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Since the thread only loads five comments at a time (Zorbaaaaaa!) I will do a small, top level update on the BYU-Duke volleyball saga. You can find previous discussion in the thread below. In short, a black college volleyball athlete claims she repeatedly heard bad words during a game with thousands of fans in attendance. Said athlete has some family that amplifies her grievance, specifies the claims, and off it goes to become a thing.
Today, BYU released a statement on the conclusion of their investigation. BYU found no evidence bad words were used, nor could they corroborate bad word usage from witness testimony. BYU formally apologized to the poor chap who was banned from the game.
Duke's athletic director also released a short statement:
Which is about as close as you get to "we will not contest the conclusion of the investigation" in a PR statement while making sure people know you hate racism, still support your athletes, etc. This is a case we've seen before. It did not garner quite as much attention as the Covington case or Smollett case, but follows the same path as them. I do not have much to add, because I'm not sure there's a lot of light here. If there is a way to cool off the culture wars it might start with interrupting the racism-to-national-story pipeline.
One interesting thing. I do not believe we saw the alleged perpetrator's name get released on the internet. BYU immediately put security in the relevant section after Richardson's claim. Eventually security targeted a UVU student and removed him, but BYU has since apologized to him. Perhaps this is evidence we are learning? The crowd may have helped in preventing his identification online or his purported disabilities protected him to an extent. Maybe all it took is one reasonable person in the chain to decide to keep his name under wraps until things had been confirmed. If so, kudos to him or her, because there's an alternate time line where some poor kid with a mental disability gets publicly shamed by Twitter mercenaries.
This aspect may have been the product of the media seemingly being disinterested in investigating this story. Alternatively, the media may be past all that jazz in these types of cases. If I were an editor Nick Sandmann's lawsuits would have some impact on how I treat these stories. Perhaps they realize the juicy headline is enough rather than the public shaming process. Hey, that'd be something. These types of cases are pure culture war all the way down. An army of online I Told Ya So's will continue to clash with the Of Course They Said Nothing Happened vanguard and Racism Is Still A Big Problem Anyway main line of infantry. So it goes.
Just to reiterate what I posted on the subreddit prior to Exodus 3:
1: There are two allegations here, one that someone in the student section shouted racial slurs, and one that Richardson was accosted by a white man who told her to "watch her back".
2: The second allegation was the UVU student, but it's unclear what exactly he said. Reports seem to indicate some sort of mental impairment, though apparently not enough to bar him from college. My read is that a weird kid said something weird and this got connected in Richardson's head to the (possibly imaginary) racism of BYU fans.
3: I had to watch women's volleyball for this, so I'm riding it as far as I can. The slur allegation was that someone (or multiple someones) in the freshman section was shouting the slur "every time she [richardson] served". She served once in the second set and twice in the fourth, so "every time" was three instances, specifically. Doesn't really impact whether the allegation is true, but some of the reporting made it sound like the crowd just chanted it for two whole sets. Which would, of course, be difficult to hide on footage.
4: I must say, I am heartened by BYU's second response. Their first was exactly as craven and shitty as we've come to expect, but apparently cooler heads prevailed.
5: Public service reminder that fake "hate incidents" are real hate incidents, just with the valence reversed. Jussie Smollett concocted a hateful and racialized plot to play the victim and thereby victimize white people, Republicans, and Trump fans specifically. To the degree that we believe a racial accusation to be false, I think it is a mistake to classify it as a "hoax". It isn't, it's a false flag intended to harm people. This isn't about sympathy or clout, it's about hurting a race of people based on their race, by making false accusations. In other words, it's the same shitty mob behavior that lead to lynchings in the past. We would not describe a false rape accusation of a black man in the Jim Crow South as a "hoax", but as an act of racism and incitement to violence.
Good additions. I believe the "watch your back" quote comes from the godmother once again and the full statement was, "a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus."
There are worse women's sports to watch.
According to YouTube's front page, though, there are better women's sports to watch, at least if you want to stare at athletes' rear ends...
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