I was in two wars

It was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home. - Second lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson, after beating a court martial for not bowing to segregated seating on an Army bus

Mere days after the current presidential administration attempted to memory hole Jackie Robinson’s military service due any contribution by a woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color falling under the great amorphous sin of DEI, the Los Angeles Dodgers accepted an invite to the White House in just a few weeks to honor their World Series victory in 2024. Robinson, of course, broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and is considered so instrumental to the history of the game that he has his number retired throughout the entire league. He is arguably the most important Dodger ever.

And his franchise just spit on his memory.

"It wasn't a formal conversation that we had as a ballclub," said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, the team's leader and ultimate decision maker in a matter like this. "It's certainly a huge honor to get the invitation to the White House. It allows us to celebrate our 2024 championship. To my understanding, every World Series champion gets that honor, so it's a great honor for all of us."

This is a very different tone than Roberts had in 2019 before winning his first championship in L.A. When asked then about potentially going to the White House, he said that “one trip to D.C., playing the Nationals, is plenty for me.”

But now it’s “a great honor.” One that will involve meeting with the President of the TV whom Roberts was critical of in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests across America. He said in an interview in June 2020,  

For me, the leaders of our country, unfortunately, aren’t good listeners and that’s how you impose change. People of color want to be heard. And when you have leaders that are put in positions to make change and don’t want to have those uncomfortable conversations, then change isn’t going to happen. There’s a difference between being educated and being ignorant. You have to understand that these situations happen every single day to people of color.

The president at that time, the one who was not a good listener and who himself was quite vocally critical of anyone with thoughts like Roberts’ then, is president again and will get to indulge in one of the presidential perks he loves most–hanging out with burly boys who win. It’s POTVS’ ideal world microcosm, really.

And the Dodgers are willing to play this game of letting the President of the TV feel cool by proxy by claiming that meeting a sitting president is an honor, as though these times and this administration follow seamlessly from predecessors. That the majority of any given MLB clubhouse in any given year is conservative is whatever. Conservative-majority clubhouses have met with sitting presidents of both parties (and why pro teams of millionaires still need to visit any president is a discussion for another time). But this time it’s much, much different. 

This administration is actively terrorizing people who were not born in this country. There are at least six members of the Dodgers roster not born on American soil who, without the protection of pro sports, if they were trying to live and work a job here that has a more tangible impact on society than pro baseball would likely be dealing with the same frightening uncertainty that keeps millions of people awake at not for the “crime” of existing on one side of a man-made line.

After first inviting, then disinviting after conservative backlash, then re-inviting after more backlash a satirical group of trans and queer “nuns” to the team’s Pride Night in 2023, perhaps there already was an inclination toward this obeying in advance to avoid the inevitable wrath of POTVS and his acolytes had the Dodgers declined an invite.    

Still, what the team has agreed to turns any and all Robinson iconography from Dodger blue into gross hypocrisy. Again, this administration attempted to wipe Robinson’s online page about his army service for no reason than because he was a Black man, just as it did weeks prior when temporarily removing an instructional video about the Tuskegee Airmen and adding “deimedal” to the page about a Medal of Honor recipient and temporarily deactivating his page. These pages were only restored after justified uproar, with this administration continuing to embody a dril tweet in earnest daily. Pages on African American History, Hispanic American History, and Women’s History have not returned to Arlington National Cemetery’s website after recent scrubbing. POTVS fired a history-making Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the sin of supporting diversity in the armed services, an accomplished man whose bona fides the grossly incompetent and legitimately unqualified Secretary of Defense questioned to justify that firing. 

The current administration doesn’t believe troops of color (or women ones or LGBTQ ones) are exceptional or notable (and in some cases even human). Dave Roberts’ dad, a Black man, was a long-serving Marine. But meeting a man who would prefer people not learn about other Black men and women who fought for the United States is “a great honor.” It’s a “huge honor to get the invitation” to meet someone trying to erase the history of Jackie Robinson, to suffocate schools would teach the context of Robinson or Floyd, to eventually seek to criminalize even teaching that history. 

Roberts said in 2020 that there’s a difference between being educated and being ignorant. The Dodgers manager is an intelligent guy, but he’s willfully ignoring a grievous insult amid a perpetual series of them, and he’s bending to a strongman like so many other dominos in this country who otherwise hold cultural or financial power to resist are doing.

And it only costs the sanctity of the greatest Dodger and what that man stood for as a soldier, as a baseball player, and as a civil rights leader. Robinson said following the dismissal of his court martial that he learned he was fighting two wars, and it seems even in death that one of those he’s still fighting. 

Remember that on Jackie Robinson Day, a week after the Dodgers’ White House visit.