In the debate about finding a rope in the garage of racing driver Bubba Wallace, American President Donald Trump has now spoken out and apologized to the Nascar driver. “Did Bubba Wallace apologize to all of the great Nascar drivers and officials who came to his aid and were ready to sacrifice everything to find out that the whole thing was just another joke?”, he tweeted on Monday.
Two weeks ago, in the garage of the only black driver in the Nascar racing series, Bubba Wallace, a rope was found that was formed into a noose. The find was initially seen as a racist attack on the 26-year-old racing driver. The entire paddock and crews then gathered behind the Wallace car before the race to set an example against racism. However, the FBI now denied a hate crime. Investigations came to the conclusion that the rope was a garage door pull rope, which was shaped like a noose and had already been attached in autumn 2019. Back then, nobody could have known that the Wallace team had been assigned this garage two weeks ago.
Shortly afterwards, Nascar published a photo of the knitting. Wallace himself insisted on the original assessment that it was a gallows rope. Trump continued in his tweet that this case and the “flag decision” led to the lowest ratings ever for the racing series. America’s racing is particularly popular among white, middle-class viewers living in the southern United States.
After nationwide protests against racism and police violence against blacks, Nascar had banned the Confederate war flag at all of its events in mid-June. Wallace had previously advocated such a ban. The Confederates had fought the southern states in the American Civil War (1861-1865) of the southern states and fought against the abolition of slavery and against more rights for blacks. The war flag is a symbol of racism in the eyes of many Americans.
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