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Monday, April 9, 2007WWJRD?What would Jackie Robinson Do? What would Jackie Robinson say? ESPN.com columnist John Helyar thinks he knows. I should warn you before you read that column though: it is filled with a bunch of Nantz-like drivel...sprinkled liberally with a bunch if ignorant, racist commentary. Cover your children's eyes. Now that we have that out of the way...the article says that Jackie Robinson would be furious with the fact that there are so few black baseball players. In a chart he notes every black player, which totals up to 68 out of 750 players. That is 9.1%. The black population in America is about 12%. {editors note - this chart has since been removed. It refuted his point, so he probably took it down.} That's pretty close considering the tiny sample size of the MLB. He does not go on to list all the Latin, Korean, or Japanese players. My guess is the percentage of Asian players compared to the general population is lower too. Should we write long boring columns about that too? Maybe we should limit the number of Hispanic players so we can fill quotas from other races. We could squeeze some more Blacks and Asians in there. Then I could write a long boring column about the company that I work for. They probably have about 10% black employment. RACISTS!!!!!!! Or how about we do this...let's find the best 750 baseball players in the world and let them join the league. We will ignore their race and color and just judge them on baseball ability (as well as we can). Then we'll count out the percentages and see where they are. Wait...it looks like we did that. It looks like about 9.1% of the league at this time would be black. It also looks like the majority of the league is Hispanic. OK...let's just move on to other sports. First basketball. ooooo...no let's just skip basketball...that won't help prove our point at all. How about football. Yikes, that's not going to help either. We could just limit our scope to quarterbacks, I suupose. No wait, I've got it. Hockey! HOCKEY IS RACIST. EVEN AFTER THEY LET THOSE THREE BLACK DUDES PLAY. PLUS TWO OF THEM ARE CANADIAN SO THEY DON'T EVEN COUNT. HOCKEY IS RACIST!!!!! See...now I have the same amount of journalistic integrity and quality as the idiot who wrote this piece. I forgot his name already. And that shows how little journalistic integrity I have! As for Jackie Robinson, he is a great guy and I would legitimately place him in the "hero" category. I also believe Jackie Robinson would say that he is very pleased with the current make of up Major League Baseball. He would be happy that so many different races are represented on the field. I don't think he would pout around about there only being a 9.1% black population. But I don't think Robinson was racist or ignorant or an idiot. So maybe this clown writer shouldn't try to speak for Robinson. Labels: Baseball, ESPN, Jackie Robinson, racism
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