U. Florida Pulls Scholarship Offer From Football Player Who Used the ‘N-Word While Reciting a Rap Song’
“I deeply apologize for the words in the song that I chose to say. It was hurtful and offensive to many people, and I regret that”
The student was reciting the words to a rap song. Does that count for anything?
The Root reports, via Yahoo News:
The University of Florida Pulls Scholarship Offer From Recruit Caught Saying N-Word
The University of Florida has decided to rescind its scholarship offer from 4-star quarterback Marcus Stokes after a video surfaced of Ponte Vedra Beach Nease senior saying the N-word while reciting a rap song, according to CBS News.
Stokes took to his Twitter account and apologized.
“I deeply apologize for the words in the song that I chose to say. It was hurtful and offensive to many people, and I regret that,” Stokes wrote. “I fully accept the consequences of my actions and respect the University of Florida’s decision to withdraw my scholarship offer to play football.”
“I was in my car listening to rap music, rapping along to the words, and posted a video on social media. I deeply apologize for the words in the song that I chose to say. It was hurtful and offensive to many people, and I regret that.”
“My intention was never to hurt anybody, and I recognize that even when going along with a song, my words still carry a lot of weight. I will strive to be better and become the best version of myself on and off the field. I know that learning from my mistakes is the first important step.”
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Comments
Only reason it is a problem, the young man is white.
Why doesn’t he just identify as a person if color?
Sounds like a possible Title VI or Equal Protection problem to me. Has anyone used the n-word and not had their scholarship offer rescinded?
That would be an interesting case. But he’d have to come up with actual evidence that black team members had done it, and it had been brought to the administration’s attention, and they’d done nothing about it. It’s obvious that many if not all of them have done it, but would anyone have bothered to bring it to anyone’s attention? And can you prove it? The administration could claim ignorance and that had it known about anyone doing that it would have done the same thing.
Blacks constitute 13% of the population of the US and thus the market for mass media. If white people simply stopped listening to gangsta rap, buying tracks or concert tickets, the entire genre would collapse.
Your lips to God’s ears.
I have used the argument that blacks are 13% of the population but account for 50% of all murders and most of their victims are black. I’m called racist for pointing that out. Furthermore, it’s primarily young black males who commit those murders and they are about 4% of the population. I’m called racist for pointing that out. I also point out that 50% of all murders occur in just 2% of all counties, while 50% of all counties have zero murders. That 2% of counties comprise primarily inner city areas. It’s easy to identify the problem, but I’m called racist for pointing it out. It’s possible to fix that issue if we would only admit it exists, but it’s easier to call someone a racist and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Rather than being called racist and catching all that grief, I’ve reverted to letting them worry about their own problem. But the rest of us don’t have to change the rules that apply to all, or distort the Constitution, because of a problem they won’t let us try to solve within the existing framework.
I’m less sure. During the music industry’s formative years, there were “colored” record labels that no “decent” white person would buy and no radio station would air. Yet they survived and spawned successors and ended up dominating certain markets. Ironically, one of the first was created by a black passing as white, something that would have gotten him denounced today as a “white cultural appropriator.”
I can’t see how we could even expect whites to reject black music. There was incredible positive cultural value in adopting jazz, blues, and swing into the American repertoire, even though there was always a certain percentage of offensive songs that titillated the unwashed (e.g., “Funky Butt Blues”). The people who brought that music into the mainstream were visionary giants, like Gershwin, Handy, Beiderbecke, back when an American market still had the power to discriminate what got to “general release” and what didn’t.
Today, of course, it’s more about money than morals. Charlton Heston famously embarrassed the entire Time-Warner board by reading the lyrics to “Cop Killer” out loud at a stockholders’ meeting, but nobody expected for a minute the album would be pulled. And that’s our fault.
The overweening issue is that music is such a generational thing. I hate rap music, not just for the gutter lyrics and antimoral themes, but because I feel that (compared to more sublime black genres) it evidences little talent that a computer couldn’t generate. But Bill Cosby famously reminded us that his father absolutely hated jazz, and would rank on his kids all the time for playing it. We live life, we stamp our tastes, we age, we see others overstamp them.
And black jazz has its roots in Caribbean music and white music. So is it a black genre? There were black artists including very good ones who had their own styles of it. There are also white artists.
I’ll sound like a broken record but, I’m sick of this.
Also sick of Whites. Refusing to fight.
I am SUPREMELY sick of blacks jerking the marionette strings. It’s time to tell them to sit down and shut up.
I’m sick of everyone who thinks it’s their business to control speech in America. I’m ashamed that my generation let it happen without so much as a complaint.
I’ve been sick of it and their “privilege” regarding that one n-word. I make my own life easy by never saying it; I lose nothing. I was once told that that was racist because I’m skipping the issue rather than confronting it in struggle session style. Indeed that’s the point. They can’t make me care with such nonsense.
I feel bad for the kid who had his scholarship pulled. Hopefully he goes elsewhere, comes back, and in a rivalry game at UF stadium, beats Florida.
He’s not very good and they wanted to drop him from the class. He gave them an excuse.
If he wasn’t very good, they wouldn’t have given him the scholarship to start with.
At the time, they had no quarterback committed so he was a warm body. A few weeks before this incident, the top QB recruit in the state flipped from Miami to UF.
They absolutely didn’t need him anymore and were hoping he would go somewhere else. It’s bad PR to pull an offer but this gave them an easy out. Welcome to D1 CFB if you aren’t familiar with how it works.
Can he go elsewhere? Is Miami looking for a QB?
One assumes that there were no repercussions for the writer and/or performer of the rap song or the station that played it.
The fact is that people offered admission but not yet enrolled have very frew legal rights. If he had been enrolled as a student, he could raise hell over this.
True, as Kyle Kashuv found out. What happened to him really was abusive.
The fact is that people offered admission but not yet enrolled have very few legal rights. If he had been enrolled as a student, he could raise hell over this.