NASCAR recently released a picture of a noose hanging in the Talladega Superspeedway garage of NASCAR’s only black driver Bubba Wallace. Bubba Wallace has always been an active participant in social justice, having worn Black Lives Matter merch to the races and driving a car featuring the BLM’s paint scheme. The noose then sparked an FBI investigation as members of his team believed it to be a hate crime.
FBI concluded that the noose had been in that garage since fall of 2019 during a time of intense racial unrest in the United States. NASCAR had banned the Confederate flag from being flown at race, so the noose found in his garage was condemned as an alleged hate crime.
Wallace was moved to tears by the support of national attention and other drivers as they moved his car to the front at Talladega before Monday’s race. The FBI’s findings concluded that no hate crime had been committed, though Wallace still went on CNN with Don Lemon to express his anger over those who didn’t believe him. He was acting off of NASCAR jumping the gun on the term “hate crime” and has accepted that he was not a victim of a hate crime, and acknowledged the embarrassing nature of the situation.
Wallace tweeted the following: “It’s been an emotional few days. First off, I want to say how relieved I am that the investigation revealed that this wasn’t what we feared it was. I want to thank my team, NASCAR and the FBI for acting swiftly and treating this as a real threat. I think we’ll gladly take a little embarrassment over what the alternatives could have been. Make no mistake, though some will try, this should not detract from the show of unity we had on Monday, and the progress we’ve made as a sport to be a more welcoming environment for all.”
Many have tweeted in response that Wallace stoked racial divide at the worst time possible for America just to be more famous. He’s been through a hell of an emotional rollercoaster and has come out admitting it was all a misunderstanding. I would actually blame NASCAR more than anyone else. Without a proper investigation, they told Wallace a hate crime had been committed and he went off of what the CEO told him.
NASCAR is wanting a little mainstream media attention more than anyone else. The company tried to smear and frame their own drivers as evil racists, when the noose was called “not a functioning noose, but a noose.” If it’s not a functional noose, wouldn’t that just be a tied loop? Maybe the little liberal CEO Steve Phelps should stop trying to get NASCAR some attention and go back to Boys Scouts of America to read the definition of a tied loop.
