The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them.
When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others who were recruited to harass the team followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, according to a police report.
Cecil Kelly III, a longtime resident of Coeur d’Alene, was not shocked by what happened, but he is saddened.
Kelly remembers in the 1960s there were agreements between the business community that “you would not rent a room to a Black person.”
“And you would not feed a Black man,” he said.
That’s just it. No one is shocked because this is completely normal. We could argue whether parts of Idaho are worse than parts of Ohio - which you seem to confuse for some reason - but no one with a passing familiarity with either is going to be surprised to hear that this happened quite openly in Coeur D’Alene, Wapakoneta, Piketon…
It’s not some secret.
It’s bad, definitely. And it should be reported. But if we’re being honest about our neighbors, no one can be surprised.
The normality should be shocking.
Nobody said racism is a secret.
The proper response to a horrific event is horror, not cynicism.
Normal? Surprising? Yes