What a bizarre saga this week.
Richard G. West (the parody account on Twitter that's constantly hooking people with fake news about UT sports) tweets that the Vols will be asking people to paint their faces black as part of "dark mode" for the UK game. Kasey Funderburg decides to call him out on it -- even though he's clearly a parody account and there's no need to do so. It came across to me as she just wanted to score points with the social justice crowd. Then a former UT tennis player named Elizabeth Profit who apparently has past grievances with Funderburg digs out some tweets she made 8.5 years ago as a high school student in which she uses the word "n***a," and calls on Danny White to fire her. Apparently, he listened.
The irony that the entire ordeal began because Kasey crusaded against RGW's racially-charged joke can't be ignored. At the same time, that we're firing people's livelihoods over stupid stuff they said as teenagers is incredible. (Look at it this way...if Kasey had committed a crime back then, her record would've been sealed because she was a juvenile.) I mean, I can't help wondering if Elizabeth Profit feels that she's accomplished something wonderful? She helped destroy someone's livelihood over something dumb they said as a kid. Petty, much?
It is surreal to me that we're living in a world where there are no repercussions for a player to punch a young coed who isn't posing a threat because he's "scared," yet someone is getting fired over a dumb comment that was harmful to no one almost a decade ago.
She supposedly said/wrote "n***a" with a soft a? Wow. That term is thrown around so much in "popular" culture it seems benign to me. I wouldn't use it toward a black person, but my understanding is the soft a makes it less offensive. Lol. Weird times. It seems absurd that we are typing "n***a" as such when we aren't directing it at anyone. And so it goes.
