While the entire town of Cleveland, OH goes nuts over LeBron James's return to Cleveland, can anyone name a white athlete celebrated by large groups of blacks? Entire sections of the stadium populated almost exclusively by whites at Friday night's Indians game were chanting 'L-B-J' (LeBron James) during the Indians baseball game.
Meanwhile, blacks have abandoned baseball while MLB goes out of its way to pander to attracting black athletes and obsesses with the legacy of Jackie Robinson.
I think that illustrates where the problem of racial division lies. Blacks mostly self-identifying by skin color and refusing to assimilate while non-blacks tend to transcend race.
Wow. Thanks for the setup. Here we go.
What exactly is it, this legacy of Jackie Robinson? What's his significance?
He was the first black player to play in Major League Baseball, right?
Nope. Nor does MLB phrase it that way -- they deliberately and particularly note that he "broke the color barrier". Nobody ever says he was the first black player, because he wasn't. That would be catcher Moses "Fleetwood" Walker -- in 1884, 130 years ago.
Why the gap from 1884 to 1947?
Because the United States of 1884 was a racist hellhole, not twenty years removed from the Civil War, with the racist side of that war in abject denial of their defeat, the terrorist Ku Klux Klan only recently disbanded, and with lynchings quickly rising to a peak. Baseball, among other institutions, instituted and kept a "gentlemen's agreement" that blacks would be kept out, reflecting the mood of the country proper. An era that gave us not only rampant lynchings everywhere as far away from the South as Duluth (see "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan), but the Tulsa race riots (and others), the film "Birth of a Nation", the birth of the (second) Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws and Alabama Literacy Tests, and ongoing entrenched racial division in every part of society that became a legacy so deep it took World War II to even begin its unraveling. A "gentlemen's agreement" kept in place by guys like Kennesaw Mountain Landis and Hall of Famer Cap Anson --- white people.
That's a history. That's several generations of Emmett Tills and Dick Rowlands and Medgar Everses persecuted. Meaning not just oneself but one's parents, one's grandparents, and on back as far as memory and oral tradition goes. And all this
after Emancipation. Those pictures of people being hosed and bitten by dogs in Birmingham posted earlier? Somebody living right now can point to one of those people and say, "this is my grandmother" or "that's my father". And their parents and grandparents before them suffered the same in their time, or far worse. That's a
legacy.
The world of 50 years ago
is the world where we come from. It's exactly what today is made of. It's not some historical door that closes on December 31st; it lives in the
memory; it's part of the makeup of people walking around right now. Just as the strife of the Civil War was where Moses Walker's world of 1884 came from; the recent past. So when you think you see an ethnic bloc "refusing to assimilate", what you're seeing is a legacy of
mistrust. And when entity A doesn't trust entity B, the former will do what any other entity feeling mistrust will do -- they
close ranks. When baseball shut them out, no pun intended, blacks were forced to form their own teams. Black teams, made up of those who weren't allowed on the white ones. They didn't do that because they decided to "refuse to assimilate"; they did it because the doors to the general greater world were CLOSED.
What you're trying to say here is tantamount to saying, "I don't know why Joe Smith won't assimilate and sit at our lunch table -- what, because we torched his house and raped his sister and murdered his son? Hell, that was a whole month ago. It's in the past. What the ****'s his problem?".