Jazz ban 2nd fan who called Westbrook "boy"

[Ogaju]

I feel like we’re going in circles here. I’m not saying to move on from slavery because it’s important to remember our mistakes, but more in general to move away from intersectionality of slicing and dicing every single difference between us to build your own predefined personal checklist.

There are some pejoratives that solely describe black people, hispanic people, Asian people, etc which if used could draw an easy conclusion that the person has some form of prejudice toward that group. I don’t personally believe that “boy” is solely offensive to blacks or has significant extra weight. It’s a universally offensive word. I noted in a prior post that I doubt there was much positive dialog between slaves and slaveowners. Are we seriously going to strike all general insults hurled at slaves as only offensive or more offensive to blacks? If so, who gets to decide what that comprehensive list is and what weight each person is allowed to be offended?

The reason I say all of this is because as a non black, non white man, be prepared for me to react extremely harshly if anyone calls me a “boy.” This isn’t just a black thing, and I refuse to be told that my own personal beliefs that I am allowed to hold and what offends me.

Having said that, in the case of this guy, he’s probably prejudiced toward blacks. I am just not 100% sure as I would be if he used a more specific pejorative, for example.

Hope this helps. I’m not trying to diminish the struggles of black people at all. I’m just saying that we’re already so divided that perhaps we should be careful about further divisions that don’t make a lot of sense.

you can subjectively be offended by anything you want, hey I know people who do not like their given names and get offended when called by that name, but that does not meet an universally recognized pejorative. When you have a system where young   white  children were taught to and did grown black men that could father them 'boy' because they were thought to be sub-human dont try to equate that to some subjective dislike you may have for the term that was probably never used to demean and emasculate your fore-fathers.

[fairweatherfan]

The fines and bans levied by the NBA and Utah Jazz all seem very reasonable in this situation, to me.

This thread seems... less so.

It got pretty dumb pretty quick, that's for sure.

Personally pedantic arguments about classification criteria get tedious when they only break one direction. I'd like to hear what folks think is the most arguably racist thing a team should let their fans shout at a player, and how that's determined. Folks, there's got to be a line.