If Your Team Isn’t “Ready” For Michael Sam, Resign

I have a piece noting that the “it’s not that I’m a bigot, but I have to respect the desires of other bigots” argument has 1)always been used to justify discrimination and 2)is a really horrible argument:

Anyone familiar with the breaking of the color line in baseball, for example, will know these feeble tautologies and non-sequiturs. Even in a context in which substantial parts of the country were formally segregated, baseball’s elites would rarely defend the exclusion of African-Americans explicitly. The racist commisioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis farcically maintained that there was no policy of discrimination despite decades of lily-white rosters, and the owners followed his lead. As Jules Tygiel explained in his classic Baseball’s Great Experiment, “[u]nable to acknowledge discrimination, owners developed a series of rationales defending the necessity of separate competition. Wherever possible, they attempted to shift responsibility to other parties or to blame circumstances beyond their control.” Tygeil’s description applies precisely to the justifications for discrimination offered by NFL decisionmakers.

As Deadspin’s Drew Magary argues, the assertion that Sam is too much of a “distraction” to justify a roster spot is particularly silly. NFL games are not played in private, and extensive media coverage is something teams have to deal with and in some cases will welcome. You create a greater media “distraction” by drafting Andrew Luck rather than Brandon Weeden, and the Super Bowl champion Seahawks will face considerably more “distraction” from the media than the Jacksonville Jaguars will. Good organizations can deal with this if not use it to their advantage. The Brooklyn Dodgers were so distracted by Jackie Robinson’s presence that they won six National League pennants in his decade with the team, including in his rookie year. (Robinson’s 1953 Dodgers outscored the next best offensive team in the league by nearly 200 runs. But if not for the distraction created by his presence they could have been really good!) The Cleveland Indians, who broke the American League’s color line, were so distracted they won the World Series in Larry Doby’s first full year with the team and would go on to set the American League record for wins in a season with the first African-American player in the league still patrolling the outfield. If breaking barriers of prejudice is devastating to an organization’s chances of winning, history keeps it well hidden.

But even if we assumed for the sake of argument that Sam would be a “distraction” and risk team discord, it’s a terrible argument. It’s an assumption that makes all discrimination self-justifying.

Read the whole etc.