In the past week Josh Hader, an all-star pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, joined a dubious list. He, Buffalo Bills' rookie quarterback Josh Allen and Milwaukee Bucks' rookie Donte DiVincenzo, have all been exposed for racist social media posts they posted a few years ago when they were teen-agers. Kevin Blackistone, an African-America sports writer for The Washington Post and panelist for ESPN's Around the Horn program, did some literary jui jitsu in attempting to tie President Donald Trump to the three pro athletes and their racist remarks from a few years ago.
Blackistone starts out writing, "On the second seismic night almost six years ago now, when President Obama was reelected, a number of digital outlets noted an eruption of tweets maligning the president, the son of a black Kenyan man, for his race. They counted that most-vile of racial epithets and the most-nauseating of racist imagery."
Many of those Tweets, he writes, were posted by high school athletes who used their actual names. "It all raised, among myriad questions, the role of schools, and even their athletic teams, in teaching tolerance in the present with the hope of extinguishing hate in the future."
Hader, who pitched in last week's baseball all-star game "was a serial hate tweeter as a star athlete at Old Mill High School in suburban Baltimore’s Anne Arundel County," Blackistone wrote.
Like Allen and DiVincenzo before him, Hader apologized and his past indiscretions earned him a seat in sensitivity training class. President Trump, who was not in office when these athletes, as teens, went off the rails in their social media, unbelievably gets tied to this story by Blackistone:
"It also can’t be ignored that this country has a president who has turned his Twitter account into a truncheon to attack people of color, immigrants and women with unchecked impunity that has emboldened others, including youth, to do the same."
2011, 2018 ... it doesn't matter when the kids made their racist rants. Yeah, let's just tie Trump into it.
Teachers, too, says Blackistone: "I don’t know Hader or Allen or DiVincenzo. But I do know that if we’re going to be a better society going forward, we need to be better teachers of right and wrong from the start. That is why an apology or assigning blame to youthful ignorance is neither enough nor right-headed. Dismissing such behavior now, and for good, is tilling the soil for racist, homophobic and misogynistic behavior to propagate."
You have to wonder what Blackistone's take on criminal justice reform is. If we can't forgive youthful Twitter indescretions, how should we feel about actual crimes?
But let's examine what's really going on here. Years ago, teen athletes spewed racist hate at Obama when he was re-elected president and Trump was a private citizen. We're supposed to be surprised that there's hate and intolerance coming out of government schools? In a pluralistic society where moral relativism has replaced the Golden Rule and everyone is taught to determine their own morality?
Blackistone is really reaching when he dredges up inappropriate remarks by teen-agers from a few years ago and then associates those with a Republican president who's been in office all of 18 months.
Appearing on ESPN's Around the Horn today, Blackistone attacked Milwaukee fans for giving Hader a standing ovation in a relief appearance. He said their actions are worse than what Hader did several years ago. And even though the contrite Hader has the support of forgiving black teammates, Blackistone then went for guilt by association, as he attacked the city of Milwaukee for mass incarceration, housing, education and division of people. "You can't just move on," he said.
So there's the answer on criminal justice reform. One strike you're out, if you're a stupid white kid.
