By Steve Sailer
11/03/2017
From the New York Times:
How Racism Made Me a Dodgers Fan
By FERN SHEN NOV. 2, 2017
This week, Yu Darvish, the Los Angeles Dodger pitcher who is half Japanese, said he was trying to āstay positiveā after a star player for the Houston Astros, Yuli Gurriel, mocked him with a racist slur and slant-eyes gesture during Game 3 of the World Series. ā¦
Too bad a racially outraged Darvish (World Series ERA 21.60) didnāt throw beanballs at the next several Astros in the grand tradition of Juan Marichal and get suspended from the rest of the World Series so Alex Wood (World Series ERA 1.17) would have had to start Game 7 in Darvishās stead ā¦ But no, Darvish had to be a gentleman about it ā¦
Iām not big on baseball, but I became a Dodgers fan this week, and I think a lot of Asians and Asian-Americans joined me. We were disgusted by Gurrielās ugly behavior and winced in unison as Darvish took a drubbing from the Astros in Game 7. (The Astros won the game and the series.) But our dismay runs deeper: Many Asian people are upset about the slick and spineless handling of the incident by the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred.
Let me take you back to a Catholic-school classroom in central New Jersey in the 1960s where Iām sitting at my desk, my face aflame.
A student has just turned around and made the dreaded gesture again: āChineeese!ā he says, pulling back his eyes, grinning, leering and causing a ripple of laughter the nuns never seem to mind.
As the lone Chinese student in the class ā my siblings and I were the only Chinese in the school ā I experienced this many times.
This is not to say I didnāt have friends or join in kickball games or share the occasional cookie from my āBeverly Hillbilliesā lunch box with a classmate.
But now and then someone would confront me on the playground, pull back their eyes and remind me that I was still, to them, some kind of freak, a foreigner, a joke.
Which brings me to what happened to Gurriel after cameras caught him not only making the slant-eye gesture in the dugout, after he hit a home run off Darvish, but also uttering a slur: āChinito,ā or ālittle Chinese boy.ā Itās the equivalent of the N-word, and the Cuban-born slugger knew it.
āIn Cuba we call everybody whoās from Asia āChina,ā ā Gurriel said afterward through a translator. āI know it is offensive to them and they donāt like that.ā
By the way, Iām fascinated by what the next wave of Cubans raised under Communism are going to be like. (Communism can do things to a people, like the difference in California between the respectable old Armenians and the hooliganish new Armenian immigrants who grew up in the Soviet Union.) Recently arrived Cuban ballplayers like Gurriel and the Dodgerās colorfully eccentric Yasiel Puig are kind of different from old-time Cubans. The bat-licking Puig acts like he must have been raised by an affectionate pack of feral dogs.
So what was his punishment? Sensitivity training and a five-game suspension that starts next season, which allowed the Astros star to stay in the lineup for all seven games. ā¦
The message sent to Asian-Americans was: Your humanity doesnāt quite make the cut. Alter the course of a World Series for this? For them? ā¦
Until recently Iād have said we were well past all that blatant stuff. Back in the day in rural New Jersey there were so few Asian people that my father would cross a room to greet one. (āHey, a countryman!ā) Now Asians are everywhere.
A lesser known clause of the Zeroth Amendment is that itās racist discrimination for immigrants to not be surrounded by people of their own race and nationality at all times.
So it was a bit of a shock to be confronted recently by some young white children in a supermarket parking lot in Baltimore. They were up in my face, doing the old ching-chang-charlie gibberish. It didnāt upset me so much as startle me; it was like seeing a ghost.
Baltimore, of course, is notorious for its roving gangs of racist white children.
The Gurriel incident, though, made the schoolyard tears spring to my eyes. ā¦
āI went through this! People did this to me!ā I replied, tears welling. Trying to sympathize, he said, āTheyāre just pushing your buttons.ā
But really, Iām glad, in this world full of hate, bias and privilege, that my buttons can still be pushed. I know what it feels like to be other-ized. Sometimes we need to tap into that wounded 7-year-old inside of us.
Fern Shen is a former Washington Post staff writer and the editor and publisher of the news website Baltimore Brew.