Happy...D.E.I. Baseball Day?

April 15th is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the day Mr. Robinson suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers and became the first African American player to compete in the modern major leagues.*

It’s a well-known, notable Black history "first" — one of the many that populate BHM calendars and February trivia games. But too often, that "first" tidbit doesn't come with an explanation of what obstacle was removed to make that first possible. Without that, we risk obscuring what we are honoring. Without that, we invite dangerous attempts to distort and corrupt history in the space left by that silence.

Wikipedia tells me that the MLB was founded in 1876. The first white player(s) presumably played that same year. I don't know their names. You probably don't know them either. Certainly not as well as you know Jackie Robinson's name. Is that...racism?

Of course not.

Unless you think it is. And you might, if you don’t know better.

If you don't know that league traditions and unwritten rules banned Black players from playing professional baseball from 1885 until Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut, you might think these April 15th commemorations at stadiums throughout the country (including at Montgomery's Biscuits stadium as I type) are just honoring Black mediocrity. You might think the league began as a good old fashioned, race-blind American meritocracy, and Black people just took a long time to produce a player as good as white athletes. You may even think that Jackie Robinson was an unqualified D.E.I. hire, and that post-WWII "woke-ness" valued the optics of integrated play and lowered draft standards to achieve it. Maybe Jackie Robinson took the spot of a more talented, unjustly excluded white baseball player. Whose name we also do not know.

Thank goodness you realize that commemorating “Jackie Robinson Day” is not honoring one Black man’s elevation to professional baseball, and ignoring many others, simply because he was Black and they were not. You understand the Day is recognizing the injustice of racial segregation that barred many Black men from competing fairly and equally on major league baseball diamonds for generations before April 15, 1947. And it is celebrating that, on this day 78 years ago, that began to change.**

Thank goodness you know the truth.

Without knowledge, you might roll your eyes at civil rights anniversary fanfare that celebrates James Meredith, Autherine Lucy, Vivian Malone, and James Hood for becoming the first Black students and graduates of the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama in the 1960s. After all, both schools had been open for more than a century by then. Why should we celebrate that it took Black people generations to qualify to attend these schools that white people had been populating, thriving within, and graduating from for years?

But you're smart. You're curious. You're educated on American history. You know that the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama (along with many other educational institutions) legally barred Black students from being accepted to their schools, no matter the students' qualifications, for as long as they could legally do so...and then a little longer. You know that even after the 1954 Brown v. Board decision outlawed school segregation, those “public” schools and elected Alabama and Mississippi officials defiantly insisted their states still had the right (and duty) to prevent Black residents from accessing the university educations that Black tax dollars helped to fund.

You know these things. Of course. And it's not you I'm worried about.

I'm worried about the people who don't.

And maybe most of all, the people who want to forget. Who want us all to forget.

My concern is acute these days, but for a long time, I’ve felt uneasy to see or hear a shorthand TV segment, radio spot, or social media post that notes a historic or modern “African American first” but leaves the obstacle unspoken. Implied. Presumed.

In February 1870, Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black person sworn in as a member of the U.S. Senate, after the slavery-defending Confederacy lost the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments established (in 1865, 1868, and 1870) that Black Americans were free U.S. citizens with rights to vote and hold elected office. He was elected during the brief 12-year, post-war Reconstruction period when Black citizenship rights were federally-protected in the South. After that, through voter discrimination and violent intimidation, Black voting power all but disappeared in the South, where most Black Americans lived, and Black representation disappeared from the U.S. Senate. A post-Reconstruction Black senator was not elected until 1967, after the 20th century Civil Rights Movement and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In some states, including Alabama, no Black candidate has won a statewide election in the post-Reconstruction era.

That’s quite a story there beneath the surface, right? But it may still be tempting to leave out the omitted parts. The shorter, simpler, and more celebratory version renders the “bad guy” invisible. In that version, everybody gets to march in the parade.

Everybody gets a balloon.

In that version, you don’t have to wonder what side your ancestors supported—or what side you would support, in its modern reenactment. What side you would support…what side you are supporting.

In my most generous moments, I may understand the temptation to leave out the why. But it’s a dangerous temptation, yall. Resist it.

In the space left by that silence, we invite the less curious, the less knowledgeable, and the willful forgetters to fill the void with something else: distortions, lies, and the same old bigotry in barely-updated packaging.

Now, when somebody sucks their teeth and expresses “worry” to see a Black pilot in a plane’s cockpit, they claim they’re not expressing a racist view that Black people are inferior aeronautics aviators. They’re just expressing concern about so-called widespread “D.E.I.” policies that they claim (with no evidence) have lowered standards across a wide swath of industries and professions in order to create the optics of “equity,” irrespective of qualifications. In this landscape, it’s only logical to regard Black people and other people of color (as well as white women—please don’t forget the unqualified white women!) with suspicion and doubt when we see them in positions that seem…higher than…their rightful place.

That’s not racism, they insist. It’s the consequence of bad, racist policy. Policy that has saddled minorities with a presumption of incompetence. Policy that has victimized meritorious white men (who somehow still manage to dominate across industries and politics). Policy that had no legitimate basis.

Those policies, they inform us, were not really designed to disrupt an environment of racialized bias, discrimination, limited access, and self-reproducing social networks in order to help historically-barred groups get onto the field for a chance to compete. That’s not possible, because past and present systemic racial inequality is all made up. Figments of your imagination. Woke propaganda.

America’s past is great. And racism—or, at least, racism that is explicitly called racism—is not great. So that must not be part of America’s past.

That’s the truth you can trust.

That seems to be the message of the day, folks. And if the powers that be get a little more time to strong-arm schools, universities, law firms, the National Park Service and the Smithsonian into capitulating to this narrative, it will be the definitive version of events. The Google result. The .gov website text.

Not because it’s right. Not even because the majority of us support or believe it. But because right now, they are holding the mic.

Luckily, our voices still work, and joined together, they can get pretty loud. But we have to use them. Smartly and carefully. We have to be knowledgeable and we have to be ready to voice objections rooted in “You’re wrong” and not just “You’re racist.”

They know the second one is true. They will still deny it, at least for a little while longer. But they know and they don’t care.

The first one is a more powerful allegation to wield, because right now, being wrong matters more. Right now, disputing the bullshit with objective truth and fact, rooted in both human experience and documented evidence, is how we build a resistance and strengthen the one that already exists. Right now, starting now, we have to resist the temptation and we have to name the why. We have to speak the context and embody the footnote.

Every time.

Earlier this year, I got into a little spat with somebody on Threads about tone and dangerous silence. She posted a conversational thread about an interesting tidbit she’d recently learned: Jimmy Carter and Berry Gordy share a common (white, male, slave-holding) ancestor. True enough, Google seemed to tell me—but the tone of the post left me bothered. It brought to mind a “fun fact” of historical Americana, from some alternative universe where race doesn’t matter and slavery didn’t exist.

Maybe because I daily feel like I’m being herded onto a spaceship bound for that universe, I was triggered. So I commented to let her know I thought it dangerous to post this information with no mention of slavery and no reference to the rape that spawned Berry Gordy’s line of that family tree.

Her response was both defensive and dismissive. Of course I know the Black woman was raped, she said, among other explanations. That was implied.

Me and my dad circa 1991 @ Circus Circus in Las Vegas. I remember it hurt a little bit taking that red nose off. The face-painter must have used glue.

My Dad, Michael Ray Taylor, died in 2017, so he has missed several chapters of this American story. If still here, I know he’d have volumes of commentary. Luckily, every now and then, a moment brings to mind a thought he shared in another time that nevertheless perfectly fits this one. The Threads conflict was such a moment.

I’ve never watched Django Unchained in full; the one and only time I tried, I fled the theater during the scene when two enslaved men are fighting to the death for Leonardo DiCaprio’s enjoyment and one starts to gouge out the other’s eye. Fortunately, my date was kind enough to come look for me.

I suspected my Dad might like the movie and appreciate the fantasy violence with less sensitivity than I’d had. But when we talked, his review was solemn, thoughtful, and uncharacteristically concise.

“It was too realistic,” he said, “to be so inaccurate.”

I don’t know if we’ve ever occupied a time when we could afford to leave slavery and the rape of enslaved women implied and unspoken, whether in a Threads post or a news article—but I know we are not in such a time now. Right now, the people with the mic are trying to rewrite our history and our future, by being just realistic enough to sound plausible…and just inaccurate enough to reshape our future by distorting the truth of our past.

With that distortion, they want to make “D.E.I.” a catch-all slur that means (1) workplace and educational diversity initiatives; (2) any and all forms of race consciousness and accurate racial history; and (3) absolutely nothing at all. They want to sustain support for erasing several generations of imperfect progress. And they want to ensure devastating regression for decades to come.

We have to be an opposing force to that effort.

But I’m not giving orders.

Resistance looks like many things and we are all doing many things—according to our skills, our stations, our talents and abilities. Please continue, expand, persist. I just ask that, while you’re doing everything else, you also do this.

Get and stay informed about the truth of our history.

Celebrate the firsts AND name the why.

Call out the factually wrong.

Decry the distortions.

Be active and be loud.

Earn. Your. Balloon.

Girl with Balloon, Banksy

Notes

* Jackie Robinson is known as the first Black person to play Major League Baseball in the “modern era” because three Black men played in the early league between 1879 and 1884: William Edward White, Moses Fleetwood Walker, and Weldy Walker. Black players were wholly excluded from the major league starting in 1884, and from the minor leagues starting in 1889. Source

** This is where I place all the caveats about continued racism and racial inequity in professional sports, including baseball, and the troubling and exploitative economics behind these systems. William C. Rhoden’s 2007 book, 40 Million Dollar Slaves, is a compelling review of this history and analysis of its legacies.