Derek Daly uttered a racist slur in the 1980s.
In a story published Wednesday night, WISH-TV said Daly, a freelance racing analyst, had confirmed he was the source of the slur in an anecdote Lamey shared from 33 years ago, leading the station to dissolve its 17-year relationship with Daly.
For the record, there is no contextual defense to Daly’s using the “n-word” back then. It was just as unacceptable then as now. Why it took so long for this to happen is another question, but that Derek Daly said it, and should never have said it, is beyond question.
On Friday, Lilly Diabetes pulled its sponsorship decals from Conor Daly’s No. 6 NASCAR ride, saying that it didn’t want the distraction from their cause.
Conor Daly is an Indycar driver who was making his NASCAR debut, with Lilly as a sponsor. He was born in 1991, well after his father’s utterance. He can’t be at fault for what his father said. Even if he was alive at the time, he couldn’t be responsible for his father’s language. But that didn’t prevent Lilly from pulling the plug on him.
Lilly’s full statement, via NASCAR reporter Chris Knight: “Our sponsorship in Saturday’s race is intended to raise awareness of treatment options and resources for people living with diabetes. Unfortunately, the comments that surfaced this week by Derek Daly distract from this focus, so we have made the decision that Lilly Diabetes will no longer run the No. 6 at Road America this weekend.
Lilly was marketing its diabetes products, and Conor was the perfect driver to carry the Lilly Diabetes label.
Conor Daly has Type I diabetes, and at the time, Lilly Diabetes’ consumer brand sponsor Ashley Brewer said: “Currently, we are partnering with Conor … in the capacity to be a platform to educate and inspire fans with diabetes to take action to better manage their health.”
Even this connection wasn’t strong enough to keep Lilly from fleeing the potential storm. It’s understandable for Lilly, in the sense that this is purely for marketing on its part, and an otherwise sound plan fell apart when the father’s use of a racial slur came to light. It was 33 years ago? So what?
Given how the mobs react today, there was no telling how they would take it, what they would do, how it would impact Lilly. Lilly wasn’t in this for a cause, but to sell. Rather than take a risk of backlash from an outraged mob by being associated with a family, even if just the son, that used racial slurs, it chose to pull out.
The elder Daly apologized profusely, and offered an explanation, if not an excuse, for what he said decades ago.
In a statement, Daly said he admitted to using a racial slur for African-Americans during a radio interview in the early 1980s. Daly, who had just moved to the United States then, said the term had a different meaning and connotation in his native Ireland.
Daly said he was “mortified’” when he learned how the term was used in the United States and has never used it since then. Conor Daly, 26, wasn’t born when his father made the comment.
“Finally, I want everyone to know I deeply regret and sincerely apologize for what I said more than three decades ago,” the elder Daly said in his statement.
Whether this makes it somewhat more understandable, perhaps even forgivable given the lapse of time, is up to you. But what of his son? Should he be tainted by his father’s word? Should the family be tainted in perpetuity?
The Indy Star had an op-ed saying the obvious: white people shouldn’t use the “n-word.”
I’m going to go out here on a limb and just say it: white people, please stop using the N-word.
It is not for you. It will never again be for you — your ancestors cashed in all your chips.
Not much of a limb, although it inadvertently raised a curious problem.
So follow my lead — don’t say the word, don’t sing the word, don’t rap the word — just don’t use the word. And don’t defend anyone else who does.
Not being a big rap fan, this presents no problem for me. But does this mean white people can’t enjoy, can’t sing, rap songs? Or is there some sort of white person thing they need to do to not be horrible while still singing their favorite rap tune? Beats me. I won’t use it. I have no clue what others are supposed to do when it comes up in the chorus.
But surprisingly, it also had an op-ed calling out Eli Lilly for taking it too far when dropping Conor Daly.
So let me get this straight, then. You’re stripping away support from Conor Daly this weekend for his Xfinity Series race at Road America because of something his father said 35 years ago? Before he was born?
In what universe does that make a shred of sense?
It makes sense in a universe ruled by irrational and volatile mobs. Reason plays no role in their outrage. Will the mob blame Conor Daly, and by extension, Lilly? There’s no arguing the point. You can’t reason with a mob. You can’t reason with people who seek out any cause for outrage. And Eli Lilly had no idea whether its retaining its sponsorship of Daly would produce applause, shrugs or a mob. As it was only there for the marketing, it decided that this was a risk it was unwilling to take.
The issue isn’t whether Lilly was legally allowed to pull away from Daly. It was. The issue is what kind of universe we live in where everyone lives in fear of the irrational mob, tries to navigate minefields of social justice outrage and wonders when or if the sins of the past will be put to rest.
I never use the N-word, because it has a meaning today that communicates hate, dehumanization, and historical racial oppression. But this line about “your ancestors” is problematic. Because they’re not my ancestors. My ancestors were French Canadian farmers. They literally had nothing to do with the oppression of African Americans. I doubt Ms. Hackney can say the same, since most African Americans trace their ancestry through the American South, and as a consequence most carry some degree of Southern white blood.
This is a perennial problem for theories of hereditary guilt: given enough time, either nobody has a given individual in their family tree, or everybody does. The legions of people “descended from Charlemagne” aren’t just wishful puffery, it’s a necessary mathematical consequence of the exponential nature of family trees.
Best just to nip it in the bud. What’s wrong is wrong because of what it is now not because of who your ancestors were.
To reply with such rationality is to step squarely on the mine of being a racist apologist, and to be blown to smithereens. When the simplistic battles line is drawn between white and black, there is nothing more to be said that isn’t per se racism.
There will come a day when people have had enough and refuse to pack bags for the guilt trip.
We’ve already seen the beginning of the backlash with the election of Darth Cheeto. It gets worse from here.
“Southern white blood” is hardly the defining parameter. Many blacks were slave owners in the south. It is a fact the black racists of today seek to write out of the history books, but it is still a fact.
The only situation worse than being a Cherokee. Creek or Choctaw on the Trail of Tears during their forced death marches from southeastern states under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, was to be the black slave of a Cherokee. Creek or Choctaw.
From the Cherokee Nation slave revolt of 1842 through about 1851, at least 300 black slaves attempted escape. The Cherokee Nation passed a more strict slave code, requiring the expulsion of free blacks.
Still ongoing in the present day is the litigation over the Cherokee citizenship of the descendants of their black slaves. The unicorn rider cognitive dissonance is between the one racism (crushing tribal sovereignty) and the other (the tribes’ racist desire to put out those not of Native American ethnic descent). A pox on both their lodges! (But only a small one).
But its all so amusing! No-one will write the word at all, they use “n-word”, as if it is somehow different, as if they are scared to write nigger in case God smotes them. I just hope Lilly goes broke!
The word EXISTS! It has been around a long time, it was quite acceptable to our elders, and the people in the world haven’t changed. Now we have Geographical Boards in countries changing the name of rivers and mountains because they are scared of those 6 letters!
The world is getting pretty queer…
I’ve discussed the “n-word” in the past. I have a visceral reaction to the word and refuse to use it. That said, is using the “n-word” any better, since all it does it ask the reader to think of the word anyway? Of course not.
The act of using the first letter, a hyphen, and “word” for The Word Which Shall Not Be Named is acceptable, even righteous, virtue signalling, condensing an entire academic paper’s worth of Gertruding into but six characters.
Yeah, I have the same qualms about saying “n-word”. And then, there’s this: How the hell did we start giving individual words such power anyway? What happened to “words will never hurt me”?
There is something profoundly broken in our current culture in a psychological sense. If I were king for a day, I would suggest we work on fixing that.
Kinda embarrassing but somehow I had never seen that before. Thanks for posting it.
Good one to share with the kids, well, after I get it past my wife.
Carlin too.
William Shakespeare.
“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.”
They took primogenture very seriously back then.
If ya gotta keep makking me louk up werds, at laest speel it write…its, primogeniture.
Thank you, BBob. 🙂
Everybody’s a pedant.
He was beaten to it by a couple of millennia
Exodus 20:5
“You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,
Exodus 34:7
who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”
But Ezekiel and Kings have a more forgiving way
Ezekiel 18:19-20
“Yet you say, ‘Why should the son not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity?’ When the son has practiced justice and righteousness and has observed all My statutes and done them, he shall surely live.
“The person who sins will die The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.
2 Kings 14:6
But the sons of the slayers he did not put to death, according to what is written in the book of the Law of Moses, as the LORD commanded, saying, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the sons, nor the sons be put to death for the fathers; but each shall be put to death for his own sin.”
It’s almost as though there’s nothing new under the sun.
Screw George Santayana. Everything is different now that we’re woke.
Woke infants versus awoke adults.
Every SJW is absolutely certain that they know stuff and we’re just a bunch of dumb, old losers who fucked up their world and are therefore can be summarily ignored as they create the New World Order.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-11
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.”
But we keep reinventing the wheel anyway.
FYI – Ezekiel and Kings are quoting Deuteronomy 24:16:
“Fathers shall not be put to death because of sons, and sons shall not be put to death because of fathers; a man should be put to death for his own sin.”
I do listen to rap quite a bit, and in the privacy of my own car, sing along. And if the word is there, yeah I sing it. You don’t want me to sing it as I enjoy your song? Then don’t put it in there. But just because I use it while singing along doesn’t mean I use it in conversation. Just like I can use bitches or hos or any number of pejorative words while singing along, but won’t use them in regular settings.
I got 99 problems but the n-word ain’t one.
1980s? Really?
The mob is creating a world where you don’t even get one strike. No one will have the opportunity to learn the lessons.
I wonder if the mob realizes that the words they’re saying in 2018 are also being recorded. They’re likely to have a lot longer than 30 years to worry about a replay biting them in the…
Unfortunately, the maturity missing from their undue passion won’t come to them until it’s far too late and their children are telling them how horrifying and exhausting they are. Only then will some of them begin to grasp the failure of their religion.
One way to give strength to the mob is to show fear of it. Through its weak kneed, lily livered pandering, Lilly Diabetes has strengthened the mob.