The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them.
When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others who were recruited to harass the team followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, according to a police report.
Cecil Kelly III, a longtime resident of Coeur d’Alene, was not shocked by what happened, but he is saddened.
Kelly remembers in the 1960s there were agreements between the business community that “you would not rent a room to a Black person.”
“And you would not feed a Black man,” he said.
Shock to racism after decades of mass incarceration, jim crow, and centuries of slavery is a symptom of naivete, apathy, or ignorance.
It isn’t surprising because the US was founded on white supremacy. The only ppl shocked by it are those who’s lives aren’t effected by it. Half the time the ppl shocked by it are part of the problem