Happy Jackie Robinson Day! We’re ‘Going Backward’ on Race Relations. Wait, What?

As you baseball fans know, today is

Jackie Robinson Day, in which the pioneering Brooklyn Dodger
who heroically broke the sport’s color line in 1947 is honored
throughout Major League Baseball by having every player wear his
otherwise retired jersey number of 42.

Combined with the April 8
anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record
in 1974, Jackie Robinson Day has become an occasion to make
sweeping pronouncements about baseball, race, and society. The
results are often bizarre.

For instance, Jon Friedman at Time last week made the
gobsmacking argument that “Hank
Aaron Would Have Faced Worse Racism Today,” because of social
media. (You know, Jon, you don’t have to read the
comments.) And in a widely reprinted column this week, USA
Today’s Bob Nightengale frets that “On
Jackie Robinson day, MLB diversity still behind.” Excerpt from

that:

Major League Baseball…has the
lowest percentage of African-Americans in uniform since 1958.

The African-American population in baseball is virtually
unchanged from a year ago at 7.8%, according to USA TODAY Sport’s
survey of opening-day rosters and disabled lists. […]

It’s a dramatic change from 1972-1996, when African Americans
represented at least 16% of the game’s players, according to Mark
Armour of the Society of Baseball Research (SABR) – with a high of
18.7% in 1981. […]

“When I first started playing, you had a lot of black players in
the major leagues,” Aaron said last month. “Now, you don’t have
any. So what progress have we made? You try to understand, but
we’re going backward.”

Is “progress” chiefly measurable here by a head-count of
American black men playing professional baseball? I think there’s
reason to question that, starting with the words of Jackie Robinson
himself.

In
Robinson’s terrific and criminally under-appreciated 1964 oral
history
Baseball Has Done It (which I wrote about
one year ago today), #42 writes rationally—and bitterly—about
his early choice to eschew academics for the more openly integrated
fields of athletic competition:

My brothers, their friends and adquaintances, all older than me,
had studied hard and wound up as porters, elevator operators, taxi
drivers, bellhops. I came to the conclusion that long hours over
books were a waste of time. Considering my situation, I was not far
wrong. […]

[U]nless Negroes can use their education to the fullest extent
in competition with whites, the crisis will continue unabated.

Baseball, ahead of other professions, and ahead of other sports,
allowed people with black skin to compete. Combined with the deep
bench of talent that had been nurtured in the Negro Leagues, this
opening led to black participation rates that quickly zoomed north
of U.S. Census figures (which these days put the African-American
population at 12.6 percent). But as other professional sports
opened up and—importantly—became popular, black Americans started
picking up the shoulder pads and lacing up the high-tops. Happiest
of all, black kids in school nowadays know they
are not doomed to max out as porters or bellhops. That doesn’t mean
racism is behind us in the workplace, but it does mean that fields
of competition in all walks of life have opened up in ways that
even optimists would have found difficult to believe in 1964.

Meanwhile, actual “diversity” in baseball has never been higher.
More than
26 percent of big-league baseball players were born outside of
the United States, across 16 different countries. The population
over-representation now comes not from American-born players with
black skin, but Caribbean-born players with black skin: According
to the Census, just 0.4 percent of U.S. residents are “Black
or African American Hispanic,” yet fully 9.6 percent of MLB
players hail from the (comparatively impoverished) Dominican
Republic alone. At some point obsessing over skin pigment in the
context of baseball becomes a pretty weird exercise.

After the jump you can find an excerpt from my 2013 piece,
“When
Jackie Robinson Fought Back”:

There is something irresistibly heroic about successful
nonviolent campaigns against majoritarian tyranny, whether at the
ballpark or lunch counter. By publicly absorbing violence, martyrs
simultaneously hold up a mirror to society while embodying the
ideal of an “acceptable” minority: noble, intelligent, and
physically non-threatening.

But in our zeal to turn Jackie Robinson into Martin Luther King
Jr., we are scrubbing from history his much longer career as
baseball’s Malcolm X—a righteously angry, relentlessly self-reliant
activist and social critic. Robinson played with pacifist handcuffs
for only his first two years in the big leagues. From 1949 to his
retirement after the 1956 season—and then after his playing career
was over—Jackie Robinson fought back.

The fighting version of number 42 was not remotely as popular as
the saint. But it’s a much more accurate picture of a complicated
and interesting man. If baseball, let alone society, wishes to
confront head-on the pathologies behind segregation and the
fortitude required to overcome institutional racism, then it needs
to grapple with the whole, thorny competitive spirit of Jackie
Robinson, not the easy-to-digest, sepia-toned myth. […]

Who the hell are you, Jackie was always demanding
to know, to think you are better than me?