Brandon Brown, a professional basketball player based in South Korea revealed racial discriminatory messages that he has received from Korean basketball fans through his personal social networking system (instagram story). The problem of racial discrimination against sport players in Korean basketball team has risen recently, as Ricardo P. Ratliffe (commonly known as Ri-Gun-Ah) playing for KCC Jeonju, who have applied and was granted a South Korean nationality in 2018, have urged to fans in his instagram to stop sending him discriminatory remarks and libel about his appearances and even towards his family. Ri-Gun-Ah, after being naturalized as Korean citizens, spoke in an interview that he wishes to become South Korea’s national team, and remarked that unlike the States that poses dangers of drugs and gun-related violence to his family, the relative safety of South Korea enticed him to love the country even more. The fact that Ricardo is receiving such defamatory remarks from the people from once-foreign country that he loved so much is quite ironic in that South Koreans have expressed frustrations and anger towards the racial discrimination that Korean athletes had confronted with in previous events. South Koreans have framed themselves as the victims of racial discrimination, yet in their home country, they became the assailants.
In the screenshots that Ratliffe and Brown uploaded on their SNS included degrading terms such as “nigger,” along with defamatory comments like “I hope you die by car clash accident,” “Are you a f***ing kidding me? Are u f***ing crazy?” Brown alongside with such hateful messages that he received, added his encouragement toward Ratliffe: “You got to keep pushing, you hoop to provide for your daughter.”
After Ratliffe’s publication of the status of racial discrimination in South Korea, he remarked in his interview that compared to the other nation’s basketball league, the discriminations that foreign players have to suffer through is relatively severe in South Korea, and that it is quite common among non-Korean basketball players.
The Korean Basketball League have responded to such issue by declaring that the KBL will find a legal method to penalize the assailants of discrimination, adding that they will work with the foreign players to gather the information of the current status of affliction.