Time for Equal Expectations
13th September 2022
Two stories in the news strike a common chord: the need to stop infantilizing minority, especially black, populations. The first comes from the world of sports and involves the familiar racial hate incident hoax. Briefly, the Duke women’s volleyball team played a match at Brigham Young University, and lost. After the match, the godmother of one of the Duke players, who is black, tweeted that someone in the BYU crowd had yelled the “N-word” at her goddaughter when she was serving. It turned out that she (the godmother) is a virulent anti-white racist (“These white folks ain’t never had they ass kicked, but they better get used to it”).
The player then backed up this claim, and it became a national news story. The reliably left-wing ESPN reported it as fact. The President of BYU denounced the incident. Good Morning America, ABC News, CNN and Deadspin all weighed in, as did Lebron James. A BYU student who was accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of being the perpetrator was suspended from attending the college’s sports events. And the coach of the South Carolina volleyball team canceled an upcoming match against BYU.
All of these people and institutions studiously ignored the fact that these campus “hate incidents” nearly always turn out to be hoaxes. One might have expected that Duke, given its history, would be sober enough to reserve judgment. But of course, that didn’t happen, even though the claim here was inherently dubious. Why didn’t the Duke player, or one of her teammates, or her coach, or anyone on the BYU team, or any other observers, say anything at the time?