I don’t get NASCAR. Maybe to appreciate stock car racing you have to love cars, be born below the Mason-Dixon line or listen to Tim McGraw. For me, NASCAR is slightly more exciting than curling.
Although, NASCAR does a have chance to win me over. All it needs is a really good black driver.
White people have been sticking it to black people ever since whites came up with the idea of kidnapping people from Africa and then forcing them to do the work they didn’t want to do.
So it makes me smile whenever a black person goes into a predominately white sport and kicks ass.
Every time Tiger Woods wins a golf tournament, it gives me so much joy knowing there is a racist somewhere in Mississippi who is grinding his teeth in disgust, wondering what happened to his all-white sport that he played with his all-white friends at his all-white country club.
As great as it is watching Woods hoist up trophy after trophy, the greatest black against white sport moment happened at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Adolph Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine was in full force, which was hyping up the “Aryan” race as the superior human beings on the planet.
African American Jesse Owens went on to win four track and field gold medals at the games. The look on Hitler’s face, with Owens running his victory lap, is timeless.
That moment won’t be matched, but how great would be if a black man (or even better, a black woman!), riding in his Sean John-sponsored car, won the Daytona 500?
Could you imagine how the “good ole boys” would react? All those Dale Earnhardt Jr.-loving, Budweiser-drinking, “still pissed off that the Confederates didn’t pull it out in the Civil War” NASCAR fans would just lose it.
The majority of NASCAR fans aren’t racist, and NASCAR itself wants more minority drivers – or at least it says it does. But, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say a successful black driver in NASCAR wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with open arms.
It is time though. Not just because it will make a few whites feel uncomfortable, but because it’s been nearly 60 years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and there still hasn’t been a black person who has had a steady career in NASCAR.
If it does happen, NASCAR will get a new fan.
