President Obama once said he could not escape the sins of his forebearers. Conor Daly can relate.
He’s a driver in NASCAR’s Xfinity Series who was supposed to make his debut last weekend at the Road America race in Milwaukee.
His car was sponsored by Lilly Diabetes, a division of Eli Lilly and Co. A day before the race, Lilly pulled out of the deal.
Stories had surfaced that Daly had once used the N-word.
Not Conor Daly.
His father, Derek, said it.
Approximately 35 years ago.
No, this is not satire designed to ridicule political correctness.
The first impulse is to jump on Lilly, to accuse it of stretching PC so far that even Harvard professors are chuckling about this one in the faculty lounge.
It is hilarious in a way. But more than anything, it’s frightening to think how corporate policy is warping.
Eli Lilly didn’t become a $90 billion company by being stupid. I presume it took a sober look at society and calculated that being remotely – and I do mean remotely – associated with the N-word would damage the brand.
So it made a business decision.
Somewhere, George Orwell is thinking “I told you so.”
Lilly’s move is a milestone victory for the Thought Police, which has already raised any use of the N-word to a near-capital offense.
It goes without saying that the word has no place in anyone’s vocabulary (rappers excluded, but that’s another story). Anyone who throws it around deserves the scorn he or she gets.
But now the scorn rains down regardless of the situation. Papa John’s founder John Schnatter was tarred and feathered last month after using it in a public relations training session.
He was describing the language people in his Indiana hometown used to use and how bad that was. But in the PC drive to purify society, context no longer matters.
It didn’t with Derek Daly. He lost his job as a race analyst when the Indianapolis TV station became aware of his N-word story.
He said it in a radio interview in the early 1980s. It was used in a phrase that was not considered offensive in Ireland, where Daly had just moved from.
When Daly realized his mistake, he apologized and swore to never say the N-word again. Willy T. Ribbs, an African-American driver who’s known Daly for 40 years, quickly came to his defense.
“I’ve never been friends with racists,” Ribbs said. “He’s a great father, great human being and great friend.”
The word did once come out of Daly’s mouth, however, so he must pay the price.
But his son?
Conor Daly was born in 1991. He has Type I diabetes, so his pairing with Lilly Diabetes was a natural. By all accounts, he was a good corporate ambassador, educated fans on the disease and never uttered an unkind word.
Yet within 48 hours of the news that his father once used the N-word in the early 1980s, a major corporation severed ties.
Just for grins, we could contrast that to how the New York Times recently hired editorial writer Sarah Jeong despite her years of “#cancelwhitepeople” and “(bleep) the police” on Twitter.
The Thought Police enforces its anti-bias rules on certain groups, so she got a pass. Which brings us back to Obama.
His minister and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., spent years bashing Jews and America from the pulpit.
When that became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama tried to quell the controversy with a speech that included this passage:
“I can no more disown (Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
His grandmother apparently would make Derek Daly look like Thurgood Marshall. But that wasn’t a disqualifier for Obama then, and it shouldn’t be now.
If everybody is held responsible for insulting things their parents or grandparents or friends ever said, nobody will escape.
But that’s now corporate policy at Eli Lilly. The Though Police strike new territory.
Celebrate at your own risk.
David Whitley is a member of our Community Conversations Team. He can be reached at [email protected]
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