Take it from one of Nascar’s rare black writers: the sport has far deeper issues over race than one driver’s use of the n-word
Race has always been a tricky subject for Kyle Larson. But, alas, we could not avoid it. He was the biracial Japanese-American phenom who hadn’t just reached Nascar’s highest rung but was being touted as the second coming of Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon … by Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon. And I am the rare black writer who covers motorsports on a national level. We have to go there.
My first meeting with Larson was in the winter of 2014 at a dirt-track racing extravaganza in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called The Chili Bowl – an event that definitely causes a chill if you happened to be one of the few non-whites attending for the first time. Larson forever struck me as a reluctant, though accommodating, trailblazer. On the one hand he has a fascinating family history: a mother whose parents were put in a Californian internment camp during the second world war. On the other hand, because of the horror of that experience and the urgency to assimilate afterward, Larson stays mum about that part of his biography.
Related: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: what sports have taught me about race in America
Related: Kyle Larson fired after Nascar driver uses n-word during virtual race
