ESPN aired a segment on Tuesday in which they held a fantasy football auction, using staged images of real NFL players. Many of the staged images were of black players, and nearly all those bidding on the players were white.
Leading some to say the scene resembled a slave auction. The network has since apologized for the segment, saying they understand how some could believe that the scene too closely resembled a slave auction.
In a statement to The Big Lead, ESPN said, “Auction drafts are a common part of fantasy football, and ESPN’s segments replicated an auction draft with a diverse slate of top professional football players. Without that context, we understand the optics could be portrayed as offensive, and we apologize.”
The insanity of this, other than the fact that we apparently can’t even have fantasy football auctions anymore without injecting race into it, is that the NFL is full of instances like this where someone could see the wrong thing if they wanted to.
How is a fantasy football auction any different than a bunch of white guys with stopwatches making black men in shorts run 40 yards? How is it worse than a bunch of white billionaires jumping up and down and cheering, after they draft some young black player who has no say in where he goes?
Not to mention the fact that people have fantasy baseball drafts (majority white sport) and hockey fantasy auctions (almost entirely white) all the time. Meaning, there’s nothing inherently racial about having a fantasy sports league draft.
Also, delightfully ironic, is the fact that ultra-liberal ESPN was the network which aired this fantasy auction. Proving once again that the left has gotten so insane that even ESPN can’t keep up with what’s offensive anymore.
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