NASCAR: Bubba Wallace knows he was not targeted
By Asher Fair
NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace knows that he was not the target of a hate crime, despite the presence of an apparent noose in his garage stall.
After NASCAR reported that a “heinous act” had been committed when an apparent noose was found in the garage stall of Bubba Wallace’s #43 Richard Petty Motorsports team at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday evening, Wallace, the lone African-America Cup Series driver, responded by calling the act a “despicable act of racism and hatred”.
On ABC’s The View on Tuesday morning, he event went as far as calling people “simple-minded” for being unwilling to admit what had happened.
As it turns out, nothing “happened”, and there was no hate crime.
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While the rope in question was, in fact, present in this particular garage stall, an FBI investigation confirmed the fact that this rope had been in this exact stall since at least the race at the track last October, when the #21 Wood Brothers Racing team occupied the stall.
Nobody could have possible predicted that it would be Wallace’s team that landed this stall, so the fact that it played out the way it did was a pure coincidence.
Upon the unearthing of this conclusion by the FBI, NASCAR released a statement referring to the rope in question as a “garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose”.
Wallace maintains that it was a “straight-up noose”, as he spoke with CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday evening. However, he admitted that things were not as they once seemed and he knows now that he was not the target of a vicious hate crime.
“It was a noose. It was a noose, that was, whether tied in 2019 or whatever, it was a noose,” Wallace told Lemon. “So it wasn’t directed at me, but somebody tied a noose, that’s what I am saying. It was — it is — a noose.”
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Fortunately for Bubba Wallace, this noose was not placed in his stall as an act of malevolence, and fortunately for NASCAR’s sake, nobody within the garage area committed such a heinous act.