EPICANTHUS

My first reaction to the story broken Saturday by Chris Foster, L.A. Times‘ UCLA beat reporter,  about freshman wide receiver Randall Carroll using a racial epithet in reference to offensive coordinator Norm Chow was “Gee, I hope he got his slurs right.” You know, I thought that maybe Carroll, the highly recruited L.A. Cathedral High star, called Chow a Jap or Gook. Chow, of course, is a Chinese American (or Chink). But the Times didn’t print what the alleged epithet was leaving Southern California sports fans (and racists) hanging.

My curiosity demanded that I pin down fo’ sho’ what the dis be, and after some due diligence came up with a screen grab of a cached version of @OCiAM’s (Carroll’s Twitter ID) “racial epithet” as posted on Twitter Oct. 22 (below) to high school running back Dietrich Riley. Either school officials or Carroll had tried to erase the tweet by closing his Twitter account, but we have our ways. Check it out.

Sounds more like a frustrated 18-year-old who wants the muthafuckin’ ball more to me. But I ain’t mad at cha. Everyone’s forgiven… even Chris Foster for filing such a thin, poorly sourced story in his lame effort to expose dissension in the ranks of Coach Rick Neuheisel’s squad.

But hold up, cuz. Yeah, I checked reporter Foster’s @cfosterlattimes Twitter account too. Foster tweets about the Chow-Carroll piece four times. The first two hype the Web-sourced piece. But in the final two Foster be frontin’ to cover his messy ass, linking to a sorry revised version of the story that includes somewhat exculpatory comments from Randall not used in the original article.

Then before beddy-bye, Foster, with an eye toward damage control, tweets: “Everyone seems fixated on the ‘racial’ term Carroll used to describe Chow (check most hip hop songs to hear it).”

Well, @cfosterlatimes, when the headline reads: “Tweet from UCLA player’s account uses racial epithet for Norm Chow.” readers will tend to “fixate” on the “racial term.”

Read the rest of this entry »