Our “What Color Is the Dress?” Memes Are Now Racial Slurs

Not exactly progress.

On Sunday afternoon, the Colorado Rockies were hosting the Miami Marlins in an unimportant baseball game between two bad teams just playing out the string, in front of a reported 34,677 people. It was a dull moment in the ninth inning, long after most fans had left, that, out of nowhere, rattled across the Internet like a bomb had gone have. I guess one sort of did.

As Miami’s Lewis Brinson stood at the plate, the quiet stadium lit up with the sounds of what very much sounded like a fan screaming a racial slur at the Black player. If you can withstand having that slur in your ears, listen, and listen closely, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzeNE3z_lfk&t=2s

It’s absolutely disgusting. I was traveling on Sunday and happened to scroll across this exact clip while waiting for my plane to take off. I read what @rcorysmith wrote above first, before I watched the clip, and was so repulsed that I wanted to throw my phone out the window. What has happened to us? I thought. What have we become? Having a fan yell that at a Black player was shocking but, considering some of the fan incidents we’ve seen in the pandemic, not to mention the political culture of the last half-decade, it’s believable. It feels like something that could actually…