Mixing It Up
Mixing It Up
Originally shared by M Sinclair Stevens
When the Segregated Team Up: Black Baseball Teams in Japan
In the mid-twentieth century my dad ran track in college. He was a vision of the midwestern American farm boy: pale freckled skin set off by flaming red hair. The college where my parents met, Knox College in Galesburg Illinois, had been founded in 1837 one of the first in the US not to discriminate on the basis of race. My mother still remembers being deeply impressed to learn that if a restaurant refused to serve a black runner on the team, that the entire track team, black and white, would stand up and walk out together.
Yes. There were color lines in Illinois, a "northern" state.
How easy it is for so many of us from the comfort of the present to forget the bigotry of the past. While there remain some vocal white supremacists who want to return to the past, we must confront the reality that bigotry was not limited to a few unenlightened hicks in a few backward states. Racism was systemic, north and south.
Nor is bigotry simply black and white. On the west coast where there were many immigrants from China and Japan, the rhetoric was pretty much the same stuff Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spew today against Mexicans.
So here is a little antidote to demonstrate that things can be different if we make the effort to make them different. The story (not so much "secret" but untold and unremembered) of how the excluded got together and got on.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/07/14/412880758/the-secret-history-of-black-baseball-players-in-japan
Originally shared by M Sinclair Stevens
When the Segregated Team Up: Black Baseball Teams in Japan
In the mid-twentieth century my dad ran track in college. He was a vision of the midwestern American farm boy: pale freckled skin set off by flaming red hair. The college where my parents met, Knox College in Galesburg Illinois, had been founded in 1837 one of the first in the US not to discriminate on the basis of race. My mother still remembers being deeply impressed to learn that if a restaurant refused to serve a black runner on the team, that the entire track team, black and white, would stand up and walk out together.
Yes. There were color lines in Illinois, a "northern" state.
How easy it is for so many of us from the comfort of the present to forget the bigotry of the past. While there remain some vocal white supremacists who want to return to the past, we must confront the reality that bigotry was not limited to a few unenlightened hicks in a few backward states. Racism was systemic, north and south.
Nor is bigotry simply black and white. On the west coast where there were many immigrants from China and Japan, the rhetoric was pretty much the same stuff Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spew today against Mexicans.
So here is a little antidote to demonstrate that things can be different if we make the effort to make them different. The story (not so much "secret" but untold and unremembered) of how the excluded got together and got on.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/07/14/412880758/the-secret-history-of-black-baseball-players-in-japan
did not know about this! Excellent post. While growing up, the dominant ethnic group was Japanese (these days, there are slightly more Filipinos) and the fave game was baseball. I loved playing it because being short, height didn't matter I could hit, field and run as well and better as anyone taller than me. However, whatever the season was, was our fave sport for me & my mostly Japanese friends.
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