When the “N*gger” is a “F*ggot”: on Rajon Rondo and Intersectionality by Mark Anthony Neal

When the “N*gger” is a “F*ggot”: on Rajon Rondo and Intersectionality by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
God forbid if Kristaps Porzingis was lost in translation one day and called his teammate, and fellow rookie, Jerian Grant a “n*gger.”  Suspect that the calls for swift justice would come swiftly, as well as nominal examples of what I’ll just call the “Duke University Defense”: he’s not from this country, so he didn’t know that “n*gger” was a bad word.
Of course that is not the case, and in this era of post...Donald Sterling, the NBA would have been hell bent on keeping its product, brand, laborers, intact.  Instead the league took a week to respond when one of its players, referred to one of its referees as a “f*ggot,” in response to a call that said player disagreed with.  
Black on Black crime might be a myth, but that was a Black man that called another Black man a “f*ggot” and I’m not hearing much about Black Lives that Matter, All Lives that Matter or All the Black Lives that Matter.  With all of this talk about Intersectionality in the lives of Black Lives that Matter, one might wonder if homophobic comments or violence directed at a Black body carries the same weight as racist comments or violence directed at a Black body.  Who is exactly the arbiter here? Is the theoretical intervention that Intersectionality emboldens not applicable in this case?
Indeed even the league, despite the delay in justice, chose to suspend Rondo. This is in contrast to four years ago when Kobe Bryant called another Black referee, Bennie Adams, a “fuckin' f*ggot” and was simply fined.  As some are celebrating Bryant now, as he takes those last layups, few seem to remember Bryant’s homophobic quip (or that rape charge).
San Antonio Spurs’ coach Gregg Popovich’s admission that “it happens all the time” is just confirmation of how casual homophobic language is among American men. Many men have memories of just how casually such language was used in the context of some of the childhood games we played in our efforts to try on what we believed to be a normative masculinity--and it was easy to be so casual because we all assumed we all were so-called “straight” boys.
While I fundamentally reject the idea that Black men are any more homophobic than their White male peers, in this particularly moment, when so many have a heightened sense of the violence directed at Black bodies, is it too much to expect that some of us might be more careful about reproducing the very language of violence and hate, that others are mounting national campaigns to challenge?
Or maybe Rajon Rondo is just be an “asshole"?