White supremacist America

Erik’s Hank Aaron grave post reminded me of how, when Aaron was about to break Babe Ruth’s record for career home runs, I read a story somewhere about all the racist hate mail he was getting. I was 14 at the time, and I have trouble reconstructing, more than 50 years later, the impression that made on me then. I suspect, however, that the chief effect of that kind of story on my political consciousness, which was just beginning to form courtesy of the Watergate scandal and the last years of the Vietnam war, was to normalize in my mind the idea that white supremacist thinking was a non-trivial part of the social and political landscape of America. (I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood of new tract homes on the north edge of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Neighbors included one black kid, one Armenian family, and one other Mexican-American family that lived about a mile away.)

I did a little digging around this morning, and here’s a sample of the enormous number of racist hate mail — it seems there were at least thousands of such letters — Aaron got. It’s a good thing Aaron saved the letters because otherwise a lot of people would just assume he was making it up or at least greatly exaggerating, because of the “victim mentality” all those free t-bone steaks etc, created according to Charles Murray et al.

I also learned that Aaron had to keep dealing with this kind of garbage for the rest of his life:

“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about,” Aaron told the New York Times in 1990. “My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”

And this ugliness did not cease when Aaron hit No. 715 or No. 755 or in his post-playing days. Aaron faced derision for the rest of his life. His former teammate, the great Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker, recalled the treatment Aaron would receive when he returned to Milwaukee to play for the Brewers in 1975 and ’76.

“Del Crandall was our manager when Henry came back, and Del made it a point for me to be with Henry all the time after games,” Uecker said Friday. “Riding a cab back to the hotel or whatever it may be. We were that close. Hank and I were that close. I remember many times seeing hate mail that he got. It was awful. It was really bad. I got mail, because I was talking about him on the air. I got mail from idiotic people who would rip me for talking about Henry. It was bad. Our manager, you should have seen the hate mail that came into the manager’s office from stupid people. They were unbelievably vile and vicious.”

When Aaron spoke to USA Today in 2014 about the letters he had kept from 1974, a fresh batch of hate mail flooded the newspaper’s office. “Hammerin’ Hank” was a living legend who remained a victim of our worst sin.

“It’s a part of America, so there you have it,” Ifill said. “No one gets a free pass on this one. So he’s an important link in a chain of exceptional athletes who had to confront that kind of racism and who performed at the highest levels despite it and who also refuse to be silent.”

Ifill wants people to remember Aaron’s story whenever Black athletes face pushback for speaking up about inequality.

“Hank Aaron is someone who was very talented, a mild-mannered person who was attacked in the worst ways and whose family was threatened,” Ifill said. “He played through it and over it. He’s an example of how absurd it is to try to silence athletes, when it was athletes who very often had to encounter the everyday of American racial or ethnic discrimination.”

Aaron encountered that discrimination with calm, with grace, with honesty and with optimism that one day we could be better. Those are the qualities — far beyond his home run tally — that many will remember him for.

Keep in mind that for basically all of the thousands upon thousands of hardcore racists who thought it worth their trouble to send this completely innocuous and non-confrontational man hate mail for the crime of existing, Babe Ruth was nothing more than a bunch of statistics: Ruth’s career had ended 40 years earlier, and of course that career was before the advent of TV. But he was a white man — an irony here is that Ruth dealt with rumors throughout his career that he had black “blood” — and therefore his greatness as an athlete was a symbol of white supremacy, which is a core value on which this country was founded, and which, to put it as mildly as possible, has never really gone away (Those of you of a certain age might remember that Sgt. Joe Friday’s badge number, always shown in the opening montage of the TV show Dragnet, was 714, because Jack Webb was such a huge Babe Ruth fan, and that was Ruth’s career home run total. To go down this rabbit hole further, Gene Roddenberry based the Star Trek character Spock on LA PD commissioner William Parker, who to a limited extent cleaned up that wildly corrupt institution, but who was a massive racist in his own right. Parker cannily pushed Hollywood to produce whitewashed propaganda like Dragnet for the benefit of his department’s public image ltd).

What Hank Aaron had to deal with and overcome is a clear reminder of that, especially for the people who believe the Civil War, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the election of Barack Obama, that annoying DEI training that they just got rid of, and so forth “ended” racism in America.