The Las Vegas Raiders responded to the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict with an incredibly tone-deaf tweet
Raiders #Raiders
On Tuesday afternoon, a Minneapolis jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin on all three counts — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — for the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
The video of the murder — which showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds — sparked global protests of police brutality and racial injustice against the Black community last year. And Tuesday’s verdict represented an important step towards a semblance of justice for the Floyd family, but it didn’t change the fact that George Floyd should still be alive today.
Predictably, many social media accounts with communications teams wanted to make a public statement about the verdict. And in the sports world, specifically, it would be tough to find a worse response than the Las Vegas Raiders’ effort.
This was just so bad.
The Raiders tweeted, “I can breathe 4-20-21,” in a Twitter graphic. This morbid play off of Floyd’s final words as he was being murdered did not sit well with anyone — even as the Raiders kept the tweet live and pinned for 30-plus minutes.
Again, the verdict doesn’t bring Floyd back to life. He still can’t breathe. Who are the Raiders talking about then? The Raiders’ tweet essentially celebrated a tragedy with the kind of tone-deafness you can expect from the NFL.
Fans were not pleased.
Never tweet, Raiders.
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