March 13, 2012
(Best of all? When you see those magic words: “Comments have been closed for this article,” that’s the tattered white flag run up the fort’s flagpole.)
I guess “reading from below” is Bob Parks’s sanity strategy, too, because the BlackAndRight.com blogger scanned the comments at the news station’s Facebook page and discovered colorful details about this “racial incident” that KSAT’s reporter weirdly neglected to mention.
Specifically, fans at the game said players on the “largely Hispanic” losing team “were rude shouting out during the playing of our countries [sic] national anthem,” they made fun of “Eddie a disabled kid and shouted rude things at him” and “had a sign that said “alamo heights suck my….””
Witness James Russell added helpfully, “We have chanted [“USA! USA!”] at multiple games against all sorts of different races. We did not mean to be racist, if we were we could have said other things.”
The 3000+ comments under the original KSAT.com “news” story tell a similar tale:
[A]pparently the chant was in retaliation for the OTHER team chanting “ALAMO WHITES ALAMO WHITES”, mocking the Alamo team for being made up of (apparently) Anglo-looking white students, as opposed to the largely Hispanic makeup of the aggrieved team. Kind of funny it was whites at “Alamo” who defeated Hispanics in “battle” 😉
In case your Racial Slang Enigma Machine is in the shop: While not quite rising to the already flaccid level of “cracker,” the expression “Alamo Whites” is (at least according to the Urban Dictionary) an actual thing“the moral equivalent of the Hispanic players shouting, “WASPs! WASPs!”
Except that some of the players on the Alamo Heights team who were disciplined for chanting “USA!” are…Hispanic.
We only know about any of this because some severely normal people spoke up, but not before the original, one-sided report of this “racial incident” had already made its way around the nation.
Still, I remember when the only option you had when confronted with shameless media spin was to yell at the radio, shoot your TV, or send a letter to the editor that would likely be ignored.
