The Chris Moeller Archives

The words of Early

A very important academic has based his study and his literary headquarters in St. Louis for 38 years and I've never thought to write about him. Gerald Early's work is right up my alley. He's an essayist who currently serves as the the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.... whew. This makes him the go-to for U.S. and St. Louis sports histories, music appreciation in the idiom of the African American tradition, seemingly for frequent phone calls and office visits from local St. Louis media personalities, and most noticeably, for PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who made Early a star in each of The Roosevelts (2014), The War [WWII] (2007), Jazz (2001) and Baseball (1994) series, as well as the film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. If you want to read or talk to somebody about Miles Davis, Ty Cobb, Sonny Liston, W.E.B. DuBois, Billie Holiday, or Cool Papa Bell-- and I do-- then this would be the guy.

Major League Baseball is in the middle of a handful of crises in 2020. One of the minor ones that it insists on turning into a major one is the economic setback initiated at the intersection of ill-planning and Covid-19, which it has infinitely worsened through its insistence on pursuing a Frankenstein season, changing rules on and off the field seemingly by the hour at times, damaging the business' long-term viability with the public, and about which I hope to elaborate soon in this space. 

Another is the ongoing devastation the league has brought about for itself through proverbial racial blinders and plugged ears, one that has left it adrift from connecting largely with a sizable part of its potential audience for more than a generation, one that has been exacerbated by recent clumsy attempts to balance an expression of meaningful support for the moral demand of the Black Lives Matter movement with the league's ever-obstinate insistence on chasing profit from white consumers. The results are an insult to them as it is to the Black audience. St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman called on Gerald Early to get his thoughts and we can learn a lot from the outcome.

What really grabbed me were the thoughts about how baseball recognizes Jackie Robinson, its pioneering demolisher of the color line in 1947. While this story of true courage and strength gets continually promoted, and honored on the field explicitly each year on the April 15th anniversary of Robinson's first game, it is always couched by this implication that the league is to be continually commended for overcoming this shameful segregation that lasted for six decades, rather than be embarrassed that the day took so long to arrive. Someone like me comes to the tardy realization, through Early, that this is the particular element of the effort to "celebrate Robinson" that does little if anything to attract black fans, and may even repel many of them. As Early says, it's as if baseball said "Oh yes, we decided to have Robinson come in and play and everything in this great historic moment." This inverts the agency of Robinson having actually succeeded against the currents of the time-- and the continuing tides long after-- and places that agency with Major League Baseball, which apparently granted Robinson a permission of sorts. It's critical that we are constantly reminded that the league-- the business-- was only a "white game" in those many years that preceded him. In a business you must promote the product, and the time is long past to begin considering how those promotions are received by all potential consumers.

I appreciate, as a Marxist, that Early refers to the Black Lives Matter movement-- accurately-- as having been built on "a Marxist critical analysis of a capitalist, bourgeois society." It infuriates me when even supporters run from these precise labels they should be embracing and when similar movements have been co-opted in the past by the grifters of capitalism and financial acquisition. If the involuntarily-retiring Steve King wishes to call them Marxists, we should openly acknowledge that he's damn right. Where he's damn wrong is calling them terrorists. They're anti-terrorists and he's among the terrorists. 

I'm very glad Early brought up the topic of the national anthem as well so that he could apply succinct and wise words to feelings I've had about how many of us view this tradition. The way Major League Baseball drapes itself in all things "patriotic" is disgusting in its insincerity and lack of inclusiveness. Its grotesqueness is as easily exampled as the adding of the maudlin "God Bless America" (in 2001) to compliment the anthem (and to often replace "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch) and the insidiousness of this "patriotism" stretches to include the bizarre fact that nearly every team, contrary to other pro sports leagues, seems to employ a red, white, and blue color scheme of some kind on its uniforms. There are also the frequent military flyovers and other pro-war demonstrations that shadow the field. Anybody that doubts we are a dying empire in its latter stages of hospice care need only to buy a ticket for an MLB game and spend a couple hours absorbing the desperate and hollow attempts by the chattel populace to hoot and holler their two hymns, one ferociously pro-war and the other simplistically and militantly pro-theist, to drown out the piercing blare of the commencing catastrophe. Black people absorb those moments of supposed community fellowship differently-- with much more apprehension-- than do untutored and hubristic whites because for people like Early, in his words, "your country didn't always love you." And still largely refuses to do so.

Thank you, Dr. Early, for a Sunday morning filled with education and raised consciousness, for enlightenment on inclusiveness and the concept of "double awareness." Do what I did and read the interview with Hochman in full, and if you want to continue feeling better about our nation's future after doing that, avoid what I did next-- which was to read the story's comment section. 

posted by CM @ 5:28 PM