It’s one of the last things you’d expect in the NBA, a sport that is dominated by Black players.
This past week the Denver Nuggets released their latest piece of apparel, the “White Pride” hats. Yes, you read that right. “White Pride” hats, in the NBA.
We know, this sounds like something straight out of the Dave Chappelle “Clayton Bigsby” skit where a popular KKK member is actually a blind Black man.
This promotion is more than just an oversight. It’s more than just a poor choice of words and someone not double checking the terminology. This is a blatant form of ignorance permeating across the entire Nuggets organization.
You mean to tell us that not one person voiced a concern over the tag “White Pride” when the marketing campaign was unveiled? Not one Black employee? One liberal employee? Better yet, not one person with some common sense?
This is not the ’80s, where commercials designed to appeal to Black audiences had to have hip-hop themes and ignorant attempts at integrating urban lifestyle into the brand. This is 2016 and it’s the NBA, one of THE Blackest sports in the world.
It should be more shocking, yet in some ways we’re sure many of us aren’t surprised by this overtly ignorant promotion based upon some of the recent events we’re witnessed over these last few years.
But still, that’s no excuse. The Nuggets should have known better, from the top of the organization down.
Now while they have since changed their promotion to simply “White Denver Nuggets Pride,” it still can’t be excused or swept under the rug with “we should have known better” or other PR crisis management phrases; this was an incredibly huge blunder and a lack of basic common sense.
