The FBI concluded on Tuesday that Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s only African American driver, was not the target of a hate crime and that the “noose” found in his team’s garage was actually a standard pull rope that had been there since last year.
“The FBI report concludes, and photographic evidence confirms, that the garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose had been positioned there since as early as last fall. This was obviously well before the 43 team’s arrival and garage assignment,” NASCAR said in a statement.
Our immediate reaction should be one of relief. It is indisputably a good thing that someone within NASCAR did not exhibit racist behavior in an attempt to intimidate Wallace or his team. And it was encouraging to see so many NASCAR drivers and crew members rally behind Wallace and push his No. 43 Chevrolet to the front of the grid Monday afternoon.
But we need to take a long and hard look at why this controversy became a thing in the first place. The “noose” was nothing more than a pull rope. A standard, easily identifiable pull rope that had been in Wallace’s garage for nearly a year. Did no one on Wallace’s team notice this rope before? Or did the team member who reported the incident to NASCAR do so intentionally?
Perhaps it’s time to admit that our society is a little too eager to find hate crimes where there are none. Part of this is understandable, though unacceptable nonetheless. Tensions are high, polarization seems only to get worse, and we’re coming out of a three-months-long period of economic, physical, and societal devastation.
But this isn’t just a recent phenomenon. This vitriol — and that is an appropriate word for what we’re experiencing right now — has manifested itself online into what’s now known as Cancel Culture. This trend has been picking up speed for quite some time now, but only recently has it begun to reach its peak, where anything can be framed as an injustice so long as you have the mob to back you up, and anyone can be targeted so long as you frame the narrative correctly.
It’s alarming, really. And it reveals a deep rot within our culture, where an ordinary woman can be harassed and doxxed for flipping someone off, where a Christian baker can be regularly sued for operating his business according to his religious principles, where mobs armed with rope and spray paint can tear down at will any historical figure they dislike, and where an everyday pull rope can be portrayed as a noose. These are all different examples, but I see them as part of the same problem: We live in a culture that demands contrition, but rejects forgiveness as a defining principle.
I don’t have a solution or an answer. But this is unsustainable. And it has to stop.
