And after what happened this week with NASCAR’s No. 43 driver, Bubba Wallace, the sport’s only black Cup driver, it’s no wonder.
On Sunday, reports claimed that a “noose” had been found in the garage space occupied by Wallace’s race team at the Talladega Superspeedway ahead of a 500-mile race the following day.
The ‘finding’ led to widespread denunciations from NASCAR officials along with a threat from the organization’s president that whoever put the noose there would be banned from the sport for life.
On race day, all three dozen drivers pushed or walked behind Wallace’s car to the end of pit row as a show of unity and support, backed by more than 5,000 fans in the stands.
But by midweek, however, it was beginning to look like the noose narrative was just another hoax. Come to find out, the FBI — which had been handed the investigation as a potential hate crime — used surveillance footage of the secure garage area to determine that the noose had actually been in the garage space since last fall, and as such it was not at all directed at Wallace.
Trending Politics reports that on Thursday, NASCAR released a photo of the ‘noose’ — a garage door rope used to raise and lower the opening:
As you can see, it's clearly a rope that is positioned RIGHT NEXT to the garage door. This further confirms that this rope was used as a "garage pull" instead of a hanging device like CNN desperately wanted it to be.
https://twitter.com/jeff_gluck/status/1276188964488003584
And suddenly, it was mea culpa time for NASCAR and its president, Steve Phelps, who — like the rest of the virtue-signaling sports league chiefs and corporate leaders — jumped to conclusions to appease a minority of Americans associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
For his part, Wallace also issued an apology of sorts.
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1275857392455094272
The Athletic sports writer Jeff Gluck posted a series of tweets in which he explained the situation.
“NASCAR president Steve Phelps says its own investigation has been completed. ‘In hindsight, I should have used the word alleged.’ But says the noose was real and the concern for Bubba Wallace was real. That was the only rope in the garage tied this way,” he wrote.
“NASCAR says it investigated how the noose got there in the first place. It was tied sometime during the October 2019 race weekend, but NASCAR was unable to determine who did it. It asked all 29 tracks to look for other nooses this week and this was the only one found,” he added.
“NASCAR president Steve Phelps says he takes "full responsibility" for the wording being wrong. Felt a driver had been threatened and it was on NASCAR to react and investigate. Says to suggest Bubba Wallace was in any way involved is offensive,” Gluck noted.
https://twitter.com/jeff_gluck/status/1276194796357341184
https://twitter.com/jeff_gluck/status/1276198248902832129
There really isn’t any big mystery as to why this noose was there — and no where else. It’s obvious that someone who knows how to tie one did so not to ‘offend’ or to ‘threaten’ but merely because they could (do you know how to tie one?).
Nooses in and of themselves conjure up various imagery. Lots of people around the world and in the United States have been hanged using a noose — as a form of punishment. Just because a noose is hanging somewhere should not be instantly construed as a racial thing (as in a lynching).
But in these ridiculously hyper-racially sensitive times, hoaxes can — and do — abound, as we’ve seen increasingly seen in recent years.
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