Major League Baseball’s recent moves to recognize the contributions of the Negro league teams they once excluded amount to only “the beginning stages of any kind of restitutive or reparative justice and wouldn’t even come close to restoring” the Black players and teams to their proper place in history, said Josh Myers, professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University. “Baseball was not just a pastime for Black people,” said Myers. “It was on the baseball diamond where community was forged, where people came together” during American apartheid.
The flames burned both for Floyd and for the vanishing dream of a moral economy.
Can and should America continue to breathe if it continues to suffocate African American people and our communities?
If we had something approaching equal justice, would we still even be the United States? “Mr. Floyd was not human to these officers.”
While most advocates focus on police abuse of the black community, we must also hold accountable the people who call police and make false claims against black people.
Pandemic or not, Brazilian police kill multiples of Black youth every day of the year. Fourteen year-old João Pedro Mattos Pinto joins the list of tens of thousands.
