FAKE NEWS | Activists Take Aim At “Racist” Game of Pool

SAN FRANCISCO – Along with working to weed out all traces of racism and white supremacy in policing, education, and the media, local Black Lives Matter activists have set their sights on another target – the game of pool.

About 50 members of Black Lives Matter Bay Area rallied outside Racks, a local pool hall on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, to protest what they called a “racist” game.

“Pool involves using a white ball to hit balls of color,” said Mariana Garcia one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter Bay Area, “and to cause balls of color to hit each other. This represents everything wrong in America today. White people are literally killing people of color and turning them against one another.”

Jamelle Jamieson, another Black Lives Matter Bay Area leader at the rally, dismissed those who claim pool is “just a game” as “hopelessly naïve.”

“Games can promote subconscious racism and white supremacy,” she explained. “For example, in pool, when balls of color fall into a hole it’s good, but when the white ball falls into a hole it’s bad. This sends the message that misfortunes are only bad when they happen to white people.

“Furthermore, pool tables and equipment are really expensive, therefore historically-disadvantaged people of color usually can’t afford to play pool, and something something something, anyone who plays pool is a Nazi,” she said, before breaking off to jeer at patrons trying to enter the pool hall.

Some prominent academics have also weighed-in on this controversy. Marissa Click, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke of the long history of systemic racism in pool, including how the game was invented by upper-class people in Northern Europe as “The Noble Game of Billiards,” and how black people were excluded from pool halls during the Jim Crow era. She also pointed out that most winners of pool competitions have been white, and called on them, and “everyone else who profited from the pain of people of color,” to donate to their local Black Lives Matter chapter as “reparations.”

Ibram X. Kendi, author of the bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, praised the activists for “fighting for what’s important.

“Racism and white supremacy are in everything in America,” he said, “from the air we breathe, the food we eat, even the games we play. People of color will never be safe until we have banned this oppressive game.”

Instead, Kendi advised people to play more “antiracist” games, like bowling.

“Bowling involves using big balls of color to smash the shit out of rows of white pins,” he said. “Now this I like.”