Source: Sam Hodde / Getty
Kyrie Irving‘s got a lot of free time on his hands.
The elite ball handler has now been subjected to watching his injury-plagued, Luka Doncic-less Dallas Mavericks limp their way through the season as he’s sidelined with a torn ACL.
With little to do other than watch game tape or his Duke Blue Devils in March Madness, he hopped on Twitch for a stream over the weekend, which he ended by speaking about how asinine he feels racism is.
“Growing up in this society, just because you have this different skin tone, you have different rules to abide by — or you can’t be proud of your history because of skin tone, because people really got killed because of [it],” Irving said.
He continues, asking, “Do you realize how stupid that is? You know how ignorant you’ve gotta be to put somebody in a tree and hang them because they’re Black? That’s probably the dumbest sh-t I’ve ever heard, to be honest with you.”
The NBA champion even broke down the socioeconomic effects of racism and how it led some groups — most infamously Black people— to fight for equality but are told it’s a work ethic problem.
“I stand up for humanity being a coexisting community where race, culture, class, and religion are not always at the forefront of everything you do,” he said.
He clarifies that there is no issue with putting one’s faith first, but he wants people to use those principles to inform how they treat others.
“If you put god first and your faith is strong, what the f-ck in your faith tells you to hate other people?” he questions. “I haven’t read that in the Quran.”
The former flat earther has also been known to promote conspiracy theories and atypical thinking, which came to a head in October 2022. The then Brooklyn Net tweeted out a link to Ronald Dalton’s 2018 movie Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black Americas, which IMDb’s synopsis says “aims to prove the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) belief that certain people of color, including Black Americans, are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.”
He was labeled antisemitic for sharing the movie and was forced to donate $500,000 to those fighting for proper representation of the Jewish community, suspended for several games, and issued an apology.
See how social media is reacting to Irving’s near-six-hour stream below.
