Yes, there is always that cloud hanging over Boston and the racial undertones that could emerge if it didn’t work out but Cam Newton is not the first black athlete in Boston sports to lead a franchise, albeit he is the first to really lead a Patriots team. Most true Patriots fans were more than excited at the prospects and Cam’s willingness to do everything needed, say everything “Patriot Way”, and conducting himself accordingly would guide him through the “transition” after the Brady dynasty years.

But alas, the season has been rocked through Coronavirus infections, lack of practice time, injuries (that plague all teams), and now that playoff hopes may be slipping through the team’s fingers, one person is looking forward and in a very ugly way.

New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton likely isn’t considering the question, the question others are thinking about, the question that involves race, sports and Boston, three components that often combine into a toxic potion.

Newton may not be thinking about it, but others are, and the question goes like this: If Newton’s tenure in New England falters, will Patriots fans see Newton as solely a failed quarterback, or because of Boston’s historically ugly racial dynamics, will he be viewed as a failed Black quarterback?
— Mike Freeman, USA Today

One of the journalist dirty tricks is to pose a question made by “some”, accusing “others” of thinking something that the journalist is really thinking but is too much of a coward to come right out and ask him or herself.

Some of those same people say they are holding their breath now watching Newton, and hoping the extremism other athletes of color faced in Boston doesn’t happen to him as the Patriots may miss the postseason for the first time since 2008.

All you need to know about Mike Freeman is his bio: “USA Today Race and Inequality Editor — Sports“, Fmr. B/R, NYT, Washington Post.

Never heard of a “race and inequality editor” before but it’s clear Mike Freeman’s job is to look for racism whether it’s there or not.

“I think a lot of Black people when it comes to Boston have had ‘the talk,’” said Saida Grundy, an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and member of the school’s Center for Antiracist Research. “When you’re Black and move to Boston you get ‘the talk’ about where you can go safely, where you can’t, the sundown parts of town. We all get that talk. I’m sure (Newton) got it, too.”

While indicting the Boston area as the somes or others, Freeman didn’t reach out to Patriots fans. He reached out to “academics”.

Coach Belichick just isn’t into off-the-field distractions. If he thought that Newton’s tenure in New England could come down to a toxic race issue, he’d probably never have considered it; not just for what it could do to the atmosphere in the locker room but what it would be setting Cam up for.  But that’s something the probably never crossed his mind when probably talking to owner Robert Kraft and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels about bringing Cam Newton to New England. It was about bringing the best available quarterback to New England, the opportunity to have a dynamic at the position the team hasn’t had in over 20 years.

Race was probably never brought up by “others” or “some” at 1 Patriot Place.

And if the Patriots don’t make the playoffs this season, will Patriots fans start blaming it all on the nigger? I hardly think so as this was never a normal season where there were great players opting out prior to training camp. Cam Newton was acquired after any opportunity for attending OTAs, there was no preseason so he was handicapped from the start and real Patriots fans cut him the appropriate slack.

Yet outside of New England others around the league watch Newton, wondering how he’ll be treated by fans if the team doesn’t make the postseason, with one eye focused on Newton, and the other on Boston’s history.

Because of the pandemic, the Boston area has not had to opportunity to see the well-documented human side of Cam Newton. The Cam that generously donates his time and money to causes off the field; the Cam that gives a little kid a football every time he scores a rushing touchdown (pre-COVID, there are at least 58 little kids with a genuine NFL game ball). You think they’ll recall this years from now with a racial asterisk?

NEWTON BALANCES his life by spending time with kids. Through his foundation and through the Panthers’ charitable efforts, he visits schools and hospitals.

After his football career ends, Newton would like to open day care centers, maybe a whole chain. He wants the centers to be fun and exciting and safe. “My passion is reaching and touching the youth,” Newton says. “I know football can only allow me so much joy; I can only play this game at this level for so long. But forever, I can experience the joy of being around kids and trying to make those guys better.”
— Charlotte Magazine, 10/19/15

The New England region may be a bit caught off guard by the hats and clothes, but Cam Newton has done everything expected of a Patriot under the most unnatural and unpredictable of conditions and to blame any team failure on him and/or his race is a slander at best.

BTW — Freeman and the activists interviewed will never admit that Democrats were the orchestrators of “Boston’s historically ugly racial dynamics“.

Mike Freeman appears to be a certified racebaiter who looks for evil bogeymen whether they’re there or not. Pouring gasoline on a fire not yet ignited is irresponsible but it seems to be what keeps people like him employed and that is what “some” and “others” really dislike about so-called journalists today.

Monica Cannon-Grant is the founder of the non-profit Violence in Boston, a campaign organizer for Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, District Attorney Rachael Rollins, and Senatorial candidate Joe Kennedy, and is arguably the face of the black lives matter movement in Boston. She’s been legitimized in the media, having written several op-eds for the Boston Globe, and has taken part in interviews on several stations including public television WGBH. She’s organized several large protests in Boston with crowds over 50,000 in size, including a 2017 anti-free speech rally, and numerous BLM protests in Boston since the killing of George Floyd.

Congresswoman Pressley is facing a challenge in November from Republican Rayla Campbell, a black mother of three from Randoph. Cannon-Grant responded by posting a viciously racist 30 minute video on Facebook, which she has since removed.
— TurtleBoy Daily News, 7/17/20

Sit back. You can see why….

Meanwhile, the damage has been done.

A Black Republican who’s challenging U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley says she’s fled her Randolph home in fear for her life after a Boston activist’s video went viral questioning the woman’s Blackness and making crude references to her sex with her white husband.

“This is racism to the ultimate level. … Racism is racism no matter where it comes from,” Rayla Campbell, the Randolph Republican, told the Herald on Tuesday. “I was horrified and absolutely terrified. I had to uproot my family and just stay elsewhere.”

In a Friday video widely disseminated by the blog Turtleboy over the weekend, Roxbury community activist Monica Cannon-Grant repeatedly called Campbell a “heifer” and made frequent crude references to Campbell’s white husband. Rollins has quickly distanced herself from the video, telling the Herald and Campbell herself that the attacks on Campbell’s family life are deeply inappropriate.
— Boston Herald, 7/21/20

As usual, the distancing from the words only come after they were made public.

As Turtle Boy also meticulously documented, Cannon-Grant has received monetary and community support from a who’s-who of Boston’s political, media, social, and business elite including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Altman Vilandrie & Company, The Network/La Red, Alpert Cohen Charitable Fund, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Shell Oil Company Foundation, Boston Circus Guild, Strand Therapeutics Inc., Trillium Asset Management LLC, Lyft, Fidelity Investments, and more.

But perhaps the most suspicious thing she’s done to date happened last year after a shooting took place at the Warren Garden housing projects where she lives with her husband and 6 kids.

Although the shooting had absolutely nothing to do with her, Monica made it sound to her followers that she was targeted, and thus needed to move because she was unsafe living there. Two separate fundraisers raised close to $10,000 for her moving expenses and hotel rooms where she would stay until they could find a place to live.

Knowing liberals as we do, they probably won’t throw this Boston racist opportunist under the bus, in fact they’ll find a way to support her and succumb to the woke.

Bostonians of the Year are selected by the editors of the Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com

They know what they’ll be called if they don’t.

UPDATE

A federal grand jury has indicted Monica Cannon-Grant, a high-profile local activist in Boston’s racial justice movement, and her husband on allegations they defrauded donors of the nonprofit they founded, Violence In Boston; committed unemployment fraud; and lied to a mortgage lender, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Cannon-Grant, 41, and Clark Grant, 38, were charged in an 18-count indictment alleging the couple spent financial donations to the nonprofit on themselves, using the cash to pay for hotel reservations, gas, restaurant meals, food deliveries, nail salon services, and personal travel, while concealing their transactions from bookkeepers, directors, and financial auditors.

The two also received roughly $100,000 in unemployment benefits they were not entitled to, officials allege.

Both were charged with two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, one count of conspiracy, 13 counts of wire fraud, and one count of making false statements to a mortgage lending business, according to Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins’s office.
— Boston.com, 3/15/22

The indictment alleges the couple used the funds to pay for personal expenses including, hotels, car rentals, auto repairs, restaurant meals, nail salons and personal travel, prosecutors said.

Cannon-Grant also allegedly paid herself $2,700-a-week and treated herself to a $450,000 five-bed house in Taunton, Massachusetts, last year. She is accused of using much of the $1 million raised by her nonprofit Violence in Boston for good causes. Her salary jumped from $25,000 in 2020 to $170,000 in 2021.
— Daily Mail, 3/15/22

The arrogant almost always go too far.

FYI — Bob was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts

UPDATE

Monica Cannon-Grant, the founder of the nonprofit Violence in Boston, plans to plead guilty to federal charges of defrauding people who donated to her organization. In a one-page document filed in federal court in Boston on Friday, Canon-Grant requested a change of plea hearing.

Cannon-Grant faces a 27-count indictment on charges including wire fraud, mail fraud, making false statements, and filing false tax returns, among other offenses.
— Fox 25, Boston, 9/12/25

Justice may be slow but it does eventually catch up.

UPDATE

“Bostonian of the Year” ordered to pay back $224K she stole from her own nonprofit
Monica Cannon-Grant was ordered Monday by U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley to forfeit every dollar she made from her crimes — from diverting donations from her own nonprofit, collecting fraudulent pandemic unemployment benefits, and pocketing rental assistance she wasn’t entitled to.

The forfeiture amount includes roughly $181,000 in diverted donations from Violence in Boston Inc., the nonprofit she founded, more than $33,000 in fraudulent pandemic unemployment benefits, and about $12,600 in rental assistance benefits, according to a copy of the court order. That’s on top of the $106,000 in restitution Kelley already ordered at Cannon-Grant’s sentencing in January, when the judge gave her four years of probation, six months of home detention, and 100 hours of community service — no prison time, despite prosecutors requesting 18 months behind bars.
— Mass Daily News, 3/23/26

Screaming racism won’t work this time.

We finally got Alexa to tune into the right “WEEI”, and then we heard two Democrat windbags bashing President Trump, the false missile alert in Hawaii, the ridiculous new American embassy in England, birth control access, Trenni’s vagina, her boyfriend and her mother’s diaphragm.

Evidently Trenni Kusnierek and John Tomase, “Trenni and Tomase”, don’t care so much about sports and feel entitled to use their platform to assault their listeners.

As you listen to the following segment, remember, this is supposed to be a “sports talk” program….

BTW — For all those Patriots-are-cheaters haters, thank Tomase for his debunked contribution to #fakenews and smearing an NFL organization.

The Boston Herald sports writer who reported the New England Patriots taped a pre-Super Bowl walkthrough by the St. Louis Rams in 2002 said he will regret the erroneous story for the rest of his life.

“First and foremost, this is about a writer breaking one of the cardinal rules of journalism. I failed to keep challenging what I had been told. I should not have written the story without seeing the tape or getting multiple, firsthand confirmations from members of the organization,” wrote John Tomase in Friday’s editions of the newspaper.
— NFL.com, 5/16/08

Well, duh. Mike Barnacle and John Tomase prove, despite plagiarism or gross negligence, as long as you’re a liberal, you’ll always have a job in their media despite how much collateral damage is done.

As evidenced by the many liberal media platforms that exist, despite consistent under-performing, there’s visual evidence that Trenni and Thomas aren’t carrying their weight. For example, a lo-res video interview with the new Red Sox manager from February 7, 2018 that as of the following September that has a whopping 41 views?

Little kids do better than that.

“People are mean online,” Trenni Kusnierek noted.
— Boston Globe, May 21, 2016

Our now ‘deeply divided’ post-Obama country is a direct result of the Democrats refusal to respect our “democratic” 2016 election results. As is always the case when a Republican occupies the White House, liberals have now rediscovered morals, ethics, “fact-checking”. Where’s an order for protection from Democrats when Americans need one?

It’s okay for the Democrat media and Democrat “sports journalists” to be “mean” and troll their listeners; it’s par for their course and the only feedback they’ll possibly read is on social media. Trenni and Tomase use their so-called sports program for their sad anti-Republican rants to this day.

Massachusetts leaders are condemning President Donald Trump’s alleged remark that immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa come from “sh**hole” countries. Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said the alleged comments made by the president during a meeting about immigration were disgraceful. “Those comments are appalling and disgraceful and have no place anywhere in public or private discourse. Period,” Baker said. “He owes an apology to all of those people who he broad-brushed with those statements.”
— WCVB Boston, 1/12/18

While there’s no concrete proof the president actually used the #shithole word and Democrats and their media are blindly taking the word of a documented liar in the United States Senate, it’s again quite ironic white Massachusetts liberals are lecturing the rest of America about racial intolerance when Boston has a well-deserved reputation of treating black people like second-class citizens in their own hometown.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh issued a proclamation Friday calling Jan. 12 “Day of Solidarity with Haiti” to celebrate Boston’s Haitian community and their contributions to the city on the anniversary of when a devastating earthquake hit the country. “What makes our city, state and country strong is diversity. We need to respect and welcome all — no exceptions,” Walsh tweeted. “8 years after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, we stand in solidarity with Haiti, and celebrate its enormous contributions to Boston.”

Sounds great, if that were really true as Boston has the same racial disparity and oppression issues almost every Democrat-controlled municipality has. That also includes ignorant black people who excuse the very people who continue to keep their living standard limited. I would know as I was born in Boston and grew up in her surrounding suburbs.

While in high school and traveling on the Red Line with friends, I was sucker-punched by a white kid who quickly ran off the train at South Station.

After high school, I rented an apartment in the South End which was a seven minute walk from Symphony Hall where I worked. At that time, the South End was considered the edge of Roxbury (the black community) and as a protective courtesy, I escorted-in any of my white friends who came by for a visit. That was in the 70’s. Today, that same neighborhood has been successfully gentrified and now I get those “What are YOU doing here?” looks from snooty millennials and scraggly-hair older liberals.

I was falsely accused in the early 80’s of rape and despite Brookline detectives assuring me they knew I couldn’t have been in two places at the same time, the white female Suffolk County district attorney would have none of it and if it wasn’t for the cheating “victim” recanting her accusation three hours before I was to be indicted, I may have spent a good portion of my life in prison.

This is just another example of liberals acting as though their racist pasts, especially in Boston, never happened because whenever you hear a professional athlete calling Boston a racist city and incidents prove the point, it makes their outrage against President Trump even more full of shit.

Democrats are no one to call anyone racist as their past is littered with examples, like Boston.

June 21, 1974 — Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city’s schools, creating one system for blacks and another for whites — separate, unequal and unconstitutional. Southie was ground zero for anti-busing rage. Hundreds of white demonstrators — children and their parents — pelted a caravan of 20 school buses carrying students from nearly all-black Roxbury to all-white South Boston. The police wore riot gear.

“I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School,” Jean McGuire, who was a bus safety monitor, recalled recently. “And the bricks through the window. Signs hanging out those buildings, ‘Nigger Go Home.’ Pictures of monkeys. The words. The spit. People just felt it was all right to attack children.”
— WBUR, 9/5/14

These racist sentiments didn’t come from a bunch of drunk townies on the street, taking it to the next level.

It came from within Boston’s elected and Democrat base.

Louise Day Hicks, the Boston public school official and City Council member whose opposition to busing to achieve school integration helped to polarize the city in the 1960’s and made her a national symbol of racial division. To her supporters, she was a champion of working-class residents and neighborhood schools. To her opponents, she epitomized an unwillingness to breach a deep-seated racial divide in deeply segregated Boston.

“She became the symbol, if you please, of someone who was against desegregating Boston schools,” said Paul Parks, who was chairman of the education committee of the Boston N.A.A.C.P. in the 1960’s, a former state secretary of education and a former president of the Boston School Committee. “She would not admit segregation exists.”
— New York Times, 10/23/03

Louise Day Hicks was a classic example of the psychotic mentality too many liberal Democrats have to this day. They have been racist, some continue to be racist, and they’ll never admit they are racists.

She refused to meet with Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama (Democrat), an ardent segregationist, telling a reporter that she did not want to be connected with him. “The important thing is that I’m not bigoted,” she once said.

Of course not.

In the 70’s, I only went to one of my best friend’s apartment to hang out once because he lived in Southie and I had to lay down on the back seat after midnight and run in low under cover of darkness. It was that bad for any black person in South Boston.

Each bus was greeted with chorus of obscene shouts and gestures, cries of “nigger,” and, once, a couple of wooden slats hurled at the side. Several women in the crowd kept running stream of invective. Later City Councilor Louise Day Hicks, the symbol of antibusing resistance, moved among the crowd. In her high, small voice, startling coming from her large frame, she said: “Go home, there’ll‐ be another day.”

There was hostility toward reporters. A woman screamed at a female reporter approaching with notebook. As a black television sound man turned away from the crowds, a youth ran out and delivered a karate kick to the small of his back, A cameraman was decked across the hood of a car.

“Any white kid that goes to school out of his neighborhood should be shot, and any black kid that comes out of his neighborhood to school here should be shot,” said a pudgy man in a pork‐pie hat.
— New York Times, 9/13/74

Republican President Richard Nixon was against busing because he rightfully didn’t think putting black kids into better white schools and white kids into neglected black schools would, if anything, encourage better education, let alone racial harmony. But it also showed the Democrat-run Boston City Council’s ongoing lack of proper funding for black education; an issue that still exists nationwide to this day.

Is Boston better than it was back in the 60’s and 70’s? Yes. Are Democrats the ones to be pointing sanctimonious fingers at Republicans? Not this time, either. White liberal Democrats are in control of almost every facet of life in Boston and yet the inner bitching by aggrieved minorities who are still too stupid to connect the dots continues.

Until liberals address and sincerely apologize for their historical legacy of racism and oppression, they have no credibility calling out anyone, let alone a president who’s done more to lift blacks out of poverty in one year than their Democrats have in more than half a century.