What Is NASCAR Without Racism?
The organization's move to ban the confederate flag from NASCAR properties is both simple and seismic.
https://www.esquire.com/sports/a32830086/nasc...nl20505353
By Justin Kirkland
Jun 11, 2020
nascar sprint cup series bojangles' southern 500
Jonathan Moore / Getty Images
Growing up, we were an Earnhardt house. Dale Sr., specifically.
In East Tennessee, about two hours from Bristol Motor Speedway, where I'm from, it wasn’t rare to have a NASCAR driver that your whole family supported. So every Sunday (and the occasional Saturday night) we would watch stock cars making laps around a steep speedway, occasionally crashing and spinning out in pursuit of a trophy that would come some 500 miles later. The cars would blur and whirr around the track as we shared Sunday lunch in front of the TV, but often when cutting to commercial breaks, the camera would pan to infield and show a confederate flag, flopping just inches away from the American one.
The flags were everywhere really: on cut-off tank tops, beer koozies, and bumper stickers. The confederate flag was a fixture of my childhood. Though my family never owned one, it was ever present on the people and in places I visited. As I got older and came to understand what the flag represented, my relationship with NASCAR became strained. I listened to countless one-sided arguments in Wal-Mart parking lots.
My adolescence was riddled with conversations on tailgates about how that flag was about “heritage, not hate." But how could it not represent hate? It stands for a chapter in our nation's history in which white people bastardized humanity, arguing that people could be owned. To hoist that flag onto a pole, right next to the flag of our nation is to suggest that it still holds that importance.
For these parking lot crusaders, it glorifies a country they have no memory of, and yet they suggest a flag so marred in racism deserves to carelessly flap inches from the one that stands for America, because it's comforting to see it there.
Then, Wednesday, NASCAR released a statement that aims to shift the sport forever: The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties. In my whole life, I never imagined a statement like that could ever be made. Because for everything I loved about NASCAR, I also knew that the confederate flag was ingrained in its culture.
And yet, with a swift declaration, it no longer has to be. With one statement, NASCAR joined the ranks of every other sports league in banning the flag. NASCAR's statement argues that someone’s alleged “heritage” does not supersede someone’s humanity, even in the deep South.
This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
pic.twitter.com/gJkIfVf3Ba
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 10, 2020
It’s a declaration so seismic, yet simple. It suggests that this deeply campy, bombastic, Americana tradition can exist on its own, divorced from the notion that it has to live in the shadow of a racist symbol. And make no mistake, the flag that the league’s only black driver, Bubba Wallace, has been forced to drive under is a racist symbol. The move reminds me of the great Toni Morrison's powerful question: What are you without racism?
For the people I grew up around, seeing a flag taken away is painful because they exist in a world where they never felt like they had much privilege at all. So they cling to the cloth, racist and dehumanizing as it comes, fearful that its removal could also signal the entire collapse of themselves.
In my NASCAR heyday, I was an elementary school student. My family lived in a single wide trailer that they’d moved into the year I was born. One day, my parents told me that we would be moving out of the trailer, and in its place, a new home would be built. I did not want to leave. I loved that trailer. I loved lining up my Power Rangers on the rusty hitch that it once rolled in on. I loved the wood paneling that lined its walls. In my mind, this is where I would live forever.
But as much as I protested, as the trailer rolled away, I saw it literally start to fall apart. It shouldn’t have been so revelatory, and yet, I couldn’t see it for the liability it was. I never imagined something I believed to be so integral could be so removable. So fragile. And in its place, the land held something better than I ever imagined—the home where my parents still live, though we don’t watch NASCAR much anymore.
nascar cup series folds of honor quiktrip 500
Chris Graythen / Getty Images
Next, we'll probably see a campaign to #BoycottNASCAR. Fans will say they won’t be tailgating. That Bubba Wallace, whose advocacy for this move is perhaps the bravest demonstration in the sport’s history, has ruined racing. We'll hear requests to "keep politics out of sports." This, despite the fact that many of those confederate flags often had a third “TRUMP 2020” flag waving alongside them. And NASCAR will continue on, whether or not the boycotters prohibited from flying racist propaganda will return.
The fact that NASCAR has moved to remove the confederate flag from its ground does not even approach a remedy for the deeply racist past that the sport carries. Over the past half-century, there has only been one black driver. This year, that driver will helm a car with Black Lives Matter written boldly on it.
But he will no longer be driving it in the proximity of a symbol that suggests he’s less than. And the deep irony is that the removal of a flag does so much and so little at the same time. But the power of the flag's absence is less a reflection of NASCAR, but of the person assessing it. The person who now must ask himself, who am I without racism?
The organization's move to ban the confederate flag from NASCAR properties is both simple and seismic.
https://www.esquire.com/sports/a32830086/nasc...nl20505353
By Justin Kirkland
Jun 11, 2020
nascar sprint cup series bojangles' southern 500
Jonathan Moore / Getty Images
Growing up, we were an Earnhardt house. Dale Sr., specifically.
In East Tennessee, about two hours from Bristol Motor Speedway, where I'm from, it wasn’t rare to have a NASCAR driver that your whole family supported. So every Sunday (and the occasional Saturday night) we would watch stock cars making laps around a steep speedway, occasionally crashing and spinning out in pursuit of a trophy that would come some 500 miles later. The cars would blur and whirr around the track as we shared Sunday lunch in front of the TV, but often when cutting to commercial breaks, the camera would pan to infield and show a confederate flag, flopping just inches away from the American one.
The flags were everywhere really: on cut-off tank tops, beer koozies, and bumper stickers. The confederate flag was a fixture of my childhood. Though my family never owned one, it was ever present on the people and in places I visited. As I got older and came to understand what the flag represented, my relationship with NASCAR became strained. I listened to countless one-sided arguments in Wal-Mart parking lots.
My adolescence was riddled with conversations on tailgates about how that flag was about “heritage, not hate." But how could it not represent hate? It stands for a chapter in our nation's history in which white people bastardized humanity, arguing that people could be owned. To hoist that flag onto a pole, right next to the flag of our nation is to suggest that it still holds that importance.
For these parking lot crusaders, it glorifies a country they have no memory of, and yet they suggest a flag so marred in racism deserves to carelessly flap inches from the one that stands for America, because it's comforting to see it there.
Then, Wednesday, NASCAR released a statement that aims to shift the sport forever: The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties. In my whole life, I never imagined a statement like that could ever be made. Because for everything I loved about NASCAR, I also knew that the confederate flag was ingrained in its culture.
And yet, with a swift declaration, it no longer has to be. With one statement, NASCAR joined the ranks of every other sports league in banning the flag. NASCAR's statement argues that someone’s alleged “heritage” does not supersede someone’s humanity, even in the deep South.
This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
pic.twitter.com/gJkIfVf3Ba
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 10, 2020
It’s a declaration so seismic, yet simple. It suggests that this deeply campy, bombastic, Americana tradition can exist on its own, divorced from the notion that it has to live in the shadow of a racist symbol. And make no mistake, the flag that the league’s only black driver, Bubba Wallace, has been forced to drive under is a racist symbol. The move reminds me of the great Toni Morrison's powerful question: What are you without racism?
For the people I grew up around, seeing a flag taken away is painful because they exist in a world where they never felt like they had much privilege at all. So they cling to the cloth, racist and dehumanizing as it comes, fearful that its removal could also signal the entire collapse of themselves.
In my NASCAR heyday, I was an elementary school student. My family lived in a single wide trailer that they’d moved into the year I was born. One day, my parents told me that we would be moving out of the trailer, and in its place, a new home would be built. I did not want to leave. I loved that trailer. I loved lining up my Power Rangers on the rusty hitch that it once rolled in on. I loved the wood paneling that lined its walls. In my mind, this is where I would live forever.
But as much as I protested, as the trailer rolled away, I saw it literally start to fall apart. It shouldn’t have been so revelatory, and yet, I couldn’t see it for the liability it was. I never imagined something I believed to be so integral could be so removable. So fragile. And in its place, the land held something better than I ever imagined—the home where my parents still live, though we don’t watch NASCAR much anymore.
nascar cup series folds of honor quiktrip 500
Chris Graythen / Getty Images
Next, we'll probably see a campaign to #BoycottNASCAR. Fans will say they won’t be tailgating. That Bubba Wallace, whose advocacy for this move is perhaps the bravest demonstration in the sport’s history, has ruined racing. We'll hear requests to "keep politics out of sports." This, despite the fact that many of those confederate flags often had a third “TRUMP 2020” flag waving alongside them. And NASCAR will continue on, whether or not the boycotters prohibited from flying racist propaganda will return.
The fact that NASCAR has moved to remove the confederate flag from its ground does not even approach a remedy for the deeply racist past that the sport carries. Over the past half-century, there has only been one black driver. This year, that driver will helm a car with Black Lives Matter written boldly on it.
But he will no longer be driving it in the proximity of a symbol that suggests he’s less than. And the deep irony is that the removal of a flag does so much and so little at the same time. But the power of the flag's absence is less a reflection of NASCAR, but of the person assessing it. The person who now must ask himself, who am I without racism?
