TAMPA, Florida – Tampa Bay Buccaneers defender Carlton Davis sent a tweet on Sunday night containing an anti-Asian insult and has since apologized, saying he did not realize the deeply painful meaning of the term.
“I have to stop g – in Miami,” Carlton wrote in the tweet deleted since then.
Davis, 24, apologized for using the string in subsequent tweets and said he thought the term meant “lame.”
“I would never offend a group of people,” Davis said wrote in a tweet accompanied by an image from an entry in the undisclosed slang dictionary. “You reporters can look for another story to explode. The term was directed at a manufacturer who claimed to have “driven Miami”. That being said, I will withdraw this word from my vocabulary, providing the hard times our Asian family is enduring ❤️.
I used a term that, where I come from, always meant “lame”, but I didn’t realize that it has a much darker and negative connotation. I learned a valuable lesson and I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by seeing that word because we need to focus on helping each other in these difficult times. “
According to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate Extremism, hate crimes against Asian Americans have risen nearly 150 percent in major US cities in the past year, with several incidents making headlines in recent weeks.
Davis has spoken out against racism in the past and his experiences as a black man. He is part of Bucs’ social justice commission, which met with community leaders last summer to discuss ways the police can build better relationships with the black community.