Racist Olympic Teams

Okay, I wasn't gonna post about this, but they did it again.

You all might have caught this last week: an ad for a courier company featured the Spanish Olympic basketball team pulling back their eyes in a "chinky" gesture, supposedly with the intention of "honoring" their Chinese hosts. There  was a bit of a hullaballoo and one of the players literally responded with "some of my best friends in Toronto are from China." Wow.

Despite the lack of apology, you might think that the Spanish athletes would have learned that this action was, at least, frowned upon by the very Chinese they were attempting to "honor," but, apparently, no.

As you can see above, the Spanish tennis team's offensive game from yesterday is just as good as their ballers'.

So what's wrong with these people? I suppose you could say that they simply don't have a lot of experience with public discussions of racism. But then, we, in the US, do have a lot of experience with public discussions of racism, and yet this sort of thing happens all the time.

I guess it's just seeing Olympic-level athletes behaving with lighthearted racism within the context of an Olympic games that is so shocking. We're used to racist incidents occurring in the more degraded context of morning shock-jock radio shows, political arguments, pop culture, advertising, and the like. But seeing it perpetrated by entire national teams during the solemn and supposedly universally respectful Olympic Games?

That's not something I'm willing to accept. But apparently, Spain is.