Francie Latour tackles the racist attacks on NHL player Joel Ward at her Hyphenated Life blog. She says that Ward’s Jackie Robinson-like stoicism should serve as a lesson for us all.
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I know absolutely nothing about the game of ice hockey, and even less about the National Hockey League. But I learned two important things about this sport in the past week: I want to be more like Joel Ward, and America needs to be more like the Boston Bruins.
Ward, we all know by now, is the Washington Capitals forward who bested Bruins goalie Tim Thomas with a rebound shot in overtime and, with a flick of his wrist, dethroned the hometown Stanley Cup Champions. As we also all know by now, Ward is one of a very few black players in the game, a Canadian citizen born of Barbadian parents.
The color of Ward’s skin and the course of that overtime puck had nothing to do with each other — until some very sore and insanely racist losers took to Twitter to try to make it so. In his column yesterday, the Washington Post’s Mike Wise described what he called two of the least egregious comments from the post-game Twitter bile (his standard for least egregious being the rare Tweets that did not use the n-word):
The only reason Joel ward is playing hockey is because he got cut from the basketball team in high school #gorilla
And,
Warning to Joel Ward. Your one of three black guys in Canada. I will find you . . . and I will kill you.
Read Francie Latour’s entire blog entry at the Hyphenated Life.
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