Tampa Bay Buccaneers cornerback Carlton Davis tweeted – and then erased – an anti-Asian slander on Sunday night, prompting him to write a second tweet later to apologize.
The third-year player tweeted: “I need to stop leaving g – ks in Miami”, a derogatory term often used for people of Asian descent – specifically Vietnamese, Filipinos and Koreans.
Davis deleted the tweet and wrote another one insisting that he was referring to a different use of the word and did not know that it was used with a racial connotation.
“I would never offend any group of people,” Davis wrote. “You reporters can look for another story to blow up. The term was directed at a producer claiming that he ‘ran Miami’. With that, I will remove that word from my vocabulary, giving an account of the difficult times that our Asian family is facing. “
On a second tweet minutes laterDavis wrote: “I used a term that I always came from meant ‘lame’, but I didn’t realize that it has a much darker negative connotation. I learned a valuable lesson and I want to apologize to anyone who took offense at seeing that word, because we need to focus on helping each other in these difficult times. “
The tweet comes at a time when anti-Asian racism has seen a worrying rise in America. In New York alone, there were a series of violent incidents last week, including a woman being brutally assaulted in Midtown.
The Association of Asian American Journalists released a statement condemning his tweet, “especially at a time when Asians in the United States are experiencing a sharp increase in anti-Asian hatred.”