"Racist" Gets Fired

I am a huge Formula 1 racing fan. I watch every race and I generally support the drivers that have been put through that mixer. Yesterday ex-Formula 1 driver Takuma Sato won the Indianapolis 500. It’s the first Indianapolis 500 that I’ve watched since Nigel Mansell lost when he didn’t realize that rules don’t actually mean rules. He came out of a yellow flag according to regulations and he didn’t realize he should have come out of the yellow flag as bat out of hell, like everyone else. He was in first, but after that, didn’t finish in first.

But yesterday Fernando Alonso and Takuma Sato, from Formula 1, and there were a few others from that parish, both raced in the Indy 500.  Now the pinnacle of the auto racing world is Formula 1.  That is the series where the most amount of money and the most amount of science is applied to make cars win races.   The Formula 1 cars make Indy cars look like commuter vehicles, from a technology standpoint, certainly not a speed standpoint because it’s a lot easier to engineer a car to race around loops than it is to have to turn the steering wheel to the right occasionally.

After Sato won the race, Terry Frei of the Denver Post Tweeted: “Nothing specifically personal, but I am very uncomfortable with a Japanese driver winning the Indianapolis 500 during Memorial Day weekend,”.  

Now, we are generations away from that horrible war, as all wars are, and does Mr. Frei think that we should ban Japanese drivers from the race?  I certainly don’t think anyone should be banned from the race as long as they are qualified and haven’t oppressed other humans.  Takuma Sato won the race and cheers to him.  Sato is world class and deserves the shot to race and he did the most with it.

But this is where I have a problem, the Sporting News reported what I thought was a very reasonable article about the situation here.  Media idiot inserts foot into mouth; media idiot gets fired.  Yup, sounds right.

My concern is that other mainstream media outlets are reporting OTHER PEOPLES’ reaction calling it racist.  When did it become the media’s responsibility to report reactions instead of the news?  I wasn’t aware Japanese was a race, and I’m pretty sure it’s not.  But that doesn’t stop our mainstream propagandists from reporting this sort of tripe.  To be fair, they aren’t saying it’s racist, they are just reporting that other people are saying he is racist.  Fine lines, but I say at the least unnecessary and more likely, socially inflammatory. I say Mr. Frei isn’t a racist; he’s a bigot.  There is a huge, huge difference and it’s a huge difference in the social implication.  But what do I know?  According to Mr. Panos, maybe they are all just Chinese…..