I wrote an article at the beginning of the week saying the racial incident with Donald Sterling didn’t mean much because it only replaced two other incidents that occurred the week before. Those two were the larger story about rancher Cliven Bundy who had a unique perspective about ‘the Negro’ and slavery and the smaller story of Bill O’Reilly going on another rant against Beyoncé. I even remember watching Tamron Hall on the Today Show talking about how it was inspiring how so many people condemned the actions of Sterling and that it was a sign that things were getting better. There were other articles and commentaries echoing the sentiment that things had to be getting better because of the condemnation of the Sterling issue. It has been less than a week and already another incident of racial anger has occurred and it wasn’t done by one individual. Nope, this was a good, old fashioned general public racial insensitivity.

Just a few weeks ago, many on the media were focused on Boston Strong. They talked about the resiliency and common good of the people of Boston as they recovered from the bombing incident from last year during the Boston marathon. We had tons of feel good stories, inspirational slogans and all seemed OK. Boston Strong became the rallying cry to for tolerance, compassion and unity.

The Boston Bruins are in competition for the Stanley Cup. On Thursday, in the five minutes after second overtime, P.K. Subban made the winning goal against Boston. That let out a barrage of Twitter attacks against the player, which could have been overlooked as simple fans bragging and snarking (as we like to pretend that it is) but I will say it bluntly; P. K. Subban is a rarity in hockey. He is a black man, so you know what happened. Some people, and the articles I have read have been painfully careful to keep reminding us that it was a small segment of the fandom and maybe not even fans at all, were all too eager to call him the n-word, porch monkey or writing he should go back to Africa. I’m sure there will be many who will try to put a positive spin on this by saying a majority of the people who cared about the game didn’t send bigoted remarks on Twitter and many condemned those remarks.

I can’t let people, and by people I mean all of us, off the hook that easily. Just like I mentioned in the article about Sterling, we keep treating these events as isolated incidents. We want to pretend these incidents are in the past, yet they keep coming up. In the past two weeks you had a rancher saying ‘the Negro’ might have been better off as slaves, a basketball owner tell his former half black girlfriend she shouldn’t associate with black people and a crowd of hockey fans post racial comments at a black hockey player because he scored the winning goal in a game. I’m sure if I dug a little I could find a few more incidents that have happened in this time period. Can you see the pattern that has formed with all of these incidents?

The sad realization that has occurred in these major and I’m sure in the minor ones not listed is that there is no pattern. You can’t say its rich anger because I doubt the Bruins fans are all wealthy individuals. You can’t say it has to do with power because the cattle rancher and the Bruins fans definitely aren’t power brokers. You can’t attribute it to mob mentality because Sterling and the rancher aren’t part of a mob. You even get a bit of confusion with Sterling because while trying to tell his girlfriend not to associate with the likes of Magic Johnson, he was sleeping with the enemy because she is half black. Even saying ‘the world’ condemns the racial aspect of the comments wouldn’t be universally true. People have come to the defense of the rancher saying his words weren’t racist because there are a few black people in the group that is defending him. I saw this morning that the former girlfriend of Sterling was interviewed by Barbara Walters and she denied he was racist. ( She also denied she was his girlfriend so there is some weak spinning going on)

We have to stop thinking racism and racist comments are going to end anytime soon. The whole hope that those with racist attitudes are just going to die off needs to be pulled from our heads. There isn’t some universal weed be gone that can be sprayed and root out this attitude. I doubt many of those Boston fans were old codgers with one foot in the grave. I doubt many of them are sitting alone at their computers. I’m sure quite a few of them have wives and children, and their attitude is going to be spread to them, spawning a new generation of racist. I’m sorry to say the work isn’t close to being finished in the struggle for racial tolerance and acceptance.

Just as I was going to post this article up I noticed something interesting coverage on local and national news. In many online papers and broadcast shows this Sunday morning, there were stories about the Clippers advancement in the playoffs and lots of talk about Sterling and his racist comments. The narrative served was the team overcame the odds and triumphed over the sideline issues with the owner of the team. Game 2 of the hockey game between the Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens gave a win to Boston and there was barely a blip about the racist comments some fans made after game 1. Cliven Bundy isn’t even mentioned prominently on local and national news outlets.