The remarkable thing about Colin Kaepernick’s banning of Nike ’s Betsy Ross flag sneaker to commemorate the Fourth of July isn’t that it happened, but how easily it happened. Nike’s management simply folded over “concerns that it could unintentionally offend.”
Translating this waffly phrase into odds, I’d put “concerns that it could” at about a million to one. But because the thought found its way into Mr. Kaepernick’s head that the shoe was about slavery, Nike’s senior decision-makers nodded without dissent: We’ve gotta pull it.
No one has ever thought to go looking inside corporate headquarters for profiles in courage, but the lurch toward timidity in our time by individuals at the top of America’s private and public institutions is something to behold. Pusillanimity has become a plague.
The ownership of the Cleveland Indians engaged in several years of passive resistance before finally caving in this season to pressure from New-York-based Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to ban the team’s mascot and logo, the joyfully smiling Chief Wahoo. The Indians’ cap now bear a nondescript C, which hereafter should stand for “craven” instead of Cleveland.
Banning Chief Wahoo—a constant presence in the city’s life since the 1950s—meant baseball’s factotums could get through Tuesday night’s All-Star game in Cleveland without the possibility that the logo might be seen on an Indian player’s uniform, forcing baseball’s leadership to endure apparently unbearable Twitter torture.
In April, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers caved in to pressure to stop playing a recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” because it emerged that Smith recorded a song called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” in 1931, when she was 24. The Flyers even removed a statue of Smith, erected in 1987, from outside their arena. If the Flyers players crumbled as quickly as their management, they’d be laughed out of hockey.
In a saner world, the Yankees and Flyers might have worked out a modus vivendi. Yes, it’s worth knowing now that racist songs were recorded in the U.S. in the 1930s. And it is good and useful if major institutions such as the Yankees and Flyers condemn them.
But it is also a fact that listening to Smith’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” has been an experience of pure patriotic exhilaration for millions of people, most of whom by now have never heard of Kate Smith, whose life and career were stellar in every respect beyond two songs. Criticize the condescending songs she recorded in the 1930s—and move on.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Mike
Unless I'm trying to win.
