This is a great piece. Please keep writing. I think something that you hinted at, but didn’t outright say is that the US also gives athletes preferential treatment. Whether or not the athlete is a professional, star of the high school football team or on the collegiate level, athletes usually find themselves above the rules — because people in power put them there (usually). This situation is no different, I 100% agree with the twitter user, that you referenced.

If people want to argue and say that, because he’s half Cuban… that makes him Latino — I can get into the racism in Latino culture (it goes along the same lines as American Racism — i.e. there is still white privilege)… Go watch the series “Black in Latin America” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. if you don’t believe me. As someone being of Mexican decent in the US but being light complected, I can absolutely speak to having received “white privilege” without being actually white, over my brown brothers and sisters.

#lochtegate was about a lot of things, these men aren’t “kids”, they knew what they were doing… and they were in a foreign country representing the US? I’m sorry, but that’s embarrassing as a country. If these guys were in the United States when they committed these crimes they would be charged with — vandalism, public intoxication, false accusations, assault, etc.

Lochte, gets no respect from me, it doesn’t matter if people think that he lied to his mother and then he was trying to cover that up. He’s a pubic figure, in the spot light on the world’s stage representing his country — we need to hold our athletes to a higher standard.