I had an English teacher in high school who refused to allow students to use the word "fall" when referring to the season. It was "autumn", or it was points off, because she would say that "fall means go boom".
Clearly she had never heard of either a synonym or a homonym, which some might argue should have been an automatic disqualifier from becoming an English teacher, but maybe they were just handing out the certificate to anybody who wanted one at the time.
But aside from my ongoing and admittedly petty resentment of a high school education that taught me absolutely nothing practical about how to operate in the real world, that's what I was reminded of amid IndyCar's latest "controversy".
And no, I'm not talking about the other ongoing nothingburger pertaining to the Long Beach push-to-pass screwup, over which fans are conveniently focusing only on one particular driver.
IndyCar recently released a shirt featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue inside the Lincoln Memorial, ahead of August's Freedom 250 Grand Prix around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a one-off race added to the calendar as a part of the ongoing "Freedom 250" celebration for America's 250th birthday. The shirt read "One Nation, One Race".
Seeing as how the shirt was released on an IndyCar site for an IndyCar race (or should we say "event"?), any logical human being without an agenda would have most likely been able to decipher that the shirt was not a racially motivated slogan promoting white supremacy.
But what do we know?
Because so many people these days seem to wake up in the morning and spend the next several hours on social media doing nothing more than finding things to argue about and posting performative, overblown reactions, IndyCar was forced to remove the shirt from the online shop over public backlash.
On one hand, I can't say I don't understand why the decision was made.
In this day and age, with social media being considered the "real world" by far too many, the court of public opinion matters a heck of a lot matter than it should, and rather than fighting it, it's just something that a lot of folks have simply come to reluctantly accept as a byproduct of what one might consider "cancel culture". It just sort of is what it is, and companies do tend to err on the side of caution.
When it comes to the principle of the decision, though, it doesn't make it right.
We will say that the designers of the shirt could have done a better job – aside from, uhh, blatantly putting a helmet on good old Honest Abe, the guy who literally did more to end slavery than anybody – in making it obvious that the shirt was clearly a shirt tied to the upcoming motorsport competition.
A logo of some sort on the front would have been nice. We'll give you that much.
I'm not sure that would have prevented the complaints, though, because as far as misinterpretations go, you would literally have to be desperately going out of your way to try to see something that clearly isn't there in order to pretend to be offended. It's nothing shy of a deliberate bad-faith misinterpretation.
As Michael Masi famously once said, "it's called a motor race. We went car racing." Yet even aside from the obvious motorsport context of the word "race" on this race car-related t-shirt, there's another well-meaning saying that "there is only one race; the human race".
But no, of course not, because that misinterpretation wouldn't have led to the online slew of self-serving virtue signalers who've emerged.
That misinterpretation wouldn't lead to clicks and engagement and online fury and algorithm-triggering nonsense posts, and the resulting dopamine rush that these people with absolutely nothing better to do always seem to thrive on. That misinterpretation wouldn't have forced a major company's hand into "playing it safe" or even "saving face".
Some folks can't see how the shirt was approved to begin with, because of the meaning they felt it could have. If you're basing it strictly on the preconceived conclusion that the shirt is offensive, it's a fair point.
But that conclusion only exists because of a conscious decision to see what clearly isn't there, just to waste time bickering on the internet about how terrible it is and how this somehow makes IndyCar look bad for working with President Donald Trump to make this race happen to begin with.
Lest we forget that fans were upset when the event was announced, simply because Trump is in support of it and he happens to be the president during the 250th anniversary celebration.
Because heaven forbid we accept that something which simply happens to involve a political figure can, in fact, actually not be politically motivated whatsoever. As a society, we can do a lot better to stop analyzing everything through a hyper-politicized lens.
What's funny about the "how did this ever get approved?" argument is how much this shirt doesn't even compare to other ridiculous instances of professional sports teams and leagues actually approving something that should have set off a million red flags from the get-go.
Remember when the New England Patriots infamously recognized an account named "I hate [racial slur]" for being their 1,000,000th Twitter follower? Remember when Fanatics released a Texas Rangers MLB hat with the team logo in the middle of the word "Texas" to create a hat that read "TETAS"?
The fact that those slipped through the cracks was a complete embarrassment.
In IndyCar's case, it was literally a shirt about a race that used the word race.
What a concept.
There was nothing that should have made the designers go "oh no!!" here, at least not until one person's overreaction went viral and spiraled into the whole world of social media condemning IndyCar for supposedly being racist.
As Graham Rahal recently said, amid all the politically motivated whining about the event being scheduled in the first place, "get a life."
These are the same people who bullied A. J. Foyt Enterprises into changing car number No. 88 to No. 55 in 2023, simply because they also run the No. 14, as if having those two car numbers was actually a purposeful, subtly crafted nod to a Nazi Germany-affiliated "racist symbol".
At some point, you've got to leave well enough alone, because as we pointed out in response to the Foyt decision, somebody can find a reason to be offended at anything if you give them long enough, even if, as one fan put it, "99.9% wouldn’t have known the problem unless Twitter told them about it."
Dare we also point out that 14+55=69, to further illustrate how ridiculous the symbolism game can become if we play long enough. But hey, maybe that's why they use the No. 4 now...
Add us as a preferred source on Google