What’s Up With All the Racism at Sporting Events?

The reasons are obvious, as are the lessons taught by these incidents

Image: Kristin Chiasson, Shutterstock, Standard license, purchased by author

It’s hard to miss the stories. They seem to be everywhere.

Across the country, in supposedly liberal states and conservative ones, in small towns and larger areas, white sports fans are behaving badly.

And not just in the typical way one might expect — bad sportsmanship among spectators is a thing from youth leagues to the pros — but in ways far more disturbing.

In these recent cases, the behavior has been more troubling than booing one’s opponents, razzing players for airballs, or screaming at the referees for calls you consider blown.

Instead, almost weekly, we hear of white fans at a high school sporting event engaged in overtly racist behavior towards opposing players of color.

From fans taunting and making monkey noises at Black high school basketball and hockey players in Minnesota to multiple stories of similar simian sounds and slurs being used against Black high school athletes in Michigan to similar monkey impersonations and slurs at a girls’ soccer match in California to an announcer calling Black players “thugs” for a hard (but legitimate) foul in a basketball game in Idaho to Catholic schoolboys from…