A minor league baseball team yanked a t-shirt bearing its nickname and logo from merchandise sales after overly sensitive fans complained that it bore too much of a resemblance to a racial slur.
The Chattanooga Lookouts have long used the nickname of “Nooga,” a shortened version of their Tennessee home’s name, and when the Double-A affiliate of the MLB Cincinnati Reds offered a t-shirt with the two-o’s replaced with a pair of eyes that have been a part of the team logo since 1991, it was decried as being racist.
After a social media video created by a TikToker named Marquis Tate who asked his followers to “send it to the press” went viral, the team reacted by pulling the offensive shirt from its online store.
(Video: YouTube/Local 3 News)
“It looks exactly like it. It looks exactly like the slur,” he said in the video which had been viewed over 200 thousand times since it was posted on Tuesday.
“Oh no, chattanooga this isn’t gonna work,” a Twitter user with the handle of Dre posted along with an image of the now-discontinued garb.
Oh no, chattanooga this isn’t gonna work pic.twitter.com/l9cnHvRzSA
— Dre (@newhandledre) July 23, 2023
But some expressed their opinions that the uproar is just more of the same ridiculous racial hysteria that has sadly become commonplace in post-Obama America, especially after the 2020 George Floyd race riots.
You have to dig really hard and be predisposed to using slurs in your vocabulary to see anything wrong with this shirt.
— Feral Fawcett (@angelRlong) July 27, 2023
You can’t be serious, right? A HUGE reach to suggest there’s anything inappropriate about this shirt. The is literally the team logo, and is used very often by tons of people to substitute for two O’s. Chattanooga is shortened to Nooga by lots of people here. Get a life.
— I AM a biologist (@Hat_rack_jack) July 27, 2023
Ridiculous. Nobody decent thinks of the N-word until someone has to bring it up to get their 5 mins of fame.
— The Potter’s Clay Church (@TPCC83335) July 29, 2023
Nooga is their long standing nickname. The looking eyes in the graphic suggest their actual name “Look outs.” So what’s the problem here?
— Catboat Guy (@catboat401) July 28, 2023
Until the community that’s seemingly “so offended” by this slur stops using the slur in every conversation, song, and communication…it’s not offensive. Go Nooga’s!
— Pat Bourgeois (@BourgeoisPat) July 29, 2023
We should probably go ahead and change the city name as well. Super offensive.
— Nathan Phillips (@natedawg035) July 27, 2023
“Some people say that you know, you know, ‘you people’ are too sensitive,” Tate said. “You know, if someone is offended by the shirt, and I, you know if they do find it offensive, that’s their prerogative. They can do that.”
“And I don’t think the people on the opposite side of that should use ‘I never get offended’ as a weapon,” he told a local news outlet.
“Wow, I’m beyond speechless,” Melanie Aycock, a woman from Atlanta told Local 3 News, saying that she wouldn’t want to wear one of the controversial shirts because of its close resemblance to the N-word.
“I don’t want to offend anyone not just my community. I’m not sure I want to wear that I have young sons and that’s not the message I would want them to portray I would want them to be more positive and not blasting a message indirectly,” she said.
The team which was founded in 1885, has been named the Lookouts since a fan contest in 1909, a reference to nearby Lookout Mountain.
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