I'd sure love to hear from the fans in the immediate vicinity as to what happened...what was said.
Yep, my feeling too. The fan and Smart have different accounts of what was said. Smart's claim of what the fan said seem dubious to me. A guy who goes to games regularly (don't know if he's a season ticket holder) calls opposing players the N word in 2014? I find that doubtful, but will await hearing what others close enough to hear the encounter have to say.
An old white Texas Tech fan slinging racial slurs? Yeah, that's super doubtful.
Yeah, it is, as a matter of fact. This isn't 1958. If he's calling people the N word, I expect he'd have been kicked out and banned from games. And interracial violence (verbal or physical) certainly couldn't be considered a predominantly white thing (as you're implying).
Not to mention that Texas Tech has a black coach, and nine black players. For this fan to be hurling racial epithets at an opposing player for being black would make him epically stupid and illogical. He may well be, but I find Smart's accusation of being called the N-word highly dubious. We'll find out soon enough.
I'm not even saying that it is the case with Orr, but it's not unlikely. It doesn't matter if every player on the Texas Tech team is black, because someone who would call Smart that word is already an idiot and illogical.
Indeed, which is what makes it so unlikely, that a guy who is a regular at their games would suddenly decide to spit out racial epithets. You would have to be stupid in the extreme to do so. In addition to being just plain wrong, unless one were a moron, he'd already know that livelihoods are lost and lives wrecked for such racial transgressions.
We'll see if that particular fan was indeed that stupid. He has denied saying what Smart accused him of saying.
As for whether racism is a white/non-white thing, you're missing the point.
You don't really have much of a point. You've merely said that:
A white person calling a black person the N-Word or telling him to go back to Africa is something that is wrong per se, regardless of how any other people interact with each other.
Sure, that would be wrong, just as it would be wrong for a black person to use racial pejoratives directed at whites Expressions of racism go well beyond mere name calling, and they are hardly the predominant province of whites, and yet you implied that a particular set of people were egregiously racist:
An old white Texas Tech fan slinging racial slurs? Yeah, that's super doubtful.
Maybe you could wait to see what happened before throwing a whole subset of people under the bus as a bunch of evil racists.
