Suppose NASCAR kept things quiet, the way some people now say it should have.
Suppose race officials reported what looked like a noose to the FBI, then just waited for the results of the investigation. Suppose they decided not to jump to a natural conclusion, and made sure that the public didn’t, either.
Suppose NASCAR never issued a press release. Suppose it avoided all of last week’s outrage, but also skipped the stirring show of support for its only black full-time driver.
Then suppose somebody leaked the photo of that noose today.
Would NASCAR look any better now?
Or would it look like it still has something terrible to hide?
This isn’t difficult. Of course NASCAR did the right thing Sunday by informing the world that a rope intricately tied into a photograph-verified, no-doubt-about-it noose was hanging in Bubba Wallace’s garage at Talladega Superspeedway.
Of course NASCAR did the right thing by condemning it before ascertaining who put it there or why, because a noose is a noose, even when it’s at the end of a garage-door “pull rope.”
And of course NASCAR did the right thing by decrying hatred and rallying around Wallace, because, well, it’s not as though that noose was the only outrageously offensive display around the track last weekend. The same day a crew member made the discovery in Wallace’s stall, the Confederate flag reportedly was flown by a small plane soaring over Talladega, waved by cars and trucks driving by the speedway, and sold by vendors across the street.
If, in the middle of all of that hostility, NASCAR had decided to let the authorities confirm the origins of the noose before denouncing it?
It would have been fair to wonder if the circuit is as dedicated to changing its image as it has recently claimed to be.
Thankfully, federal investigators concluded the noose wasn’t directed at Wallace. It was, the FBI and NASCAR found, not a hate crime but a coincidence that Wallace happened to be assigned to the one stall at Talladega where the noose had hung from a garage door since October 2019.
In that regard, it is a relief that there wasn’t anyone working at Talladega this weekend who was hateful and vicious enough to hang an image synonymous with racism and lynching in Wallace’s stall.
But it doesn’t make it a hoax. It doesn’t mean NASCAR shouldn’t have issued a press release Sunday, saying, “We are angry and outraged, and cannot state strongly enough how seriously we take this heinous act.”
There was nothing wrong with that then. There’s nothing wrong with it now.
This wasn’t Jussie Smollett inventing a crime that never happened. Wallace, it should be pointed out over and over, had nothing to do with reporting the noose. He never saw it. His crew and NASCAR officials did.
This also wasn’t just some hilarious misunderstanding. When NASCAR released a photo of the noose Thursday, it became blatantly clear this was not a case of someone mistaking a harmless, benign rope for something else. As a pull rope for a garage door, the meticulously wrapped loops of the noose served no purpose.
And when NASCAR asked officials at every track on the circuit to inspect their garages this week? According to the Associated Press, only 11 of 1,684 stalls had pull ropes with a knot on the end, and only one of those 11 was tied in a noose:
The one in Wallace’s stall at Talladega.
“The noose was real, as was our concern for Bubba,” NASCAR president Steve Phelps told reporters Thursday.
There is no need to apologize for that concern. There is no reason to apologize to anybody. In the hysteria over the past couple of days about how “NASCAR got it wrong!” people seem to be missing something:
Nobody was falsely accused of anything. Nobody had a reputation ruined. Nobody was charged or arrested for anything. Nobody was unjustly tried in the court of public opinion.
NASCAR, which just this month banned the Confederate flag from its races, saw the noose and announced “there is no place for racism” in its sport. Wallace’s fellow drivers heard reports of the noose and decided to stand behind him, figuratively and in an emotional made-for-TV photo opportunity.
Why should either of those statements be lessened now? Why does the fact that a noose hung in a Talladega garage for eight months without anybody objecting to it make anyone think that it wasn’t a problem?
Just like a lot of us, NASCAR has turned a blind eye too often, and it has made its share of mistakes.
This week wasn’t one of them.
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