A racist incident blew up at Yankee Stadium on Saturday between Josh Donaldson of the Yankees and Tim Anderson of the White Sox. It threw into stark relief why football has replaced baseball as America’s favorite pastime. Not to mention the perfectly compelling reasons I provided recently in “Another Baseball Lockout as Pecan Pie Dethrones Apple Pie,” March 5, 2022.
But here is how CBS Sports reported on this latest black eye for baseball yesterday:
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Major League Baseball suspended Josh Donaldson for one game Monday after the New York Yankees slugger made multiple references to Jackie Robinson while talking to White Sox star Tim Anderson during the weekend. …
Anderson, one of baseball’s leading Black voices and an all-star shortstop, said it was a ‘disrespectful comment.’ White Sox manager Tony La Russa said it was racist, and Anderson agreed.
Donaldson, who is white, said he had used the ‘Jackie’ reference in the past with Anderson, who had said he viewed himself as a potential modern-day Robinson in a 2019 interview with Sports Illustrated.
‘My meaning of that is not any term trying to be racist by any fact of the matter,’ Donaldson said Saturday.
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Frankly, it is self-evident that Donaldson was being disrespectful and racist. Which is why I was stupefied to hear no less a person than Stephen A. Smith, arguably America’s most influential Black sports commentator, upbraiding Black folks for calling this spade a spade.
ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith defended Josh Donaldson on Monday over the New York Yankees third baseman calling White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson ‘Jackie,’ which Anderson decried as racist.
‘Here’s what upsets me about this. We are having a conversation about race and I can’t sit here and tell you that anything Josh Donaldson said was racist,’ he said. ‘I think that it is actually wrong for people to attach racism or ‘racist’ to Josh Donaldson today or for this incident.’
(MEDIAite, May 23, 2022)
In other words, we now live in a world where we’re having to depend on the white barons of MLB to call out racism that a Black sport commentator can’t even see. Because mere hours after Smith was lecturing Blacks on how wrong they were for attaching racism or racist Donaldson, MLB suspended and fined him.
Mind you, I think MLB is being far too lenient. Like everyone else, they are giving this Yankee racist too much credit by assuming he was, in fact, referring to Jackie Robinson.
Because I suspect he was calling Anderson “Jackie” as code for blackie. This, because it’s an inside joke among his racist clubhouse buddies.
Even worse, though, his racism reeked of “great replacement” bravado. Stephen A. and others might be too ignorant to realize this; but Donaldson was mocking Anderson much like the Taliban mocked America. Because what he was really saying to Anderson is that, after decades of trying to integrate baseball, here you are – basically where Jackie Robinson was 75 years ago, when we white boys completely dominated this sport.
Apropos of which, the only wonder for me is the deafening silence among Donaldson’s few Black and Hispanic teammates. I mean, you’d be forgiven the impression they’re cool with this racist just because he’s on their Yankees team. But how pathetic is that!
Meanwhile, MLB would like the world to believe it is trying desperately to increase the number of Blacks in its sport, which has fallen to a gentrifying 7.2 percent. Because that’s down from a peak of 18.7 percent in 1981. But their efforts will surely be in vain if predominantly white clubhouses are breeding a culture that causes these kinds of on-field incidents.
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Another baseball lockout…
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