“I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways,” Cuban told an audience Wednesday at Inc. magazine’s GrowCo conference in Nashville. “If I...
“I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways,” Cuban told an audience Wednesday at Inc. magazine’s GrowCo conference in Nashville. “If I see a black kid, in a hoodie, and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy who has tattoos all over his face, white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere, I’m walking back to the other side.”
Too soon, Cuban, on that blithe reference to a hoodie, a sweatshirt suffused with symbolism since unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot to death in 2012 while wearing one.
On Twitter, ESPN’s Bomani Jones took Cuban to task for equating a person wearing the tattoos of prison culture with someone wearing a sweatshirt, sparking a debate with the franchise owner, who wrote, “The point was that before we can help others deal [with] racism we have to be honest about ourselves.”
Cuban later tweeted an apology for the hoodie reference Thursday afternoon, writing: “In hindsight I should have used different examples. I didn’t consider the Trayvon Martin family, and I apologize to them for that.” He added that he stood by the substance of his comments.
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