Wallace doesn’t deserve any blame
It wasn’t a hoax, and it wasn’t a staged incident.
Until this week, a noose had been hanging in the Talladega Superspeedway garage since at least October 2019, according to the FBI. NASCAR is still investigating how and why it got there in the first place, but law enforcement and the governing body concluded definitively: Bubba Wallace didn’t put it there.
Yet that hasn’t stopped pockets of NASCAR’S fan base from attacking, criticizing and demeaning Wallace on social media. The FBI announcement Tuesday that no charges related to the noose will be filed, further galvanizing that crowd against the only Black driver in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Everyone in NASCAR should be relieved to learn someone, possibly within the industry, did not commit a hate crime. And plenty of people have said as much, including seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson and NASCAR president Steve Phelps, who called it “the best result we could hope for.”
Critics are citing the lack of charges as evidence that Wallace fabricated the whole thing and are arguing it wasn’t a noose in the first place, all of which is untrue. The FBI and U.S. Justice Department’s joint statement regarding the investigation used the word “noose” four times to describe what it was investigating. NASCAR called it that as well. Authorities didn’t deny it was a noose; they just concluded a federal crime wasn’t committed. And Wallace said he has never seen a garage pull rope tied like that, calling it a “straight-up noose.”
NASCAR said as part of its preliminary investigation, it checked every Talladega garage stall and only one had a garage pull tied into a noose.
“The image that I have seen of what was hanging in my garage is not a garage pull,” Wallace said Tuesday on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon. “I’ve been racing all my life. We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that.”
Wallace said he’ll always have haters and is used to them, but added: “It stings a little bit worse when they’re trying to test your character.”
Before and after the FBI’S conclusion, people repeatedly called the incident a hoax and suggested it was staged – a claim Phelps said personally offended him. They disparagingly compared Wallace to actor Jussie Smollett, who was accused of staging his own attack in 2019 and was charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report. Charges against the actor were later dropped.
What happened this week in Wallace and the No. 43 team’s Talladega garage stall has absolutely nothing to do with Smollett. And anything suggesting otherwise is a false equivalence comparing two decidedly different situations that both involve Black men.
Wallace didn’t lie about what happened or stage anything, like Smollett allegedly did. The 26-year-old Richard Petty Motorsports driver did nothing wrong. He wasn’t even the person who found the noose in the Talladega garage stall.
A crew member for the No. 43 team did, and he brought it to the attention of his crew chief, Jerry Baxter, who then alerted NASCAR Cup Series managing director Jay Fabian, Phelps detailed. Then NASCAR called law enforcement, and Phelps explicitly said the governing body wouldn’t hesitate to do again should a similar situation arise.
“The evidence that we had, it was clear we needed to look into this,” Phelps said Tuesday after the FBI’S announcement. “The 43 team had nothing to do with this.”
Any rational person would look at the way in which the rope was tied and see a noose.
Whether it was a noose functioning as a garage pull, it’s still a noose.
“NASCAR was worried about Talladega – being there and knowing we were allowing fans back, and some of the most passionate fans are down there,” Wallace, an Alabama native, said Tuesday on CNN while still praising the overall atmosphere and racing the iconic track offers.
“But we had that one circled on the radar with everything going around. Let’s just be extra careful. So absolutely, I think that definitely intensified everything that went on [in response to the noose discovery].”
NASCAR did the right thing by opening an investigation and alerting law enforcement. That’s the appropriate reaction to finding a symbol of death and racism – and, arguably, a weapon – hanging in anyone’s garage stall, not to mention that of the only Black driver in the series.
This wasn’t a hoax. Even if it wasn’t a hate crime, it’s still a problem, and NASCAR is rightly digging further to learn exactly why a noose was tied in the first place. It also needs to figure out why no one noticed it until Sunday.
Those are answers everyone, especially Wallace, deserves.