Hank Aaron is as good a metaphor as any for racial issues in the US
[dropcap]The[/dropcap] saga of Henry “Hank” Aaron, who died last week, is more than a baseball saga. If we discount Barry Bonds’ homerun total — earned with the aid of performance enhancing drugs — Aaron holds the all time home run record at 755. He eclipsed the legendary Babe Ruth’s 714 lifetime record that stood for decades. The all time home run record is considered the most prestigious in sports.
That, one would think, would be more than enough to have bestowed on Aaron a charmed life. One would need to think again. He broke into the Major Leagues a few years after Jackie Robinson’s unprecedented entrance in 1947. One would have expected the racism that greeted Robinson also to have greeted Aaron. However, Aaron’s career ended in 1976. The way Aaron felt, even then, more than two decades later, even his own fans were not really excited as he closed in on and then broke the homerun record.
Now, Aaron was never your flamboyant, egotistical sportsman. He was not a complainer nor one who sought attention for himself or for his achievements on the field. That he still felt the racism says a lot.
That was 1976. Now it is 2021. Black and other minority players occupy the rosters of every major sport. Like every other group, they include their lesser talents and their greater talents, who break records. Virtually no one today pays any attention to a player’s race when he (or she) breaks a sports record. We have come a long way.
Yes, but we also have a long way to go. To get there, it is critical to define the obstacles ahead. They are not the same obstacles that Aaron or his generation, not to mention earlier generations, faced. Today we are not discussing, for example, minority players being asked to drink from separate drinking fountains or to stay at inferior hotels, segregated by race. We are not surprised at racial minorities who are mayors, state legislators, US congress people, city councilpeople, etc. For example, we are not surprised when Denver, whose minorities are a minority of the overall population, elects minorities to be mayor. We expect to see people of color in advertisements and movies. We expect to meet them in the grocery store and at work.The great majority of us do not even notice. This is not the US of 50 or 70 years ago.
That said, the lethal treatment meted out to the late George Floyd in Minneapolis symbolizes the racism that persists and needs to be rooted out. Unless one is a racist, we can all agree to that. Whether it is life itself, as in the case of George Floyd, or a more subtle but still cutting racism of the sort that dogged Hank Aaron, we can all agree that this is wrong and must end. Here is where is we disagree: on means toward a solution.
We cite one arena: policing, highlighted by the tragic, unnecessary death of George Floyd. In principle, the solution is simple: equal treatment of every criminal, and every suspect, regardless of race. But how does one measure that? One solution is to keep track of disparities in the number of minorities arrested or convicted or both. When, say, the number of arrests of blacks and of whites is the same, then equality in policing will have been achieved. This is a favored method on the progressive left.
This, in our view, is fallacious and artificial. It eviscerates context. The context is the number of crimes committed. If a given racial minority commits a greater number of crimes, whether measured relative to population or absolutely, then the number of suspects in that minority will be higher. This is not a racially based disparity. The rate of crimes committed by a given minority will not be reduced by defining it away as a racial disparity, if there are a relatively high number of minority suspects. The definition of racial disparities in policing must rest on this definition: whether each and every suspect, regardless of race, is treated equally with reference to the severity of the suspected crime.
This is a lot harder to measure, and a lot harder to correct after the fact — after an instance of police brutality. This is best addressed in training and in role modeling by senior officers. Racial disparities in policing cannot simply be reduced to a statistical tally of, say, the numbers of suspects of a given race. If only it were that easy.
How to define and address the causes of a given minority’s higher crime rate are critical, but they are not essentially a policing issue.
No one should be afraid to contact the police. Equally, the police should not be afraid to do their job.
No person should go through life feeling that racism dogs him or her. Equally, no person should be ungrateful for the freedoms he or she does enjoy.
It is a balance. It is not yet achieved.
The sadness that Henry Aaron felt as his career reached its glorious climax — yet robbed of some of its glory — does not precisely reflect the current state of affairs, but it does highlight an enduring problem that is more easily perceived in Aaron’s case than in the polarized reactions to George Floyd. Some see post-Floyd peaceful protests but not post-Floyd violence; some see the violence but not the peaceful protests. Much easier to see is how even a model citizen and a sports hero (free of the character defects of many such heroes) suffered groundlessly, on the basis of a criterion that should make no difference about anything: race.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News