NASCAR: Ridiculous comparison places blame on ‘white privilege’

Rapper “The Game” made a ridiculous comparison between the recent NASCAR fight and the infamous Oscars slap, and he blamed “white privilege” for the reaction.

By now, NASCAR fans have all probably seen the fight between Joe Gibbs Racing’s Ty Gibbs and JR Motorsports’ Sam Mayer following last Friday night’s race at Martinsville Speedway.

After contact between the two drivers on the final lap in their battle for the $100,000 Dash 4 Cash prize, a prize that ironically ended up going to neither driver, Gibbs was upset with Mayer, despite the fact that Gibbs himself has been known to race everybody else the exact same way.

Gibbs damaged his own #54 Toyota by slamming into the rear end of Mayer’s #1 Chevrolet on the cooldown lap, and he made additional contact with Mayer’s car in the pits.

After the longtime rivals got out of their cars, a brawl ensued.

Gibbs confronted Mayer, and as Mayer was removing his helmet, Gibbs shoved him and began to walk away. Mayer confronted Gibbs, who still had his helmet on, again to continue the discussion, only for Gibbs to start swinging at his head, leaving him with a bloody cut on his lip as well as one above his left eye.

The brawl had NASCAR fans and others talking for quite some time. But perhaps no take was more bizarre and just plain idiotic than that of rapper “The Game”, whom many fans of the sport had never even heard of beforehand.

In a since-deleted tweet, he compared this brawl to the infamous Oscars slap, and he blamed “white privilege” on the fact that Gibbs and Mayer weren’t given 10-year bans from NASCAR.

He is, of course, referring to Will Smith’s 10-year ban from the Academy after going onto the stage during the Oscars and slapping Chris Rock.

As you can imagine, The Game’s tweet was deleted after public backlash. But nothing on the internet ever truly gets “deleted”, and fans still had their say (and, of course, some pretended to be outraged just like he did as well).

Comparing a NASCAR fight — or really a fight among athletes at any sporting event — to a random blow to the head at what is supposed to be a classy awards ceremony is a ridiculous comparison to begin with. While he is right in that violence should never be condoned, fights have been a part of NASCAR for decades. We just hope he never watches MMA.

That the rapper would blame the reaction on skin color is only a further sign of the times and not the facts.

Had Gibbs walked onto the stage and slapped Mayer in the face at the post-season NASCAR Awards banquet, that’s probably another story. But that’s also a story that isn’t going to happen.

But given how few people watch the Oscars anymore anyway (or even knew that they were still a thing before the incident happened), that actually might have made headlines and gotten people talking just as quickly.

And what’s with the idea that they got a free pass?

Sure, Mayer probably did, but he also didn’t throw any punches. So why wouldn’t he get one? As for anyone who was watching the action live and had interests beyond stirring up racial controversy, it was quite clear that, yes, fans did have an issue with what Gibbs did.

So the whole narrative about fans suddenly condoning violence was way off-base.

But when your whole goal is to do nothing more than try to create division and get attention, you tend to ignore important things like this, as The Game evidently did.