"People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African-American," Hunter said. "They're not us. They're impostors. Even people I know come up and say, 'Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?' I say, 'Come on, he's Dominican. He's not black.' "
He continued:
"As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us. It's like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It's like, 'Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?' ... I'm telling you, it's sad," he said.
Vladimir Guerrero
Now I think Hunter was trying to say that whereas since Jackie Robinson's pioneering season black players in the Major Leagues had predominantly been African American, things have changed considerably over the last 15 years, to the extent that a few years ago, the number of African Americans baseball players at the elite level and even in the pipeline was dwindling, in part because of the leagues' financial cutbacks in scouting, developing and promoting black American athletes. Instead, many teams had chosen to focus their efforts and funds on the much less expensive talent available overseas, especially in the Dominican Republic, such that the only black faces on some teams were Afrolatino. He clarified his remarks by saying that:
"What I meant was they're not black players; they're Latin American players. There is a difference culturally. But on the field, we're all brothers, no matter where we come from, and that's something I've always taken pride in: treating everybody the same, whether he's a superstar or a young kid breaking into the game. Where he was born and raised makes no difference."
Luis Tiant
Yet this is still very problematic. Hunter did not make clear who the "people" were who asked him if Guerrero was black (he is), but interestingly enough, after several years in which African Americans had begun to disappear from the MLB, the numbers, at least on major league rosters, have risen, and some bona fide stars, like the Yankees' pitcher C. C. Sabathia and the Philadelphia Phillies' recent NL MVP Ryan Howard. Nevertheless, many teams now have Afrolatinos from DR, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, and a few even have Afrolatinos from Panama and Cuba.
While I understand where Hunter is coming from, I also have to say that he's making a basic, common and problematic categorical error here, that points to ignorance that unfortunately is widespread. Not a single media report I've read has cleared it up, so let me do so now, for him and everyone else, with a simple formula to recall.
All self-defined African Americans are black, BUT not all blacks in the Americas are African American. MOST ARE NOT.
Zoe Saldana
That is, Barack Obama, Mo'Nique, Torii Hunter, Beyoncé, and anyone else who defines herself or himself as African American is black, but black people like Idris Elba, Sophie Okenedo, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Pelé are not African American. The latter encompasses and isn't reducible to the latter. To put it another way: The majority of black people in the Americas are not African American. Those players aren't African American, but they are black.
Now, it's also the case that there are more black Latinos combined in the Americas (though not in the United States) than there are African Americans. Some of those black latinos, like actress Zoë Saldana, or actor Laz Alonso, stars of the blockbuster Avatar, may and do consider themselves many things: black, latino, Dominican-American and Cuban-American respectively, even African-American.
Manny Ramírez
Blackness is a racial definition, while "African American" functions as an ethnic designation. "Dominican," which Hunter cited in opposition to "black," is a national definition but also an ethnic one in the United States. According to the last US Census and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the majority of black people in the United States are African American, but the percentage of non-African American blacks grows daily, primarily as a result of the immigration from Africa, Europe, and yes, Latin America. And some of these black immigrants decide, as they see fit, to call themselves African American. One category does not elide the other.
Roberto Clemente and his family
In terms of baseball history, Hunter's ignorance is also glaring. Among the major black players in Major League Baseball's history are several black latinos, including Roberto Clemente, who was Puerto Rican and black. Both. In his lifetime he acknowledged this fact, and spoke elequently about the racism he encountered as a result of being both latino and black. Also, among the great pitchers of all time are several Afrolatinos, including Cuban Luis Tiant; another, still pitching, is Pedro Martínez. Yet even if we simply look at the earliest years of integration of Major League baseball, among the first blacks to play after Jackie Robinson's important debut was black Cuban Saturnino Arestes Armas "Minnie" Minoso, who broke in as a 23-year-old rookie with Cleveland (which also fielded the first African-American to play in the American League, Larry Doby) in 1949, two years after Robinson, though he was out of the league for several years until he returned in 1951. Interestingly enough, during the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut, in 1997, the discussion of the role of Afrolatinos in integrating Major League baseball remained muted, despite the raft of scholarship on the subject, including studies of the transnational interplay between African Americans and Afrolatinos in the early years of organized baseball and the Negro Leagues. As Hunter's comments suggest, it unfortunately remains so today.
Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos
Former President George W. Bush learned, after his now apocryphal query to Brazil's then-president, F. H. Cardoso, that Brazil has one of the largest self-defined black population in the Americas according to its Census, and if we were to use the various US definitions of "black," the number of black people in Brazil would dwarf that of the US by at least a factor of two (100+ million vs. 47-48 million). The Dominican Republic, the country that Hunter cited, has a far larger percentage of people of African descent (well over 85%) than the US; this is the highest of any Spanish-speaking country in the Americas. In fact, it exceeds that of all other Spanish-speaking countries with identifiable black populations, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay, and Panama.
US actor Andre Royo
This brings me to a question I've asked again and again is, mentioning it sometimes on this blog and sometimes in other forums: why don't black Americans know this basic fact? We just concluded Black History Month, which unfortunately functions as a kind of African American Trivia and Recognition Month, with some emphasis--though too little, I think--on Africa itself or its peoples, or blacks more broadly across the Americas. It's bad enough that we barely hear anything about black people living on the continent where they are the overwhelming majority--can you think of a single dedicated public discussion, for example, on the situation in the Congo, which was part of the region that supplied the most black people to the transatlantic slave trade and which is still suffering as a result of European and regional meddling?--but there is almost zero discussion of the black people in this hemisphere. I even joked on Twitter as to whether there'd be any mention of Zumbi de Palmares, Célia Cruz, and so forth, and certainly there were programs all over that talked about Afrolatinos and Afrohispanic cultures, but no concerted effort during this vital month to open up the dialogue and spread the knowledge, including to people like Torii Hunter. A while ago I reviewed the film Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player, and one of the more interesting moments in that film concerned its treatment of the relationship between the Dominican player and an African-American teammate. What the film portrayed was an attempt to communicate across a linguistic and cultural divide, and considerable nuance in the ways that each player read the other. It also suggested the possibility of a kind of amity and brotherhood, and not the wall that Hunter's comments suggest. I don't know how true the relationships the film portrays are, though what also is clear is that in their home countries, despite the complicated and often racist discourses around blackness in which their identities and consciousness are formed, there are all kinds of pockets of resistance, sometimes inspired by African-American culture (especially black American musical forms and styles), and when Afrolatino ballpayers from outside the US spend any length of time here, their perspectives often change, even if their self-characterization and identifications, and their own struggles around race (cf. Sammy Sosa, and his skin-bleaching spectacle of last year) do not.
Reggie Jackson
Interestingly enough, Hall of Famer and former Yankees star Reggie Jackson (Reginald Martínez Jackson), who is African American and Latino, defended Hunter, saying:
"Torii Hunter has no malice in his heart. He's a wonderful person of great character and he's done a great deal in communities to prove that and back that up. I think when you make a comment to the media - and I'm at fault at times - you need to be able to read what you're saying at the same time."
"Torii Hunter has no malice in his heart. He's a wonderful person of great character and he's done a great deal in communities to prove that and back that up. I think when you make a comment to the media - and I'm at fault at times - you need to be able to read what you're saying at the same time."
That's all well and good, but now Jackson and others--George Bell? Joaquin Andújar? José Rijo? Bernie Williams?--need to educate Hunter and a lot more people, especially black folks, about the reality of black people in Major League baseball, across the hemisphere, and all over the globe.
***
A new documentary about late art great Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of those African Americans who was also an Afro-Latino (the son of a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian-American father, no less), which was nominated for the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize this year, is set to hit screens soon. Directed by his friend, Tamra Davis, the documentary, titled Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, includes interview footage from the period near the end of Basquiat's life when he was living in Los Angeles and already established as one of the hottest young artists to grace the American and international art worlds. The Variety review I link to above praises the intimate portrait it presents of Basquiat while simultaneously criticizing it as perhaps too much a work of hagiography. As a Basquiat devotee, I can't wait to see it!
Ah, reading week! Which is reading papers week, attending lots of meetings week, conducting an oral exam week, finishing planning for the summer week. But a good partial-week nevertheless.
First, congratulations to all the Ph.D. students in my department who took their orals this week: all passed! And especial congrats to one of my TAs, Wanalee Romero!
Congratulations to Felicia Butts, the brillliant student whose honors thesis in African American studies I supervised this winter and spring. Felicia was one of two students to receive departmental honors, and she graduates in a few weeks, so congratulations!
Congratulations to all of my former writing students and to all the students who received prizes at last week's departmental prize ceremony!
Congratulations to my colleague Barnor Hesse, one of the smartest people I've ever come across, who received tenure!
Congratulations (belated) to my friend, exemplary editor, writer and teacher, Rone Shavers, who successfully defended his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois-Chicago not long ago! Rone also has a gotten a job on the East Coast, and as my students who studied with him will attest, he will rock! And when his novel appears....
Congratulations to the many, many Cave Canem-affiliated writers who've received awards, graduated from various programs, are publishing new books, chapbooks, pamphlets, and who're lighting up the literary and cultural realms!
We are still in the midst of senior major readings and graduation is still several weeks away, but congratulations also to all of my many undergraduate and graduate students, in the major, in the minor, in the English and African American studies departments, and in the graduate creative writing program!
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It's spring, right? Almost summer? Here are some photos from yesterday in Chicago. It was so foggy when I drove up to the university that I vowed I'd drop by the beach after work to take pictures. I went to Leone Park Beach, in Rogers Park, and snapped quite a few, but here are four. Standing outside near Sheridan Road, the air was cool but not especially gauzy, but the closer I walked towards the sand and water, the chillier and denser it became. It actually felt quite wonderful, though I would much rather have the sun beaming and 70s weather. It also reminded me of San Francisco when I visited there some years ago; it was June, I think, but the temperature was in the low 60s and, when my cousin and I took a little trip around the city, we reached the summit some hill and you could both see and feel the fog not far away. I'll take the fog over snow and ice any day. The beach facing north, towards Evanston One of the concrete piers, facing west, towards the lake and Michigan Look south towards downtown Chicago (I've been to Britain but never to British beaches or to any part of Ireland, but this is what I imagine they look like around this time) A kayaker heading out into the lake! (He asked me if the police "up here" give lots of tickets, I guess to figure out if he should leave his car at an unpaid meter, so I let him know that they gave out tickets like candy. He found a meterless, tow-less parking spot soon after, and I guess was on his way. I didn't check to find out if he was from Illinois or some neighboring state--Wisconsin? Indiana? Kayaking under these conditions strikes me as a bit terrifying and foolhardy, but what do I know?)
==
Good old Chicago, which has (along with Hawaii and other points along the map) given us our next President Barack Obama.
Some interesting points: Obama's margin of victory in Cook County (which includes the cities of Evanston, Oak Park, Winnetka, and a few other well-known Chicagoland venues) was about 400,000 votes, which about equals his popular vote margin over Senator Hillary Clinton if you exclude Michigan and Florida.
Senator Obama won his 2004 Illinois Senate race in a landslide, and Illinois was the first state ever to elect an African-American Democrat to the US Senate, doing so in 1992 when it elected the history-making Carol Moseley Braun, who defeated an incumbent, Alan Dixon, in the primary, and then defeated her Republican challenger Richard Williamson by 10 points. Moseley Braun remains the only woman elected to the US Senate from Illinois, and the only African-American female Senator ever. Illinois is now reliably Democratic in presidential elections, having not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988 (George H. W. Bush). The state has elected a Republican Senator, Peter Fitzgerald (who defeated Moseley Braun in 1998), since then, though he served only one term. Chicago, the state's metropolis and the hub of the entire Midwest, has made great strides as well. 25 years ago, it elected its first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, who served for one full term and part of an abbreviated second one (which Eugene Sawyer, another black politician, served out); this was a landmark election in a city that was long considered (and well chronicled, by figures such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, and others) as perhaps the most segregated and violence-wracked in the North.
Rick Perlstein, the author of the highly praised new book Nixonland, a history of contemporary Republican-conservative political dominance, notes the changes that have occurred in Illinois and Chicago alone in his blogpost today. He discusses the general backlash against this legislation, and the many letters with which constituents besieged Illinois liberal Democratic Senator Paul Douglas concerning the open housing legislation, one of a raft of liberal legislative triumphs that President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress passed in the wake of his landslide 1964 election, and which led, Perlstein notes, to severe Democratic losses in the 1966 election, two years after which Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. In that 1966 election, Douglas, an economics professor who'd been one of the architects of the New Deal and a passionate advocate for civil rights, lost to the wealthy executive and moderate Republican Charles Percy, who remained in office until his defeat by another progressive Democrat, Paul Simon, in 1984. Perlstein posts some of the letters, which are potent reminders of the widespread, fear, ignorance, hate, and misunderstanding that has often marked the history of this country, and of how far, in some ways at least, we've come. Here are a few:
Recently we members of the Marquette Park area of Chicago witnessed violence over the so called subject of civil rights. Since the Civil Rights Act Act was passed all we have seen is violence, riots, and general defiance of the laws of our land by the Negro population under the guise of this nebulous term, civil rights. When is the Congress going to wake up to the fact that it cannot legislate morals or love? "We white people have taken a lot from the Negro. We have been patient, and now find ourselves pushed up against a wall by groups that feel it is their God given right to have our property. We have worked hard and saved to get what we now own. Because we do work hard and wish to maintain our property are we to be denied the right to dispose of our property as we see fit? Is the ultimate aim the same as the Soviet Union when all property was collectivized.... The Civil Rights legislation amendment that which deals with the so-called open occupancy law is disgusting and makes me almost ashamed to admit that it has been proposed in America. All this civil rights legislation is un-American.
and
At least fifty square of Chiago is occupied by negroes which means that no part of that area is safe for white people to travel... It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes.... "NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.
and from Chicago banker Milton J. Hayes:
As a member of the over 150 million white population of this country, I respectfully request that some action be taken to prevent such demonstrations in the Nation's capitol. This is an imposition on the majority and prevents the average citizens from enjoying his capital. This is itself is one of the most severe forms of discrimination.
To quote Perlstein:
Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: Voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their Social Security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.
Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the mid-century American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.
This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.
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On his Monaga blog, Anthony points to Joe Contreras's new Newsweek article, on the rise of Afrolatinos. Here are the first two paragraphs of Contreras's piece:
Hugo Chávez is known as a revolutionary in many contexts, especially his defiance of the United States. In recent years, however, he's also broken ground on a far less well-exposed subject: the question of race in Latin America. The saga began two years ago, when, during a tour of Gambia, Chávez surprised observers by declaring that "I've always said that if Spain is our mother, Africa, mother Africa, is much more so." Since then, the Venezuelan leader has often revisited the theme at home, even drawing attention to his own African roots. It may not sound shocking. But such language would have been inconceivable from a major Latin American leader just a short time ago.
That's now changing, due to a black-consciousness movement stirring in Central and South America. Emboldened by the success of their indigenous countrymen in pressing for resolution of long-ignored grievances, Afro-descendientes (people of African descent), as they are known, are now lobbying for recognition of their own communities' land rights and for increased spending to improve living conditions in urban slums and rural villages. Local activists have begun urging Latin blacks to take pride in their culture, and with the help of the Internet, leaders are reaching across borders to share tactics and compare notes with their brethren in the Caribbean, the United States and Africa. This "black-power movement has gone way beyond anything that has happened in the past," says Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "People are making critiques of racism in their own societies, and there's been a real shift in black consciousness and involvement.
