While I doubt anyone saw the outcome of Game Three in San Antonio Tuesday night coming, most of what followed was predictable. ESPN once again took up the narrative of a LeBron James who is unable to succeed on the big stage, no one could believe the game both Gary Neal and Danny Green had, and Gregg Popovich probably laughed somewhere in a basketball cave at all those who doubted his Spurs. These story lines were predictable largely because they should have been: LeBron’s offense never got going and proved underwhelming at best, both Neal and Green were throwing golf balls into an ocean, and Popovich has a way of making you hate yourself for ever doubting him.
So in a night of unpredictable predicability many went outside the game for news. Enter Sebastien de la Cruz, a preteen who sings better than I ever will. He has sang on America's Got Talent. This makes him far more famous than most everyone I know. He's a Texas native of Mexican-American descent. He also killed it before Game Three, especially considering he was a last minute addition after Darius Rucker was stuck putting on a little Dylan sitting on a fence somewhere.
As great as the kid was, and as excited as he seemed to be (dude’s a huge Spurs fan), as Jezebel, Salon, and many news outlets reminded us the day after his performance, America tried desperately to rain on his parade. A flurry of racist and jingoistic tweets and comments bombarded the internet during de la Cruz’s two and a half minutes of basketball fame.
The boy dressed in a full mariachi outfit for his performance and narrow minded people across the country felt this a call to arms. They swarmed to Twitter and comment sections of YouTube to proclaim their own stupidity loudly, with strange sentence structures and an abundance of exclamation marks. It cannot be said enough that in their racist anger these few soldiers of idiocy went to where their kind can be heard: an online comment section. Salon called it “the curious case of singer Sebastien De La Cruz, and the racist tweets that accompanied his presence” and Jezebel claimed emphatically that “RACISTS AREN’T HAPPY” saying they (racists) “could not help but indulge in voicing shallow stereotypes about Mexicans and sharing shitty shit racist remarks.”
All alliteration aside, this is not necessarily good journalism for two reasons. The first is simple: it is hardly a revelation that someone with brown skin is criticized publicly in a way his or her white counterpart is not. It is horrible but I'm not sure anyone paying attention was surprised at the backlash. The white girl singing before both Heat home games certainly did not produce much hate-buzz. But de la Cruz made a decision to honor his familial heritage by wearing his mariachi outfit. Much like those from South Boston tattoo Irish flags on their arms or a quick drive through Long Island will feature many an Italian flag on the side of the road, Sebastien and his family embrace the culturally hispanic identity many San Antonians share. Since this kid is not white, the idiots of America pounced and today's reaction by many was to lambast any easy target: those on the internet of the almost anonymous variety.
The second is where people went to spit their venom: Twitter. If you’ve ever ventured down the gutter of trending topics it won’t take long until burning your eyes clean out of your socket seems a better decision than reading on. For all that is good about social media it is a breeding ground for stupidity; this stupidity includes racist bastards. They are allowed the same amount of internet and social media as everyone else in this country, no matter how many petitions I send to Congress. In other words it isn't hard to imagine that after de la Cruz sang, racists got all racist on an open social platform whose main feature is anonymity. These idiots are a problem; they stand in the way of soical progress and reform, but proving this using Twitter and, to a lesser extent, YouTube makes for an underwhelming argument. It’s just too easy to find a group of angry people hating on anything and everything.
The problem is that the hatred of a brown kid singing his country’s National Anthem, while simultaneously honoring his own heritage, is in fact news. The kid's only real crime was being brown and this crime caused predictable stupidity. But to cherry-pick poorly edited tweets of seething hatred only cheapens through laziness. It also brings those fighting issues of racism and jingoism down to the level of those who are proud of the fact they will never change. It’s like fighting the plague by pointing out the rat who thinks his particular strand of Bubonic looks quite good on him. To me it feels like a cheap way to make the right point. I for one loved that Sebastien de la Cruz honored his heritage, his country, and his favorite team all in two minutes. No idiot with a twitter handle should take that away from him.
