Former NFL player Burgess Owens slammed former ESPN personality Jemele Hill as racist following the FBI’s announcement that the rope found in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage was not a hate crime.
Hill criticized NASCAR and its fans after the racing association’s only black driver, Bubba Wallace, first floated allegations that a noose had been placed in his garage as a hate crime. Journalist Megyn Kelly asked if she would issue an apology for her comments against NASCAR fans.
“Now that we know the #BubbaWallace ‘noose’ was not a racist attack at all, will @jemelehill apologize to the NASCAR fans she unfairly besmirched?” Kelly tweeted, along with an article where Hill called the alleged incident a “disgusting reminder” of who NASCAR fans are.
Now that we know the #BubbaWallace “noose” was not a racist attack at all, will @jemelehill apologize to the NASCAR fans she unfairly besmirched?
Jemele Hill Condemns NASCAR Noose Incident: ‘Disgusting Reminder of Who This Sport is for’ https://t.co/BPF9YRgFQl— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 23, 2020
Owens, who is running for Congress in Utah, responded to Kelly’s tweet with strong words for Hill.
“Jemele an angry, hateful Black American Racist,” the former Super Bowl champion tweeted. “BTW.. if anyone ever tells you that Black Americans are not capable of being racist ‘like normal people’ ..YEP, you’re staring in the face of a rabid, judge a person by skin color, ‘RACIST.’”
Jemele an angry, hateful Black American Racist. BTW.. if anyone ever tells you that Black Americans are not capable of being racist “like normal people” ..YEP, you’re staring in the face of a rabid, judge a person by skin color, “RACIST” https://t.co/Gjt0zGCUpk
— Burgess Owens (@BurgessOwens) June 24, 2020
Hill has been criticized for injecting race into political debates dating back to 2017, when she called President Trump a “white supremacist” in a comment that was disavowed by ESPN, her employer at the time.
The FBI announced on Tuesday that its investigation into the alleged incident led them to the conclusion that the rope tied into a knot in Wallace’s garage had been there for months, before Wallace was assigned to the garage.
“I’ve been racing all of my life. We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So, people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots as their evidence, go ahead. But from the evidence that we have, that I have, it’s a straight-up noose,” Wallace said on CNN Tuesday night following the FBI’s announcement.
On Wednesday, Wallace praised NASCAR and the FBI for “acting swiftly” and said, “I think we’ll gladly take a little embarrassment over what the alternatives could have been.”
— Bubba Wallace (@BubbaWallace) June 24, 2020
