Last week’s erasure of Jackie Robinson from the Department of Defense website, as brief as it was, amounted to the latest example of Donald Trump’s dystopian vision of American society. If the President’s edict against all forms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is to rule the day, then an historic figure such as Robinson—who served in World War II, became the first Black man in the most significant professional sport of his time and spent his life fighting racial discrimination—apparently had to be disappeared.
The blowback to that act of moral turpitude was immediate and widespread, prompting administration officials to clumsily shift blame to artificial intelligent tools for the “error.” But the message had been sent and was perfectly clear.
It summed up Trump’s long personal history of disparaging minorities. It signaled that DEI has become, as The Nation’s Dave Zirin wrote, “an all-purpose term to demonize anything that promotes the histories and experiences of Black and brown people.” It broadcast, as Zirin put it, “that Robinson’s accomplishments are fraudulent and exalted only because of the color of his skin.”
Veteran Atlanta journalist Terrence Moore pointed out that, beyond Robinson’s Hall of Fame baseball career, which was so visible in embarrassing the country’s Jim Crow leanings, “Robinson was Rosa Parks 11 years before Rosa Parks,” who famously refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955. Robinson had declined to leave the front of an Army bus during military service in ’44 and was court-marshalled for it. (He subsequently was acquitted and received an honorable discharge.)
When Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 on his solitary mission to personally integrate the Major Leagues, baseball was a central piece of American culture, legitimately the “national pastime” to a populace barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA.
Joe Dorinson, the prominent Jackie Robinson scholar who co-coordinated a massive Long Island University academic conference on the 50th anniversary in 1997 of Robinson’s breakthrough, noted that “Babe Ruth changed baseball. But Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.” At that LIU event, Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.” Turning the other cheek to vile racist treatment and carrying on.
The late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in that Robinson symposium) believed that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”
Major League Baseball, in retelling Jackie’s story, officially retired Robinson’s uniform No. 42—leaguewide—in 1997 and, since 2008 has marked the anniversary of Robinson’s debut, April 15, by having every player on every team wear Robinson’s uniform No. 42 on that date.
But given the White House’s chainsaw attack on DEI, its monetary bullying of any organization that continues to traffic in diversity, Terrence Moore wondered if Jackie Robinson Day “might be “going, going, gone….”—that “just to make sure the U.S. government doesn’t unleash its considerable wrath on their industry that made a record $12.1 billion last season,” MLB could pull the plug on such a celebration.
MLB indeed might be hinting at that, having already removed references to “diversity” from its home page and issued a statement that it is “in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward.”
If there is some positive to be found in these dehumanizing, history-cancelling actions by the reigning President, perhaps it was provided by veteran Minnesota Twins reporter La Velle E. Neal III of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who wrote that he would like to “express my gratitude toward the Department of Defense for reminding us of the impact of one of our greatest Americans.
“Because of the DoD’s reckless slicing and dicing of everything it deemed to fall into their diversity, equity and inclusion danger zone,” Neil wrote, “webpages lauding the contributions of many who proudly fought for this country were erased.
“One of those histories was of Jackie Robinson. A man who lettered in four sports at UCLA, served his country during World War II, then broke baseball’s color barrier while fighting discrimination and segregation the entire way.
“Because of the DoD’s gaffe, Robinson’s legacy is back in the conversation. And just in time for the approaching baseball season. And in time for Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, when his career will be remembered across Major League Baseball.
“Jackie should be celebrated with more gusto than ever this year.”
Then again, as Joe Dorinson emailed upon the news of the temporary Robinson benching, “Fascism’s footfalls grow louder each day.”