5 Feet of Fury

Forgetting the Alamo: my latest at Taki’s

About that “racist” chanting of “USA! USA!” at a Texas high school basketball game — called “Alamo Heights”, no less — and why it pays to read the news “upside down”:

I guess “reading from below” is Bob Parks’s sanity strategy, too, because the BlackAndRight.com blogger scanned the comments at the news station’s Facebook page and discovered colorful details about this “racial incident” that KSAT’s reporter weirdly neglected to mention.

Specifically, fans at the game said players on the “largely Hispanic” losing team “were rude shouting out during the playing of our countries [sic] national anthem,” they made fun of “Eddie a disabled kid and shouted rude things at him” and “had a sign that said ‘alamo heights suck my.…’”

Witness James Russell added helpfully, “We have chanted [‘USA! USA!’] at multiple games against all sorts of different races. We did not mean to be racist, if we were we could have said other things.”

The 3000+ comments under the original KSAT.com “news” story tell a similar tale…