Apologies are like coupons; they come with a list of rules.
Saying to someone “I’m sorry your foot was in the street and therefore I rolled over it with my car,” is not an apology. Saying how you really feel and then apologizing because you’ve been called out is not an apology, it’s a get-right. Meaning, you’re trying to get right so you don’t lose your job or endorsements or public standing after spouting your true feelings.
See, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith’s apology for his xenophobic comments about Japanese Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani. Smith’s apology had nothing to do with own feelings and everything to do with getting right with his employer.
So with that I say, fuck Texas Deputy Attorney General Aaron Reitz, who fixed his dumbass fingers to tweet that Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast in the history of the sport, is a “national embarrassment,” after she withdrew from the team final and the individual all-around competition earlier this week to focus on her mental health.
Biles lives in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston, and it remains unclear whether we’ve seen the last of the most accomplished gymnast in the sport at the Tokyo Games.
In a now-deleted tweet, Reitz, who would probably get winded running a city-block, “quote-tweeted video from Kerri Strug’s 1996 Olympic performance on an injured ankle” then said, “Contrast this with our selfish, childish national embarrassment, Simone Biles,” CBS News reports.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Reitz tweeted to say he owed Biles “an apology. A big one”:
It is exhausting dealing with the criticism of Black women who have elected to take care of themselves over everything. Show me one time where America ever gave a shit about Black women who still aren’t paid properly and who are three to four times more likely to die during pregnancy than their white counterparts. Why would a Black woman ever risk her mental health for a country that hasn’t figured out why they are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer and are more at risk than white men to die from COVID-19?
If Black women don’t look out for themselves and their own mental health who is going to? Surely not doctors. Doctors don’t even listen to them, and when they do, they don’t believe that Black women are suffering as badly as they say they are.
Simone Biles is the face of a sport that allowed her and her teammates to be sexually assaulted. Let that sink in.
So fuck all of these Facebook warriors, elected officials and armchair quarterbacks who couldn’t carry Biles’ medals on a good day without needing to take a water break. And fuck America, too. You should be ashamed of yourself for wanting to ride the coattails of a Black woman when it’s patriotic, but can’t support her when she’s not performing for you. (See, the Democratic Party.)
And fuck Reitz and his bullshit apology.