The state of Pennsylvania hasn’t looked very progressive or intellectually enlightened lately. First you have their laws on child molestation, which appear to be extremely lenient as Jerry Sandusky is still walking around a free man. Even living across the street from an elementary school! Then you have the entire state’s deification of the late Joe Paterno, who was complicit to child rape in his college football program, doing the absolute minimum about the situation because he “didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend.”
But that’s mainly the isolated, rural portion of the state. We expect more out of the major cities and their suburbs. But what happened near Pittsburgh in a recent basketball game, and the pathetic lack of action regarding the situation looks a lot like the south during 1950s era Jim Crow times.
Hard to believe an incident like this between a lily white school and a nearly all black school is happening in 2012 Pittsburgh.
From Prep Rally:
As reported by a variety of Pittsburgh media outlets, the Monessen Valley Independent and WPXI prominent among them, the annual basketball rivalry game between Pittsburgh (Pa.) Brentwood High and Monessen (Pa.) High turned extremely ugly when the two teams tried to head to their respective locker rooms for halftime. Before the players could leave the floor, three fans from the visiting Brentwood student section ran onto the court in full-body banana suits.
The fans surrounded the Monessen players and allegedly began making monkey noises and hurling racial epithets at the Monessen players, with no one entering the fray to stop the horribly inappropriate catcalls.
“I was appalled and shocked,” Monessen parent Terri Payne told WPXI. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing that, and they didn’t do anything about it.’”
Disturbingly, other Monessen parents claim that the Brentwood players hurled similar racist epithets themselves, calling the Greyhounds “monkeys and cotton pickers,” as one Monessen fan told WPXI.
Meanwhile, Valley Independent staff writer Jeremy Sellew claimed that Brentwood Director of Security Joseph Kozarian, who was on duty at the game, refused to intervene, instead sitting back and at one point smiling and laughing with the Brentwood fans in the stands.
The school has said the three idiot morons in the banana suits were identified and punished, but the details of the punishment were omitted. I’ll be pretty pissed off if multiple suspensions aren’t handed out for this. Not just the instigating students, but the players too. You’d think a team from Brentwood, a city synonymous (granted it’s the California, not the PA version) with an event that was the most racially divisive in a generation (O.J. Simpson murder case/verdict) would have better racial sensitivity than this.
Hell, any non-KKK member or non-neo-nazi should have much better sense than this! Starting with Kozarian, how can he (or anyone) find this funny? What kind of example are you setting for the Brentwood Spartans, or kids in general? If you’re the Monessen Greyhounds how can you play these racist bastards again?
Paul M. Banks is CEO of The Sports Bank.net, an official Google News site generating millions of unique visitors. He’s also a regular contributor to Chicago Now, Walter Football.com, Yardbarker, and Fox Sports
A Fulbright scholar and MBA, Banks has appeared on live radio all over the world; and he’s a member of the Football Writers Association of America, U.S. Basketball Writers Association, and Society of Professional Journalists. The President of the United States follows him on Twitter (@Paul_M_BanksTSB) You should too.
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Maybe you should do your research and get your facts straight of this one-sided story. I am a graduate of Brentwood and was in attendance at the game. Joe is the last person to allow anything even remotely close to this incident to happen at games let alone stand there and laugh about it. You weren’t there so to make such allegations is appalling to me. Read the stories from both sides. Hell, get the videos from the game yourself then pass judgement. No “monkey noises” were made and banana-suits have been worn to more than just basketball games over the years. No one can really confirm what was said on the court but trash talking is part of the game. But once you go attacking people that do nothing but protect that school when you don’t know the correct story, that’s just wrong.
Become a better journalist & learn the story from both sides to get your facets straight and before you go passing judgements. It’s reports like this that are causing THREATS against Joe & his family.