the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 29, 2020
Steve Phelps, president of NASCAR, discovered a noose at Talladega Speedway in the garage of Bubba Wallace, the most successful black NASCAR driver in history. The news came just weeks after Wallace successfully campaigned to get NASCAR to ban Confederate flags at its events.
Informed of the noose, Wallace spoke out, tweeting that the “despicable act leaves me incredibly saddened and serves as a painful reminder of how much further we have to go as a society and how persistent we must be in the fight against racism.”
The FBI conducted an investigation and declared that Wallace was not the target of a hate crime, because the noose had been in the garage since October 2019, before Wallace was assigned the garage. NASCAR then said the noose was used as a garage pull rope.
But when Speedway employees insisted on a deeper look, NASCAR checked every garage at all 29 of its tracks. They found only 11 pull-down ropes tied in a knot out of all of its 1,684 garages. And the one in Wallace’s garage was the only one tied in a noose.
The FBI hardly instills confidence as an arbiter of what is a racist hate crime, given its own racist history. Don’t forget the FBI’s COINTELPRO attacks on leaders of the black movement in the ‘60s.
And whether or not the noose was directly put there just ahead of Wallace’s arrival at the garage, as Wallace pointed out, “It’s still a noose,” a symbol that carries an obvious racist meaning in a country with a vast history of lynchings of black people.