People being arrested or harassed for doing something innocuous while being black seems to be getting worse. We now have a case where a group of black women at a golf course had the police called on them for playing too slowly, a charge they vigorously denied.
Sandra Thompson and four friends met up Saturday to play a round of golf at the Grandview Golf Club, where they are all members, she told the newspaper.
At the second hole, a white man whose son co-owns the club came up to them twice to complain that they weren’t keeping up with the pace of play. Thompson, an attorney and the head of the York chapter of the NAACP, told the newspaper it was untrue.
…The five are part of a larger group of local women known as Sisters in the Fairway. The group has been around for at least a decade, and all of its members are experienced players who have golfed all over the county and world, Thompson said. They’re very familiar with golf etiquette, she said.
In this video, Thompson shows the interaction she had with the owner of the course.
To their credit, the police decided that nothing had happened that warranted them being called, though calling police for a frivolous golfing issue might merit a citation. These were middle-aged women which likely helped prevent escalation. If they had been young black men, who knows what might have happened. The co-owner of the golf club, also the wife of the man in the video, later apologized to the women.
George Carlin, in this utterly hilarious rant, lets loose at the game of golf and those who play it and suggests what we should do with all the golf courses. (Language advisory, no surprise considering it’s Carlin.)
It is impossible to separate American racism from American classism. Both suck, and the intersection of the two is the pinnacle of suck.
This reminds me of a case of ‘farming while black’ from around 5-6 years ago.
The police in Lincolnshire (a largely agricultural UK county) responded to a call about a man who had stolen a tractor with attached plough, and was joy-riding around a field, tearing up the ground.
The police arrived to find that the ‘thief’, a middle-aged black male, had owned the farm for many years and was busy ploughing to ready his land for the season’s planting of crops.
The complainant had been driving past the farm, saw a black man on a tracor, and assumed the rest.
Last sentence of #3 should say ‘tractor’, of course.
I was suggesting to a friend who golfs that he needs a dog. A retriever, in fact. That way he can hit the ball and the dog can bring in back. He laughed at me !!
I was wondering if the call to the police was intended more as a threat against what looked like some rather aggressive young men?
Rather than bothering with the ‘__________ while black’ construction, I vote we simply call it ‘being black.’
No. It’s just being recorded now. This isn’t a rise in racism, it’s holes being ripped in our convenient illusions that it doesn’t happen.
Happily, Golf is a dying industry. Courses are closing left and right.
@8 “Golf is a dying industry”.
Can you post some links? In a fair way?
Uh, it’s golf. How can you tell they’re going “too slow”?
I know you are kidding, grasshopper, but…https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-america-fell-out-of-love-with-golf/?utm_term=.b9b92f59dff7
🙂