The Chris Moeller Archives

Carson King, white Iowans forgive you for your racist tweets

The “hospital wave” is a sensation in Iowa. Know what this is? Iowa Hawkeyes football fans gather in unison-- black and gold color-coordinated unison, before each home game, and wave from their stadium seats to the young patients through the windows of the university children's hospital that overlooks the stadium. To me, this relatively-new tradition is more self-congratulatory than warm fuzzy, but I’m a dick. Allow me to elaborate.

At this year’s Iowa/Iowa State football game two hours away in Ames and a week ago Saturday, an ISU fan jokingly tweeted with a camera-captured placard for ESPN audiences that he needed people to transfer him money through the Venmo app so that he could purchase more Busch Light beer to drink. When dollars started coming in by the thousands still days later, this fan, named Carson King, announced that he would donate all the money sent to him to the children's hospital, and then Anheuser-Busch InBev, the corporate brewer behind the Busch Light brand, announced that it would match donations up to $350,000. Venmo said it would follow suit. A week later-- this week-- the effort had topped a million dollars. King flew across the country and did television interviews to raise additional money for this drive while wearing an Iowa State polo.

That’s where the story takes a turn. The Des Moines Register interviewed King for a profile that published yesterday. In it, in a blurb near the end, the Register’s reporter makes mention of the fact that King had a pair of terribly racist tweets from 2012 still on his social media profile. One tweet referred to African-American mothers as gorillas, and the other joked about black people killed in a holocaust. He says he was quoting the TV show Tosh-O, but I never watched that. King has since scrubbed the posts away, staging a preemptive news conference as well to address the matter ahead of the Register’s publication. Anheuser Busch dropped their affiliation with King (a series of Busch Light cans featuring the man’s face had been hitting shelves) while saying it would still honor the financial promise.

The story set off a firestorm reaction from Iowans as well-- against the Register. Online boycott movements began overnight Tuesday, and King defenders dug up racially-insensitive posts connected to the reporter’s social media profile. Within the quarters that I run, support for a repentant King seems to be almost universal. His expressed regret seems to have been received almost universally as sincere, and in apologizing, he thanked the newspaper and the reporter for the fairness of their treatment of him. If you're not from here, you need to know that, in Central Iowa, this story is bigger than the one about the impeachment inquiry into the president.

I don’t mind telling you that I stand here firmly in the camp of minority opinion. I won’t make this text mostly about white privilege and the mentality of “boys will be boys” that does not apply to all boys, or all humans. But it is tempting to do so. This week, two diametrically-opposed but related actions took place-- a celebrity white actress, Felicity Huffman, received a sentence of 14 days in prison for her part in a college admission scandal involving her children and millions of dollars while a black man in Alabama got released from prison after 30 years for having stolen $50 during a break-in. In the United States, we find it so much easier to look inside the hearts of white people.

As a friend of mine wrote online, I don’t pine for the long ago day when there were no repercussions for saying or doing awful things. The crowd so quick to say “I’m glad there was no social media when I was a kid,” is, by and large, being very unfair to itself. I choose not to believe that anybody in my circle would even think a thought akin to black mothers are gorillas, let alone post it for all family and friends to see, and then keep it there for years, until you're called out on it, and so I won’t stand by and let them talk about themselves that way. We were all kids. We weren't all racist little shitheads. I say thank you instead to the maligned newspaper for their disclosure.

The Register, contrary to public opinion, doesn’t exist to be a civic booster (although sometimes it must seem that way) or to be a buddy in a fundraising drive. The local daily-- and in Des Moines, we have only the one-- is a watchdog. That metaphor is perfect for journalistic entities because watchdogs bark at everything, whether the threat is real or imagined. Then the consumer-- the citizen-- is free to label for him or herself the real and the imagined. If this discovery about the now 24-year-old King’s previous 16-year-old self means nothing to you, then simply ignore it. The facts in question were buried at the end of a lengthy profile piece, not presented at all salaciously or scandalously, and the rest of the article positively glowing in tribute to King, the Super Iowan. The paper’s editorial head said they chose a compromise in their treatment by including the facts of the tweets, but not making them the focal point.

The tweet discovery did mean something to Anheuser Busch, as it would to any modern day corporation concerned about everything modern-day corporations are worried about. If you find it crassly opportunistic on their part to jump on and off the bandwagon so easily, take it up with the Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, and there are some Democratic Socialist candidates on the 2020 ballots that really need your support. I absolutely feel people are misdirecting their anger for this man onto the newspaper instead. Carson King has let him down, not the Register, but online or over the air, I haven’t heard one person say they’re disappointed in him. No, there’s nothing offered for him but empathy and instant forgiveness even though none of them in my immediate experience know him personally nor were the targets of his offensive posts. Not at all. Kind-hearted Iowans need to defend kind-hearted Carson from "click-hungry" newspaper reporters and from the monolithic "media."

If the Register does a profile piece on somebody, they'd better be looking at the person’s online presence. That’s Day One shit on running a background. He’s not a 16 year old boy who tweeted terrible things. He’s a 24-year-old man that still has (now, had) terrible tweets on his online profile. This is while he’s on a national tour promoting his whole thing. And he's precisely famous because of what he has tweeted. Tell me, how bad does this reporter and his employer look if they run a half-page-in-print profile such as this, measuring out to several hundred words, and the fundraising story continues to grow bigger and bigger (like the one about the hospital wave), and then an outlet like Deadspin posts the big tweet reveal that the paper missed or ignored? It looks really bad. They look like homers.

As for the reporter’s supposed hypocrisy, editors made that decision to put those elements in, not him. He certainly just came back to the office armed with the details. They could have struck it, or told him to make it the center of the story. As the editor said, they chose the compromise. If the Register has made any mistakes, it’s in not being adversarial enough against conventional thinking in their previous work to remind people what their social function is.

I think King has handled it very well actually. I don’t hear him saying the same thing in his own defense that many of his defenders are saying. He’s saying thank you to the reporter and basically-- I know I need to do better. That’s wonderful. He’ll be fine, and if it matters to you, I believe the fundraising will definitely be fine, too.

I honestly think this was a story resonating with people because it previously possessed a rare purity. People want uncomplicated good news and this was it-- a positive, successful fundraiser that had been goosed by a nice-seeming fan from a rival school during the rivalry week-- we're all Iowans-- and they believe that this reporter and his employer managed to shit all over that. But their expectations of what constitutes a happy ending in life are wrong-- at least much too simplistic. Carson has learned and has handled it admirably, beautifully. And frankly, being faced with this scrutiny is what helped him on his way. He probably kicks himself for having not deleted the posts, but I’m glad he didn’t. For the sake of himself, and more so for the rest of us. And I hope the thanks he expressed to the Des Moines Register are sincere. They should be. Deadspin wouldn’t have been nearly as nice.

That is the happy ending-- and he’s the one that’s writing it for himself. Props to him. We need to adjust our mindsets. In reality, happy endings tend to be about human growth, not old-fashioned, simplistic “values.”

posted by CM @ 8:05 AM