People are still talking about Seattle Seahawks cb Richard Sherman’s post game comments from Sunday. Sherman held a news conference Wednesday where he stated that the people who are referring to him as a “thug” are really doing so in place of calling him a n***er.
“The only reason it bothers me is because it seems like it’s the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays. Because they know.”
Sherman also pointed out that a hockey brawl that took place on Saturday between the Flames and Canucks – actual physical fighting, which is the norm in hockey – and no one referred to any of those players as “thugs”
“There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey, they just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that, and said, ‘Oh man, I’m the thug? What’s going on here?'”
Sherman also said that coming from Compton, and seeing real “thugs” and “gangsters,” he knows that’s not who he is. Just because you come from a certain area doesn’t automatically mean those labels apply to you.
“I know some ‘thugs,’ and they know I’m the furthest thing from a thug. I’ve fought that my whole life, just coming from where I’m coming from. Just because you hear Compton, you hear Watts, you hear cities like that, you just think ‘thug, he’s a gangster, he’s this, that, and the other,’ and then you hear Stanford, and they’re like, ‘oh man, that doesn’t even make sense, that’s an oxymoron.’
“You fight it for so long, and to have it come back up and people start to use it again, it’s frustrating.”
I applaud Sherman for tackling this topic. It needed to be said.
