Jackie Robinson Teaches Us to Never Back Down to Bigots

Rachel Robinson, a professor, nurse, activist, and the wife of baseball trailblazer Jackie Robinson, is still with us at 102 years old. This month, the Department of Defense deleted a webpage detailing Jackie Robinson’s World War II military history and replaced it with an error page with the letters “DEI” in the URL. Perhaps the most upsetting part of it is that Rachel Robinson has lived to see her late husband’s name demeaned by a new round of white supremacists 78 years after he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

“DEI” has become the Trump administration’s all-purpose term to demonize anything that promotes the histories and experiences of Black and brown people. In this context, its use is especially blunt: It’s a racial slur. Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense was sending the unmistakable message that Robinson’s accomplishments are fraudulent and exalted only due to the color of his skin. Robinson was not the only target in Hegseth’s fusillade of racism. Articles about the famed Navajo Code Talkers, who have been commemorated in books and films, were taken down as well as commemorations of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. All erased, with a DEI error page in its place.

Not surprisingly, waves of anger followed by media coverage ensued over this brazen disrespect aimed at the unassailable Robinson. The rage deepened when the DOD’s retort to every reporter from ABC News to The Progressive was an identical e-mail that seemed cut and paste out from the transcripts of fascist YouTube: a world Hegseth seems familiar with. The statement said that celebrating the achievements of people of color (like Robinson) was an example of something the military now opposes: “cultural Marxism.”

To many, this surely sounded like off-putting nonsense: the incel-speak of the online right wing. But the phrase is more nefarious than that. “Cultural Marxism” has long been code on the far right for Jewish conspiracy, especially in the darkest corners of online media and on Nazi message boards. As an antisemitic slur, it predates our online world, able to be traced back to the Germany of the 1920s when a rising Adolph Hitler denounced the “cultural Bolshevism” of leading German artists. It’s incitement against us Jews, who are to blame for weakening the US military through a master plan of celebrating Jackie Robinson. (No one ever said bigotry has to make sense.) The casual use of the phrase is yet another example of the fact that this is an administration of antisemites and trusting them to “fight antisemitism” is a death wish.

When “cultural Marxism” was put forward as the pseudo-intellectual, gobbledygook reasoning for Robinson’s ouster, even on ESPN’s homepage, the puzzled rage grew until Hegseth’s DOD buckled and restored Robinson’s page. The bright light on the new politics of the DOD made the chastened Hegseth cower and the aforementioned disappearance of tributes to the Code Talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen magically reappeared, too.

This might not sound like much, especially in a climate where people are being disappeared for thought crimes against US foreign policy. But it is, I would argue, a desperately needed reminder that even in this repressive climate, we can beat them back. Like sniveling bullies, they only project strength when they think we’re weak.

Branding this DOD as white supremacist is a charge not to be made flippantly, but one struggles to find an alternative explanation for why any of this happened. Robinson, after all, was a Republican. When the GOP was attempting to be less racist as a remedy for Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss (they didn’t stick with that strategy for very long), they produced materials that highlighted “famous Black Republicans,” and Robinson was front and center. Sure, the RNC left out that he was a centrist “Rockefeller Republican” who, in a state of repulsion, likened the 1964 GOP Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater to a Nazi rally, but he was still a Republican.

What is clear is that Hegseth and friends were not erasing Robinson merely because of his Blackness but because of what is inextricable to his Blackness: a life story shaped by the reality of Jim Crow and American apartheid. Robinson once said that if he had to choose between the Baseball Hall of Fame and full citizenship for his people, he would choose citizenship. Attempting to erase this story is not only an effort to whitewash the sins of the past, but a statement on who gets to claim the mantle of “citizen” in the present. Or maybe Hegseth and friends are just still upset over who won World War II.

That the DOD had to backtrack should be claimed as both a victory and a reminder of who these people are. Jonathan Coleman, the author of the indispensable book Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, said to me, “In the legal world, when something is said, even if it is later ruled inadmissible, lawyers will insist you ‘can’t unring a bell.’ In the case of Jackie Robinson, ‘restoring’ it is much too little and much too late. The damage has already been done.”

Robinson once said that when he sees an American flag decal on a truck he knows “that person is not my friend.” Hegseth is “that person.” The secretary of defense and his ilk are the kinds of individuals who would have kept Robinson out of Major League Baseball. They have picked a side, and it isn’t the side of Jackie Robinson. I feel for Rachel Robinson, and I’m sure I’m not alone. But she has faced down bigger bullies than this. We should remember that and know that we can do the same.