Struggling to Find the Right Words

A Threatening letter targeting the African American and Latino players on the Boston Red Sox has changed the very nature of a series set to present baseball at its best.

At this moment, the baseball world centers on Tampa Bay. Hold on, I need a minute to digest what I just typed. Nope, I still need more time. Ok, moving on. Monday night marks the opening game of a series between the Red Sox and Rays (of light, not marine animals) that will determine first place in the American League East. Baseball fans are excited because this marks the first time in many years that the terms “American League East,” “pennant race,” and “Red Sox” were not accompanied by anything remotely related to New York or the Yankees. Casual fans are stoked because of the events earlier this year. People tune in hoping to see fisticuffs and the not-so-sweet science displayed by James Shields and Coco Crisp earlier this year (If ESPN really wanted to make money with their Wednesday game, Jim Ross and Jerry “the King” Lawler should announce it). The people in Tampa…well the people in Tampa have just awoken from a nap after that filling early bird special. We’ll have to check in with them later.

With all those plotlines swirling through the baseball universe, one exists that stands out: Report: Red Sox Players Receive Mailed Threat . The Red Sox received a threatening letter, believed to be postmarked from Memphis, Tennessee, targeting the black and Latino players on the Red Sox. Authorities suggested that the letter was unrelated to the brawl earlier this season. Seriously? I just spent five minutes scrolling through various windows and tasks on my computer, simply because I find myself speechless. I have no words strong enough to condemn the author of these letters.

Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record in 1974 amid the most vitriolic and hateful of atmospheres. He received threatening letters just like this one, warning him against hitting that 715 ^th home run, and graphically depicting the atrocities that would be committed against him and his family. When he hit the homer to break the record, two white men managed to run onto the field. They jogged with him, smiled, patted him on the back. Years later, his wife admitted that she believed they intended to kill him. She feared that her husband would never be able touch home plate.

In 2008, 35 years later, very little has changed. A person with a pen, a vendetta, and a 42 cent stamp can change the very nature of something as pure as a game of baseball. Do I think this threat is credible? Probably not, the chances of something horribly devastating happening at tonight’s game are pretty thin. Is that the point? Not really.

Gordon Allport defines prejudice as pre-judged, irrational, emotional behavior designed to fulfill a person’s psychological need to feel the superiority of one’s group over another’s. With the scratch of a pen, an American has allowed his or her prejudices to change an event based on sport and competition into one of fear, anxiety, and racial tension. Why, as a society, do we allow this behavior?

Remember the “Seinfeld” when Jerry dated the police illustrator, who demanded that he take a lie detector test because he swore that he had never watched “Melrose Place?” When he asked George how to beat the test, George simply said, “If you don’t think it’s a lie, then it’s not.” When it comes to race, that’s where we are as a country. The media subjects the American public to incessant rhetoric centering on our progress and the “national conversation on race.” Who actually is involved in this conversation? What exactly is the conversation about? Are we sure it’s not a conversation about the race—the one where Big Brown choked and finished last? Ultimately, we believe we are making progress because we say we are.

However, all it takes is one ignorant nut to show us that we haven’t moved as far as we would like. In a time where the economy falters and the middle class has become socially marginalized, doesn’t it make sense that people would once again resort to pre-judged, irrational, emotional behaviors in order to feel good about themselves? As such, we have mega-churches, ultra-conservatives, and amazingly large pockets of people driven by the same core principles of the KKK and the white supremacy movement of the 1900s. All they have done is adapt these values to the twenty-first century. Where the film “Birth of a Nation” (a movie produced in the 19-teens, portraying the Ku Klux Klan as the saviors of the South and heroes of the film) focused on the absurdity that people saw in giving African Americans the right to vote, now the same ignorance targets those minorities that have used their physical gifts to become more powerful and influential than any middle class American could ever dream to be.

Honestly, I have struggled through this article. I simply can’t grasp the words that accurately depict the outrage I felt when I first heard this report. How someone can act based on obscenely outdated and inaccurate views is beyond me. The fact that this continues to happen in all walks of life, from sporting events, to entertainment, to politics, is a travesty. When will we leave these debilitating beliefs in the past? When will we move from the empty rhetoric to sustained and meaningful action?

I, for one, hope we do so before the next tragedy occurs.