I feel this is a fitting place to post this thought.
When the incident happened between Westbrook and the Utah fan this year, I wasn't actively posting. Shortly after the fan incident, I read online a second fan had been banned too.
I cringed and thought about what this other fan said to get banned. I got on YouTube and searched for the video and I came across a vlog post that showed what the fan said. I can't remember exactly what the video was titled, but it was something along the lines of Incredibly Racist Utah Fan - Unacceptable.
I watched the video and I was kind of confused. The guy called the player boy and all I could think was this is a bit of an overreaction. In fact, I typed out a comment and right before I hit enter, I decided to Google is calling someone boy racist.
After googling it, I did in fact find that calling someone boy is racist and it's history. I'm so glad I took one more step before I posted my comment.
I went back to the video and read the comments. Sure enough, someone posted the same question. I noticed the responses to the question were mean, condescending, and filled with hate. This made me feel bad.
I'm 35-years-old, and I had no idea calling someone boy was racists. People's reactions online towards something like this is to call the person ignorant and or privileged. Yeah, sure, those are possibilities. But instead of attacking someone because they have a different perspective, reality, life, experience than you, why are people not prone to educate others online? There's so much toxicity and mob mentality online.
After this all happened instead of feeling dumb or ignorant that I didn't know what boy meant, I felt a sense of happiness not knowing it. To me, this racist saying never caught traction in my surroundings or my upbringings and was long forgotten or never known. That's a silver lining to me.