The Boston Red Sox permanently banned a fan from Fenway Park for life for using a racial slur toward another fan during Wednesday night’s game against the Baltimore Orioles.
Red Sox fan Calvin Hennick described the incident in a post on Facebook and Twitter and said after a Kenyan woman finished singing the Star-Spangled Banner, a middle-aged white man in the stands next to him used a racial slur to describe her rendition of our National Anthem.
“I thought that surely I’d misheard him,” Hennick said in the post. “This was the day after Fenway fans had made national headlines for racism, and the man could plainly see me sitting with my black father-in-law and half-black son. I asked him to repeat himself, and he said [it] again.”
The headlines Hennick is referring to, of course, involves the uproar after Orioles outfielder Adam Jones said fans shouted the slur at him and someone threw a bag of peanuts at him Monday night.
In Wednesday night’s incident, Hennick wrote that he reported what the fan said to an usher and that fan was kicked out of the game.
The Red Sox released a statement saying that the fan has been banned from Fenway Park for life.
“The Red Sox organization will not tolerate the use of racial slurs at Fenway Park, and we have apologized to those affected,” the team said in a statement. “There is no place for racial epithets at Fenway Park, in baseball, or in our society.”
The Red Sox went on to say that the organization has reported what occurred to the Boston Police Department for further investigation.
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