re: #194 Backwoods_Sleuth

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I’m pretty sure Bruce Levenson is not a hater, but what he said is the kind of thing that will anger and worry black people, and they would be right to be offended.

But in some ways, Levenson is just the messenger of some seriously problematic facts. Here’s a paragraph from his email that expresses something I is very true. It’s spelling and punctuation errors have been left uncorrected. I have bolded the most critical bit:

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don’t know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.

Source.