Bubba Wallace prefers to be a victim rather than a victor over racism

Then one of Wallace’s crew members found a pull rope tied into what they thought was a noose intended to intimidate the driver. Based on NASCAR’s enthusiastic response up to that point, it came as little surprise that NASCAR rallied around Wallace. It was one of the most heartening displays of friendship and comity of this past month of unrest. Keep in mind that this happened amidst all of the looting and arson and destruction of statues:

Then the story got even better — or so it seemed. The FBI discovered that the “noose” had actually been there since last fall and could not have been put there to intimidate Wallace deliberately since no one could have known that his team would be assigned to that garage. It had likely just been tied as a handle into a pull rope similar to those present in all NASCAR garages. Wallace was not the victim of a hate crime, but he wasn’t a hoaxer either. He had managed to bring NASCAR forward, and fears of a nasty, racist reaction to his efforts had been debunked.

All in all, this was about as happy an ending as we could have hoped for. Alas, after the FBI’s resounding determination that Wallace was not the victim of a hate crime, Wallace went on CNN to lament that people don’t believe that he’s the victim of a hate crime.

“I’ve been racing all of my life,” Wallace told Don Lemon. “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 being as their evidence, go ahead, but from the evidence that we have, and I have, it’s a straight-up noose.”

For days, Wallace’s claim has been scrutinized by those still wary of hoaxes like that of Jussie Smollett. Yet the FBI vindicated him while also finding that there isn’t some vile racist lurking in the NASCAR staff. Wallace isn’t a victim, and he can still be a hero.

Yet he and his media champions would rather make him a victim than a victor. Jemele Hill followed the party line, maintaining that an FBI investigation was wrong that a pull rope was a noose.

And here’s Al Sharpton, who’s already fairly familiar with pushing crime hoaxes.

This story should have concluded with a reassuring sign of racial progress. Instead, society’s worst faith-grifters, such as Hill and Sharpton, have piggybacked onto it to smear NASCAR as irredeemable and racism as eternally insurmountable.

That’s not progress. It’s giving up. It’s pathetic, and it doesn’t correspond to the last 60 years or even just the last six years of civil rights history. Consider not just in the abstract how much had to change for NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag, but the bigger picture. Just two years ago, voters on the whole were opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, both Republicans and Democrats have become more supportive, leading to a 28 point net support for it nationally.

When the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014, just 43% of people thought the prominent police killings of black men were indicative of a broader problem. Now nearly 3 in 4 Americans believe that to be the case.

We have become significantly and quantifiably less ignorant about racism, and far more of us are willing to call it systemic. The display of support for Wallace and Black Lives Matter served as a confirmation of how much and how quickly white minds have changed in the era of the cellphone camera.

The Wallace fracas should have been a victory, both for him and his community. Now he’s just another celebrity capitalizing on his 15 minutes, and the grifters are happy to get in on it with him, even if it harms the cause of broader national racial harmony.