Bill Romanowski Calling Cam Newton 'Boy' Was Racist

By Shaun King, New York Daily News

08 February 16

ormer NFL standout Bill Romanowski is a racist.

Last night, after Cam Newton, who broke records for being sacked in the Super Bowl, saw his dreams of winning the game dashed. After it was over, as expected, he was utterly dejected.

This is normal, but black men are not often given the space to be emotional or expressive without being subjected to white anger.

Romanowski, a former Denver Bronco with a bad reputation, could not wait to chime in. In a now deleted tweet, he said “You’ll never last in the NFL with that attitude. The world doesn’t revolve around you, boy! #CamNewton”

Apparently, even though it’s 2016, I have to explain where the racism is in that tweet.

Newton is not a boy. He’s not a rookie. He’s the MVP of the NFL. He’s a father. He’s the face of his franchise. He’s a businessman and a role model.

Racist white men, for hundreds of years, have found power in calling grown black men “boy.”

Age has nothing to do with it.

Throughout history, black men who were decades older than white men have been called “boy” by them. It’s meant to belittle and dehumanize. It has deep roots stemming from slavery, all the way through Jim Crow, and, as we now see, into modern America.

Let’s not mince words here. Romanowski wasn’t saying Newton was acting like a boy. He made a statement to Newton, put a comma after that statement, and followed the comma with the word, “boy.” He was calling Cam a boy.

Show me one instance where another league MVP has been called “boy” by anyone other than a stone cold racist. Show me one instance where any athlete in the Super Bowl has been called such a slur.

We should have seen this coming. Last week, Romanowski openly threatened Newton, saying he would choke him and hold on to it for a long time, until he couldn’t breathe. One of the commentators then using the exact words of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by the NYPD, said the words “I can’t breathe.”

Who says this stuff? I don’t care how crass this man is known for being — this is disgusting.

To be clear, this was no coming out party for Romanowski. He was a racist before he wrote a bigoted tweet about Newton, but he has now proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that being an African American quarterback still requires athletes to wade through a sea of ridiculousness that has nothing to do with athleticism.

Romanowski once spit in the face of another black player. That’s about as deeply insulting as it gets. Later, another athlete told Sports Illustrated that Romanowski referred to other black players privately by the “n-word.”

After a denial of the allegation by Romanowski, Sports Illustrated stood by their story and their source.It doesn’t matter though — he keeps getting asked his opinion. At a time when Donald Trump is a popular candidate for president, how can we be surprised?

To be clear, I wasn’t even a Cam Newton fan a few weeks ago.

His Carolina Panthers are division rivals to my hometown Atlanta Falcons and he has pretty much made our lives miserable these past few years.

But to see this man subjected daily to thousands of racist messages and critiques, online and off, has caused me — and thousands of others — to root for him more than ever.