“I never said that I hated the country,” said Gwen Berry, the world’s most famous hammer thrower — male, female or non-binary. “All I said was I respect my people enough to not stand or acknowledge something that disrespects them. I love my people point blank, period.”
Berry, who finished third in the female hammer throw at the U.S. track and field Olympic Trials, was attempting to explain why she turned her back on the National Anthem. If her subversive pout appalled half of America, it surprised no one. In the year 2021, sports fans have come to expect athletes, black and white, to disrespect symbols of national pride.
It didn’t use to be this way. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, race relations were better than they had ever been. As to athletic protests, it had been forty years since any Olympian grabbed the kind of attention Berry got.
At the 1968 Olympics, 200-meter medalists Tommy Smith and John Carlos famously gave a black power salute while the Anthem played. Unlike Berry, however, they at least had something to bitch about, Smith having grown up in the Jim Crow South and Carlos having been schooled there.
Berry had no idea what she was protesting. Born in a St. Louis suburb in 1989, she likely cast her first presidential vote for a black man. She may have even believed Obama’s insistence that there “is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”
POS!!!
Perfect example of a dumbass C***.