Anonymous asked: where is the proof that Gallagher was being racist? sure you can make a sketchy argument for Colton teubert, but where is the proof Gallagher said anything or encouraged anything other than being tagged in a post???? Brendan and PK have always been antagonist towards each other when they've played against each other, and that interview showed more frustration at the interviewer asking the same question repeatedly, and trying to stir shit, than actual resentment of PK
Teubert calling PK “Monday” in a tweet to Gallagher is a racist in-joke from when they were both on the same team and called him that, as is documented in the thread I added. Literally the only reason for Teubert to tweet that to Gallagher is as a callback to something they both knew and joked about: you can argue that neither of them knew the racist history of the word they just so happened to pick for one of the NHL’s few black players, but the fact that you’ve got a bunch of white players actively excluding a black player in the first place is a red flag all on its own. They’re not obliged to like PK as a person, but there’s a big difference between not getting along with someone and going out of your way to belittle and gossip about them.
Plus and also, the whole thing about Gallagher knocking PK for “doing what he does” and how “you can let him talk about himself all night” like… it doesn’t take a genius to see the constant racist micro-aggressions in how so many white hockey players and commentators react to PK doing the exact same things that they fawn over white guys for doing. You get commentators dissing him because his celly is too “showy” while, to take one example, praising Alexander Radulov for being “flamboyant”.
And I mean, Gallagher of all people complaining that PK talks positively about himself? He’s not exactly Mr Humble! Which, on its own, is fine - but that’s exactly the point. There’s a double standard in how the league treats PK for being an enthusiastic, exuberant player compared to how they treat equally flashy white guys, and it’s rooted in dog-whistle racism. The fact that the NHL openly promoted Patrick fucking Kane for Central Division captain at the 2018 All Star game when PK was leading in votes is part of the same thing.
So, no, I’m not inclined to give Brendan Gallagher the benefit of the doubt when he’s got an old teammate directly hitting him up with a racist callback to that time they used to hate PK together on the same night that Gallagher feels the need to diss PK to the press. Yeah, he got asked about it three times, but that happens all the damn time when you’re up against a former teammate, regardless of whether the trade was acrimonious or not: Tyler Seguin still gets asked about the Bruins trade every time he sets foot in Boston, Matt Duchene is likely going to be asked about the Avalanche whenever the Senators play in Colorado, and PK himself sure as hell still gets asked about playing for the Habs And meanwhile, what’s PK doing on Twitter while Teubert is being an ass? Saying nice things about Montreal.
Well fuckin said
I wanted to add a few specific receipts, because I think people might read “the racist history of the word” like it’s from the 1920s and it’s almost folksy now.
This is not something a person in his 20s calls anybody by cutesy accident. It dates back to ye olde days of 2004, its peak was 2012, and every definition uses the N-word.
“Monday” is a code-word that started in the Boston area and is used in the restaurant industry or other places where folks feel like they really need a way to complain about black people daring to exist in public, but like, subtly. It spread on Youtube in the early 2010s, when the more sensitive racists were realizing that if they used bad words people might call them racists, and that would be very painful for them. The whole idea is a Relatable Humor joke–everyone hates Mondays, right?We’re not Racist-racists, we’re just ordinary folks and we all know what we’re talking about.
OP’s argument seems to be that maybe only one guy said it, and the others innocently didn’t know what he meant. To which I need to say:
First, if you hear your buddy call the only black man in the room a funky new slang term, and you genuinely don’t know what he means by it, and your response is not to investigate, not to say, “Wow, huh, I’ve never heard that one, whadda you mean by that exactly bro?”, but to assume that the worst possible things it could mean would be justified and the black man must have done something to deserve them…then you have failed to behave like an adult with responsibilities to the people around you should behave.
Brendan Gallagher is required to talk to other human beings. He has to cooperate with them and lead them. That is actually his job, which he is paid money to do. If he said literally nothing to Subban ever, he still failed to do what he should have by his response to this.
And second…they knew what it meant.
In 2012 it landed in the headlines of the Boston Globe, a story the sports section followed for months.
Even if Brendan Gallagher and his buddies had never been on social media, which they have, as professional athletes they had no excuse in the world not to know this. It was headline sports news at the time. There simply isn’t a way a Quebecois hockey team came up with an English pun completely independently and innocently but at the same time as it was being used across the Anglo East Coast. I’m sorry, no, that’s…dumb.
(It is a bit bitterly hilarious to hear the Habs using Boston slang. Sure brings the hockey community together, you know?)
No, they heard it in the same place as everybody else, and they thought the same thing, which was, “Hey, I hate this black man because he’s happy, Black, and taking up our precious white hockey space. But if I say that out loud, people will say that’s racist.” Sure, they didn’t believe they were really being racist when they said it to each other! That’s not the same thing as innocence. That’s what every person who has ever called a black person this believes!
It was first submitted to the Racial Slur Database in 2004, without much explanation. This entry happened to appear on Urban Dictionary the same year:
Which you might’ve passed over until 2006, when someone made what kinda prejudice it is exactly explicit. New entries have been added and upvoted every year since then, by both users and non-users. I’m gonna paste some in behind the cut; I stoppedon page 3 and I left many out for space. Expect the kind of petty, mis-spelled hate you’d expect from people who submit slurs to Urban Dictionary. They’re so stunningly dumb and direct about it I found them kind of reassuring after hearing Gallagher hide behind excuses, but you decide if you want to see this shit or not. I’ll guarantee you none of them are defensible.
If you don’t read the definitions and you keep defending the Habs who said this, though…don’t do that?