. In January, when she played against Mary Baldwin University, Cross alleged that she was insulted by a white player, who remains unnamed, from the opposing team.
“Basically she had called me a N*****. And then she had walked to the ref and told him ‘can you please watch number 15. You know how they get.’ Referring to the color of my skin,” Cross said.
After she was called the racial slur, Cross punched her opponent. Although she later apologized, Cross was penalized and suspended for four games.
At the professional level, Jeremy Lin has spoken out about racism against the Asian-American community after he was called “coronavirus” during a game a month ago. In a Facebook post, the former NBA star turned G-League player stated that his time in a professional league has not exempted him from racism.
“Being a 9 year NBA veteran doesn’t protect me from being called ‘coronavirus’ on the court,” Lin wrote.
Lin elected to keep the name of the man who insulted him private.
However, the past week has revealed that, when committing racially-motivated acts as a public figure, there are several mechanisms in place to enforce accountability. On March 9, Miami Heat center, Meyers Leonard, called a video game opponent an anti-Semitic slur on the live stream gaming platform, Twitch. As a result, he was fined $50,000 by the NBA, suspended for a week, and required to take a cultural diversity program. Following his suspension, he was traded to Oklahoma City Thunder. Now, it is unlikely that he will return to the league any time soon.
“I am deeply sorry for using an anti-Semitic slur during a livestream yesterday,” Leonard wrote on social media. “While I didn’t know what the word meant at the time, my ignorance about its history and how offensive it is to the Jewish community is absolutely not an excuse and I was just wrong.”
Leonard’s Twitch account has since been suspended, and, in addition to his lost footing in his sport’s career, he has also lost several gaming company connections as a result.
In the case of Cross and Lin, they suffered the consequences of racial discrimination, an additional burden that affected their careers. Cross’s suspension led to her team forfeiting the championship and while Lin did not lose on paper, he did adopt the hefty additional role of being a spokesperson for the Asian-American community.
Conversely, white men such as Rowan and Leonard, often feel comfortable feigning ignorance or placing the blame on unrelated circumstances, like diabetes. But it is marginalized players who must carry the trauma and fear of being profiled and those players should be listened to and believed, even when their transgressions are not recorded for everyone else to hear.
Whether the torment be physical or emotional, the current climate of the industry justifies the treatment of these incidents by blaming heightened adrenaline and blood sugar spikes, none of which are root causes of white supremacy.
