Last night, Deadspin did us all the valuable service of exposing various morons who weren't thrilled with ESPN showing the World Baseball Classic game between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in Spanish by simulcasting its ESPN Deportes feed, which it could do as the Spanish-language rights-holder while MLB Network showed the game in English.
But being the kind soul I am, even as I condemn people who say stupid, racist things for being ... well, people who say stupid, racist things, I want to offer them help. So I have a few suggestions. Feel free to share as necessary.
1. Stop, just stop -- Really, pull this one off, and everything else solves itself. While asking if ESPN has been "taken over by wetbacks" may be popular in certain precincts, it's actually not cool, and neither is the attitude that leads to questions like that.
2. If suggestion No. 1 doesn't suffice for the people who just can't drag themselves into the latter half of the 20th century, much less the 21st, try to be a little less stupid -- I realize that Mexicans are the all-purpose boogeyman these days, but there is no "Mexican" language any more than there's an "American" language. We mostly speak English; they mostly speak Spanish. Furthermore, while Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, like Mexicans, are Hispanic and are very likely to speak Spanish, they're not all the same. And let us not forget ... Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.
3. Step away from the Twitter machine -- I really thought we had figured this out with the whole Obama-speaking-during-Sunday-Night-Football thing, but Twitter is no friend of the stupid racist (No one or nothing else should be, either, but we're specifically talking Twitter here.) Everybody can see anything anyone writes, as long as they look in the right places, and if Deadspin gets hold of it, they will publish it, by name.
And sometimes there are even consequences.
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