A Parallel Journey
As the country witnesses/undergoes/suffers through yet another contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearing, I recognize parallels with another era and arena, going back 75 years. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has become the first Black woman who will serve on the US Supreme Court. Jackie Robinson was the first Black player allowed into major league baseball, breaking in with the old Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. That happens to be the year I was born, after which I grew up in baseball. Later, my dad managed Black players in the South in the 1950s, when non-white fans still had to sit in separate, but definitely not equal, unroofed bleachers rather than the whites-only roofed grandstands.
The Symbolic Role of Sports
Some scoff at taking sports seriously. No more than modern bread and circuses, they say. But I have another view, based on personal experience and observation. Sports often play a symbolic role. International too, forcing us to behave better than we would at home, knowing the rest of the world is watching. Consider Jesse Owens showing up Hitler’s “Master Race” at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And sports offer us a leading, less risky, cultural edge. They serve up multi-ethnic test cases, enacting/acting out/modeling what will later become central to our shared national life and identity, as in the progression from baseball to the Supreme Court. And yet, all these years later, it still takes a lot of fighting and to-and-froing to grudgingly take next inclusive steps.
The Courageous Pioneers
Consider two courageous pioneers, both highly talented and qualified, eminently worthy to belong, except for resistance to the color of their skins. There’s an interesting semi-convergence with the names. Reaching the “eye on the prize” goal requires willingly offering themselves up to brutal hazing, all the while maintaining their own poise and cool. A line from a Malvina Reynolds’ tune comes to mind: “It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice. You’ve told us once, you’ve told us twice, but if that is freedom’s price, we don’t mind.” And of course, even what Robinson went through represented a vast improvement over earlier, more perilous times, when attracting attention and/or acting “uppity” were so often matters of life and death. Details differ, of course. Judge Jackson, operating in a highly verbal world, has been subjected to verbal attacks. Though chosen because she’s a centrist, some Senators on the Judiciary Committee sought to portray her as super-liberal. This included inaccurate claims that she’s been soft on pornographers, when in fact Congress established the sentencing guidelines. There’s the old saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Not exactly, especially considering aspersions were cast in the presence of her husband and young daughters. It had to come as a huge relief—one of the few times she teared up—when Senator Corey Booker addressed her to say she deserved and earned the appointment.
Denying and Admitting Racism
Robinson also earned his place, a star in the Negro Leagues and the first to cross over from them. He’d been handpicked as a man who could handle the pressure. He heard all the ugly words, back when tongues were far less restrained. And, as an athlete, he faced actual threats of bodily harm. Baseball players come with weapons if they choose to use them that way. Metal spikes on their feet at that time. Bats and hard balls in their hands. Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer (1971) described “bean balls” that in the Robinson years opposing pitchers often intentionally threw at Dodgers’ heads for playing with him. Robinson’s own head was the target even more frequently, with potential to maim or even kill. This is no theory; a friend of my dad’s, hit in the head with a ball, spent months recovering speech and coordination. Not safe on the base paths either, where some opposing players tried to spike Robinson’s Achilles’ Tendons, potentially crippling him and wrecking his career. But he was too quick, known for blazing speed. It must have been a great comfort for him that he had the unwavering support and friendship of Peewee Reese, Dodger shortstop and team captain.
Polarization in American Society
Three-quarters of a century on, we do seem to have arrived at a time when racial animus can no longer be overtly expressed on a political stage. As Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), “Defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, makes it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste.” But she noted a downside: “You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.” And, of course, denying and not talking about it doesn’t mean that different, encoded versions cease to exist and operate and, when revealed, are often denied. Wilkerson described “Caste [as] the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank of standing in the hierarchy.” So, questions of belonging and competence persist.
Ezra Klein, in Why We’re Polarized (c2020), cited other thinkers who had addressed related topics. Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University’s Political Communication Laboratory found that “partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages.” And so, Democrats and Republicans simmer in mutual mistrust, each considering the other an existential threat to the country’s future. And we’ve built “a world in which we’re not going to listen to politicians on the other side of emotional and controversial issues, even if they are making good arguments that are backed by facts.” Henri Tajfel, in his 1970 paper Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination, noted “classification of groups as ‘we’ and ‘they’ and once someone has become a ‘they,’ we are used to dismissing them, competing against them, discriminating against them, even if there is no reason for it in terms of our [own] interests.” No surprise then, that the Judiciary Committee tied on Judge Jackson’s nomination along party lines, which threw confirmation to the full Senate. No surprise either that Senator Lindsey Graham threatened to block any future Supreme Court nominations during Biden’s term.
Identity, Contradictions, and Pushback
Breaking down barriers takes revising our sense of national identity and working through our contradictions. Knowing not everybody’s going to be happy about it but going ahead anyway and understanding there will be pushback. As Klein stated, there’s “nothing that makes us identify with our groups as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified.” The Supreme Court Judge Jackson aspires to join is part of a “white city” of buildings often constructed using slave labor. Many viewed Robinson’s presence on the field as defiling the pure, pristine white temple of “the American Pastime,” with its fairytale origin story that Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented the game during his boyhood in pastoral Cooperstown, NY. Thus, it made silly sense to further extend the fantasy and choose that little town as the location for the Baseball Hall of Fame. There’s a Negro Leagues display, but it’s only a footnote. Wilkerson features a vignette on Satchell Paige, recognized as one of the greatest pitchers ever, who only made it to the majors at age 40, his best years behind him.
I go back and read Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. That image of “Mute inglorious Miltons,” prevented by their circumstances from adding their voices. What do we lose as a country by not including? And what does it cost the pioneers who go up against the system? Judge Jackson apologized to her daughters for time spent away from them. Wilkerson noted the toll of the enormous stress on pioneers who directly confront the system. Robinson suffered heart attacks and diabetes, went blind near the end of his life. I recall a moment from A League of Their Own, about women playing baseball during WWII. Another marginalized group kept out, which has also merited a footnote display at Cooperstown. The ball gets away from the catcher, Geena Davis, and lands in a Black churchyard. A woman dressed in Sunday best picks up the ball. Davis calls to throw it to her. And, as he makes the catch, we see in her eyes that she realizes this woman could do what she was doing and maybe even do it better, if given the chance.