A Texas school superintendent has found himself in serious hot water after accidentally posting a racist message about a black NFL quarterback on Facebook, thinking it was just a private message to a friend.
At the end of the Houston Texans’ nail-biting 17-20 loss to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday, the Texans’ young quarterback DeShaun Watson was leading a comeback drive down the field with no timeouts and just seconds left on the clock. Needing to stop the clock and get into field goal range with a short pass to the sideline, Watson rolled out wide, dodged two defenders before finding DeAndre Hopkins across the middle just as time expired, ending the team’s chance at stealing a win.
Onalaska ISD Superintendent Lynn Redden went online and raged that “That may have been the most inept quarterback decision I’ve seen in the NFL. When you need precision decision making, you can’t count on a black quarterback.”
Redden says that he “totally regrets” that he made the remark, which most likely just means he is “totally regrets” that he got caught.
“Over the history of the NFL, they have had limited success,” he whined to The Houston Chronicle in a shameful spin that makes it clear that he is very much not sorry about his racism.
There’s a whole lot wrong with that despicable statement, and it shows just how fair-weather these garbage fans really are when it comes to race and their favorite football teams.
The twelfth overall pick in the 2017 draft, DeShaun Watson lit the league on fire when he replaced the very white and very, very bad quarterback Tom Savage after just one half of the first game of the 2017 season. Through seven starts, Watson shattered records while throwing for 1,699 yards and nineteen touchdowns before tragically tearing his ACL in week nine.
Without Watson, the Texans went on to lose seven of their next eight games and finished with a record of 4-12.
So I’d like to see if Redden was complaining about how “black quarterbacks can’t make precision decisions” when Watson was the talk of the league and lighting up the scoreboard.
But it just goes to show how little benefit of the doubt that racists will give to black Americans. Watson is just 23 years old, coming off a serious injury, starting his second season in the NFL after just 8 starts. He’s young and a little green and he’s going to make mistakes — but to racists like Redden, the minute one error is made, it’s all of a sudden part of some inherent racial deficiency in black quarterbacks, a disgusting stereotype that contributes to the lack of black quarterbacks in a league that is majority African-American.
When Cam Newton does his touchdown dances, fans complain that he’s “showboating” and “flashy.” When players kneel for the anthem, they’re slandered as disrespectful and uppity. It’s clear that conservative football fans only see these players as chattel for their own entertainment, appallingly dismissive of the enormous sacrifices and the excruciating pain that these players endure just so Redden has an excuse to not talk to his wife on Sundays.
Redden deserves another ten years of Brandon Wheedon.
Original reporting by Julian Gill at Chron.com.
