By Mateo Banegas

Following racial remarks made by Adrien Broner during his post-fight interview this past weekend, the WBC has hereby suspended Broner from participating in any WBC-sanctioned championship and will exclude him from the WBC ratings, until he makes a public apology that is satisfactory to the global public.

As announced on the WBC website (wbcboxing.com) today, May 7^th, “The World Boxing Council holds human equality as its banner and will not accept a former WBC champion to make racially offensive statements.”

In the open letter, the WBC has asked Broner to clarify the basis of his words, “since words have different meanings and can be interpreted in different ways”, or issue a public apology if those words were purposefully offensive.

This comes at a time when racism and irresponsible language in sports is no longer being tolerated, as witnessed by the strong stance taken by the NBA in response to Donald Sterling’s now well-known racially charged rant.

These steps by the WBC may, then, represent efforts to demonstrate equally swift and firm action against one of it’s athletes. Particularly in a sport as racially and ethnically diverse as boxing.

Boxing fans should take note of this move and see how future use of culturally-insensitive and inappropriate language in boxing, whether used in an attempt for cute sound-bytes or simply out of ignorance, is handled.