A day after the wife of Bills kicker Dan Carpenter apologized for a tweet suggesting that Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman should be castrated, Sherman wasn’t much interested in Kaela Carpenter’s public apology.
“It’s not surprising at all,” Sherman said when reporters asked him about her tweet on Wednesday. “This is a day in age where you’ve got Ku Klux Klan running around . . . you know, people say whatever they want and here’s very little consequence. For her to say something like that and then have a BS apology like she did, I mean, it’s just the way of the world. I don’t let it bother me. It’s something that I’m very used to. It’s just the way people are — the way people were raised.”
Sherman hit Dan Carpenter on the knee after jumping offsides late in the first half of Monday’s Bills-Seahawks game. That was just the start of a wild sequence that may have cost the Bills points and forced NFL vice president of officiating to tweet that officials didn’t properly enforce a penalty on the play. Sherman later had words with Bills coach Rex Ryan, who called the officiating “ridiculous.”
In a follow-up question Wednesday, Sherman was asked if he was saddened by Kaela Carpenter’s original response.
“It’s more disappointing than anything, but it’s also something that’s understandable,” Sherman said. “Ignorance has always been in the world. The core of this country has been built off slavery and people owning people. Anytime you understand that’s the core principles of the way a nation was built, then you’ve got to have some kind of, I guess, sympathy for it.”
In Kaela Carpenter’s online apology, she said she was making “an attempt at humor” and did not intend for her response to be racially charged.