The United States’ growing Latino population is confusing to the rest of the country when it comes to racial categories.
Lighter-skinned Latinos often have to put up with a reaction of “you’re kidding” when they acknowledge their ethnic ties to places in Latin America, while very dark-skinned Latinos run the risk of being ignored altogether (if they’re not African-American, they’re clearly not anything else, so they might as well be nobody. Or so goes the half-wit logic).
IN FACT, I heard a speaker earlier this week give a lecture about the status of the United States’ growing Latino population who said there was only one area of our society where dark-skinned Latinos get any attention whatsoever.
Baseball.
Our “national pastime” is a place where men who look like U.S.-born blacks (until they open their mouths and speak accented English) can get some sort of public attention for their achievements.
But before we start praising baseball people and their fans for being overly enlightened, keep in mind that many of them can’t quite figure out what to make of these sons of the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries who come to the United States to play professional baseball in hopes they can be the “one in a million” who makes it big.
KEEP IN MIND that for every one who achieves some sort of financial success, there are dozens more who returned to their home countries in failure or are now living in secrecy in the Bronx because they chose to stay in the U.S. without a valid visa after being released by some minor league ballclub.
Go to the Internet and check out the websites that purport to offer information about baseball. Whenever the issue of race and where Latin Americans fit in comes up, the rhetoric gets feisty (and often ridiculous).
What makes the issue worse in baseball is that in recent years, the number of U.S.-born black ballplayers has declined severely. Some ball clubs have none, and only have ballplayers “of color” because of the athletes they employ who come from Latin American countries.
I still remember when it was pointed out during the 2005 World Series that the National League champion Houston Astros had no African-American ballplayers on their roster.
“HOW COULD THAT be?,” critics noted, pointing out the extremely dark hue of pitcher Wandy Rodriguez’ skin as he managed to get knocked around, ultimately losing his game to the Chicago White Sox (who themselves only had Carl Everett, Jermaine Dye and Frank Thomas on the disabled list to prevent themselves from being a non-African-American ballclub).
But Rodriguez is a Dominican. He’s a Latin American. If he were to ever become a permanent U.S. resident, he would be robbed of that ethnic distinction and receive the generic “Latino” label.
Now I’m going on record here as saying I could care less about the racial aspect of ballplayers, finding it less interesting than the ethnicity. And while baseball is becoming less urban black, it is becoming a more diverse game in this country because of the influx of Latin American and Asian ballplayers who come to the U.S. to make the “big money.”
Be honest. If the American and National leagues were still predominantly Anglo as they once were (back in the 1960s, it was common for a 25-man roster to have maybe three non-white ballplayers), then professional baseball in the United States would have been surpassed by the professional leagues in Japan in terms of quality.
BUT STILL, WE run into this confusion about how to classify these ballplayers.
Such confusion came in a recent study by Michael Hoban, who wrote recently trying to argue that the important factor when determining the status of non-white ballplayers in U.S. professional baseball is NOT the number of non-Anglo athletes currently employed – but the quality.
He argues that back in the 1960s when there might not have been many black ballplayers, it was a golden era because the quality of black ballplayers was so high – he claims six of the Top 10 baseball players in the major leagues back then were black.
He then works his way down the list of baseball stars from the era, noting that players such as Roberto Clemente should not be classified as African-American (Clemente always took pride in being Puerto Rican, while also acknowledging the African origins that clearly ran in his family).
BUT HOBAN’S ANALYSIS caught my attention for including Rod Carew, the old infielder for the Minnesota Twins and California Angels, as an African-American ballplayer.
That classification comes even though Carew was born in Panama, and didn’t come to live in New York until he was a teenager. He’s an immigrant.
But the fact that he was named by his mother for the English-speaking doctor who gave birth to him on board a train meant he didn’t have that “traditional” Spanish name. The fact that he has learned to speak English so clearly that no stereotypical take on a Spanish accent is noticeable also may have hurt him.
Does this mean that Carew, or any Latino, loses their Latino-ness because they become fluent in English? That’s absurd.
I’M WILLING TO think of the race classification as some sort of slip on Hoban’s part. But it amazed me to read a running dialogue on the website Baseball Think Factory where otherwise rational people were willing to argue that Carew wasn’t a “true” Latino and ought to be thought of as just black.
So as much as I’d like to think of following professional baseball as an activity I can partake in to escape the nonsense that confronts our society, it appears that the nonsense even pops up there.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTES: How severe is the problem of fewer U.S.-born black ballplayers in Major League Baseball (http://seamheads.com/blog/2008/10/26/blacks-in-baseball-%e2%80%93-a-question-of-quality-not-quantity/)? And what should we make of the (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/seamheads_hoban/) disagreement over how Latino ballplayers “fit in” to the major leagues?
Lighter-skinned Latinos often have to put up with a reaction of “you’re kidding” when they acknowledge their ethnic ties to places in Latin America, while very dark-skinned Latinos run the risk of being ignored altogether (if they’re not African-American, they’re clearly not anything else, so they might as well be nobody. Or so goes the half-wit logic).
IN FACT, I heard a speaker earlier this week give a lecture about the status of the United States’ growing Latino population who said there was only one area of our society where dark-skinned Latinos get any attention whatsoever.
Baseball.
Our “national pastime” is a place where men who look like U.S.-born blacks (until they open their mouths and speak accented English) can get some sort of public attention for their achievements.
But before we start praising baseball people and their fans for being overly enlightened, keep in mind that many of them can’t quite figure out what to make of these sons of the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries who come to the United States to play professional baseball in hopes they can be the “one in a million” who makes it big.
KEEP IN MIND that for every one who achieves some sort of financial success, there are dozens more who returned to their home countries in failure or are now living in secrecy in the Bronx because they chose to stay in the U.S. without a valid visa after being released by some minor league ballclub.
Go to the Internet and check out the websites that purport to offer information about baseball. Whenever the issue of race and where Latin Americans fit in comes up, the rhetoric gets feisty (and often ridiculous).
What makes the issue worse in baseball is that in recent years, the number of U.S.-born black ballplayers has declined severely. Some ball clubs have none, and only have ballplayers “of color” because of the athletes they employ who come from Latin American countries.
I still remember when it was pointed out during the 2005 World Series that the National League champion Houston Astros had no African-American ballplayers on their roster.
“HOW COULD THAT be?,” critics noted, pointing out the extremely dark hue of pitcher Wandy Rodriguez’ skin as he managed to get knocked around, ultimately losing his game to the Chicago White Sox (who themselves only had Carl Everett, Jermaine Dye and Frank Thomas on the disabled list to prevent themselves from being a non-African-American ballclub).
But Rodriguez is a Dominican. He’s a Latin American. If he were to ever become a permanent U.S. resident, he would be robbed of that ethnic distinction and receive the generic “Latino” label.
Now I’m going on record here as saying I could care less about the racial aspect of ballplayers, finding it less interesting than the ethnicity. And while baseball is becoming less urban black, it is becoming a more diverse game in this country because of the influx of Latin American and Asian ballplayers who come to the U.S. to make the “big money.”
Be honest. If the American and National leagues were still predominantly Anglo as they once were (back in the 1960s, it was common for a 25-man roster to have maybe three non-white ballplayers), then professional baseball in the United States would have been surpassed by the professional leagues in Japan in terms of quality.
BUT STILL, WE run into this confusion about how to classify these ballplayers.
Such confusion came in a recent study by Michael Hoban, who wrote recently trying to argue that the important factor when determining the status of non-white ballplayers in U.S. professional baseball is NOT the number of non-Anglo athletes currently employed – but the quality.
He argues that back in the 1960s when there might not have been many black ballplayers, it was a golden era because the quality of black ballplayers was so high – he claims six of the Top 10 baseball players in the major leagues back then were black.
He then works his way down the list of baseball stars from the era, noting that players such as Roberto Clemente should not be classified as African-American (Clemente always took pride in being Puerto Rican, while also acknowledging the African origins that clearly ran in his family).
BUT HOBAN’S ANALYSIS caught my attention for including Rod Carew, the old infielder for the Minnesota Twins and California Angels, as an African-American ballplayer.
That classification comes even though Carew was born in Panama, and didn’t come to live in New York until he was a teenager. He’s an immigrant.
But the fact that he was named by his mother for the English-speaking doctor who gave birth to him on board a train meant he didn’t have that “traditional” Spanish name. The fact that he has learned to speak English so clearly that no stereotypical take on a Spanish accent is noticeable also may have hurt him.
Does this mean that Carew, or any Latino, loses their Latino-ness because they become fluent in English? That’s absurd.
I’M WILLING TO think of the race classification as some sort of slip on Hoban’s part. But it amazed me to read a running dialogue on the website Baseball Think Factory where otherwise rational people were willing to argue that Carew wasn’t a “true” Latino and ought to be thought of as just black.
So as much as I’d like to think of following professional baseball as an activity I can partake in to escape the nonsense that confronts our society, it appears that the nonsense even pops up there.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTES: How severe is the problem of fewer U.S.-born black ballplayers in Major League Baseball (http://seamheads.com/blog/2008/10/26/blacks-in-baseball-%e2%80%93-a-question-of-quality-not-quantity/)? And what should we make of the (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/seamheads_hoban/) disagreement over how Latino ballplayers “fit in” to the major leagues?
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