Don't Forget the "Systemic" Part
In the bottom of the fourth inning of Tuesday’s Mets/Diamondbacks game, the camera lingered on pitcher Marcus Stroman, and Diamondbacks announcer Bob Brenly said, “I’m pretty sure that’s the same du-rag that Tom Seaver used to wear when he pitched for the Mets.” His partner in the booth, Steve Berthiaume, tried to move past it, but the remark did not go unnoticed. Stroman himself called out the “racist undertones” of the comment, and Brenly was condemned by other players, managers, and the media. Just two days later, he announced he would go on leave so he could “listen, reflect and devote my attention to awareness training related to diversity and inclusion to enhance my understanding and appreciation of others.”
It might seem like progress that he was so quickly and uniformly condemned, but it really is not.
Last year, during all the protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, there was a lot of discussion of “systemic racism.” For socialists and materialists, this was an encouraging development. It seemed to move discussions of racism from being about personal behavior and ideology to being about systems and institutions. Now we had a way of acknowledging that racism was not merely about people’s personal feelings, but about the structures that oppress people of color, whether they be housing policies that exacerbate the racial wealth gap, or environmental racism that leads to disparate health outcomes across races. If you really want to address these injustices, then these systems need to be overturned and replaced. Socialists would go further, highlighting how many of these structures are the same capitalist institutions that oppress working people of all races, and that the best strategy for defeating them is a multiracial coalition committed to a socialist agenda.
But somewhere along the way, we moved on from the “systemic” part of racism. People still use the term “systemic racism,” but now it seems to mean something like “perpetual racism” or “omnipresent racism.” The lesson is no longer that we should look at institutions and systems, but that racism is more common than you might think. This is true as far as it goes, but it’s a pretty banal observation. It’s something white people seem to relearn and write a song about every few years. Instead of the takeaway being that institutions need to be torn down, it becomes that people need to be extremely vigilant about detecting racism, in themselves and others.
So when Bob Brenly makes a tasteless comment about Marcus Stroman’s headwear, people who might previously have recoiled at it for being stupid and outdated are now quick to point out that it is also racist. But instead of calls to change systems, the call is simply to discipline Brenly harshly. Indeed, Aramis Ramirez, a former Cub who had issues with Brenly when he was an analyst in Chicago, called for Brenly to be fired and explicitly invoked last year’s protests as the reason: “I see what [the US is] going through with the racial stuff. It’s just the timing, I don’t think he deserves a second chance. I think he already had it.”
I don’t really care about Bob Brenly. He was a terrible manager and has been a bad announcer for a long time. He probably should be fired. But firing people won’t make racism go away. And it has been intensely depressing to see how all of last year’s serious reckoning with racial iniquities in this country has been flattened in the same tired debates about acceptable language and whether or not certain people have “racist bones” in their body.
When people call for firings like this, they often say that there is “no place in the game” for racism, and I understand why people would insist on a zero-tolerance policy for racism in a sport or workplace or any institution. But if we take “systemic racism” seriously, then we realize racism is actually embedded into many of these institutions already. Can we honestly say there is “no place for racism” in baseball when there is, for example, such a serious lack of Black managers in the game? Or when the game allegedly exploits “hundreds” of underage players from Latin America? Clearly Bob Brenly is not the biggest problem here. It might seem like a small step to get rid of Brenly, but it is a step in the wrong direction if it moves attention from racist systems to racist comments.