Kyrie Irving been turning up every day since he won. That boy turning up on the yacht as we speak pic.twitter.com/aCLg5ff2a9
— TheHumbleJerk (@BUCK15) June 24, 2016
You remember the above video of Kyrie Irving enjoying the bacchanalia and hedonism that often accompanies an NBA championship victory? It was part of his summer fun tour, where he indulged in the company of scantily-clad women, top shelf bottles and…chicken fingers before he got down to the business of winning gold in Rio with the USA Basketball Team.
Except, if you’re someone who keeps track of such things, you may have picked up on a homogeneity among the the women in attendance at his yacht party — at least in that brief snippet of video. All of them appear to be Caucasian, and that seems to have rubbed some the wrong way. Here are a few tweets as an example:
https://twitter.com/cthagod/status/746413953585127424
For every Kyrie Irving out there that doesn't appreciate black women, there is also a Dirk Nowitzki that does. #StayWoke
— Iris West-Allen (@model_type_bre) June 24, 2016
https://twitter.com/GeTeMviLLe/status/746400672522743809
https://twitter.com/israelizreal/status/746408576151781376
It’s become enough of a thing online that Kyrie Irving felt the need to address the video in a Facebook post today.
Click here if you want to see a bigger screen capture, or just read the copy and paste below:
I’d never think I would have to address something as ridiculous as a yacht party, but I wasn’t raised to discriminate against any race let alone any race of women, especially my own. I was raised by the black women in my family and for me to be connected to some nonsense like a “No black girls allowed” party is embarrassing and an inaccurate portrayal of who and what I represent as man. I wasn’t going to even address any of this because there are literally a million things going on in the world right now that are far more important, rather than people trying to bring question to my character. I would like to apologize to anyone if they were offended initially without knowing any of what actually happened, but that story has no truth to it and I wanted to clear the air on all of this B.S. And for those who know me, I’m sorry you all had to answer questions about a story as ridiculous as something like this. But now, I would like to continue celebrating this championship. Thank you.
Irving had already alluded to the story in an Instagram post the day after the backlash started by captioning this photo “All different shades.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHEEUnpA0zx/
But Irving obviously felt that caption wasn’t enough to explain how he felt about the reaction, so he wrote the lengthier Facebook post going into more detail about his distress at the narrative.
