It got hot Saturday at Yankee Stadium, and not just because it was nearly 90 degrees in the Bronx by gametime: Yankees designated hitter Josh Donaldson made a comment to Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson that Anderson contends was “racist.” The benches cleared, tempers were short, and the controversy is still raging; Major League Baseball officials have begun an investigation.
A disquieting sign of the persistence of racism in American culture today? Nope. The incident was actually a disquieting sign of how our racism-obsessed culture has given all too many people a hair-trigger sensitivity that sees racism everywhere, and manufactures it when it isn’t present.
So what happened? Did Donaldson use the dreaded word that shuts down all discourse and rational thought and excludes one from polite society forever after? Of course not. Did he come out to bat wearing blackface? Did he taunt Anderson with old racial stereotypes about blacks? No. All he did was pass by Anderson in the first inning and say, “What’s up, Jackie?”
Yeah, really, that’s all. Donaldson was needling Anderson over a 2019 Sports Illustrated interview in which Anderson said he felt as if he were “today’s Jackie Robinson” and was “getting to a point where I need to change the game.” What Anderson meant is unclear, as there are no bars to black people playing Major League Baseball today, and contrary to accusations of racism, baseball teams have actually been aggressively courting young black men to play the game, so as to offset those very charges of racism.
Anderson’s remark was a self-important and self-pitying manifestation of what happens when you tell someone every day of his life that he is oppressed and denied opportunity. Tim Anderson made over seven million dollars in 2021 and stands to make nine and a half million this year; in 2019, when he likened himself to Jackie Robinson, he made only a paltry 1.4 million. The poor guy! How did he ever get by on that?
And so, the aggrieved victim fumed about Donaldson: “He just made a disrespectful comment. Basically, he was trying to call me Jackie Robinson. ‘What’s up, Jackie?’ I don’t play like that. I don’t really play at all. I wasn’t really going to bother nobody today, but he made the comment, and you know it was disrespectful and I don’t think it was called for. It was unnecessary.”
Well, sir, he called you Jackie Robinson because you called yourself Jackie Robinson. But in today’s racism-charged culture, Donaldson, a white man, did not accord Anderson, a black man, the cringing respect and honor that the Left demands from the white oppressor, and so had committed “racism.”
For his part, Donaldson said he had “joked around” with Anderson about his fatuous remark before. “My meaning of that is not any term trying to be racist by any fact of the matter,” he said. “Obviously, he deemed it disrespectful. And look, if he did, I apologize. That’s not what I was trying to do by any manner and that’s what happened.”
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White Sox catcher Yasmani Grandal threw fuel on the fire in the fifth inning when he began yelling at Donaldson when he came up bat. “Believe me, you don’t want me to tell you guys what I told him,” Grandal told reporters later. “This game went through a period in time where a lot of those comments were meant, and I think we’re way past that. And it’s just unacceptable. I just thought it was a low blow and I want to make sure I’ve got my team’s back. There’s no way that you’re allowed to say something like that.”
Well, sure. Nowadays we aren’t allowed to say a lot of things, and more of that is coming. The White Sox’s superannuated manager Tony La Russa, who at 77 is old enough to remember real racism, has learned in his dotage to be woke, and so he jumped on Donaldson as well. Donaldson, he said, “made a racist comment, Donaldson, and that’s all I’m going to say. That’s as strong as it gets.” Anderson agreed with La Russa’s comment, saying, “Same. Same. Along that same line.” According to ESPN, “Major League Baseball is looking into the matter and speaking to all of the relevant parties involved.”
The great former pitcher Curt Schilling, who would be in the Hall of Fame today if he weren’t a critic of Leftism, offered a note of sanity: “So a black player calls himself a modern-day Jackie Robinson, why I have no idea, and then a player rags him on it, and that’s racist? This is what happens when the liberal world WAITS in anticipation for the next event they can label racism.”
Indeed. There is so little actual racism today, and so much hysteria about racism, that racist incidents have to be invented. The measure of how much Josh Donaldson is punished for this will be a measure of how insane our culture has really become today.
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