NBA Star Meyers Leonard In Trouble For Having a Heated Gaming Moment on Twitch
I have some life advice for you: stop using racial slurs. If you yell the n-word at your tv screen every time you die playing Super Mario Bros, guess what’s going to happen when you hop on Twitch and start playing Super Mario Bros. Of course, the best way to not say the n-word on Twitch is to not say it the rest of the time.
Yet every day it seems there’s a new story about someone saying something horribly racist on an internet stream.
Today that story is about Miami Heat forward Meyers Leonard, who blurted out (and keep in mind we’re talking about someone using a racial slur here) “don’t fucking snipe me, you fucking kike bitch.”
Now, Leonard did apologize for the incident. And honestly, it’s the most hilarious apology I’ve ever seen.
He actually claimed he didn’t know what the word meant.
I don’t buy it for a second. It’s certainly possible for someone to say something that isn’t intended to be racist; there are things that certainly have a racist connotation when said to someone of a specific racial group but not others and some words have multiple meanings or sound racist but aren’t.
This is not one of those things. This is the worst slur there is for Jewish people and it doesn’t really have any other use that isn’t just a mean thing to call someone who is Jewish.
But it doesn’t really mean anything, either. It’s etymological roots likely date to early American I’m irrational through Ellis Island, where illiterate Jewish immigrants would make a circle as a mark instead of an X which they thought looked too much like a Christian cross. The Yiddish word for circle is kikel. The word began as a sectarian thing among groups of Jewish immigrants and was later adopted by hate groups and applied to Jewish people in general.
It’s not like this is something anyone reasonably thinks means something other than something mean to call Jewish people.
I don’t know why someone would try this as an excuse, but I guess he had to try something.
