ESPN host Mina Kimes made the massive mistake of mentioning the fact that the DoD has “mistakenly” removed mentions from the Pentagon website of Baseball hero Jackie Robinson’s former military record.
Boy-oh-boy did heads explode.
But not because of the Pentagon’s actions, No. It was because Ms. Kimes dared to “inject Race” into a sports report because clearly Racism has absolutely nothing to do with the legacy of Jackie Robinson or baseball.
Yeah, because why would the issue of “Race” ever come up regarding Jackie Robinson and sports?
Nor was Kimes alone at ESPN bringing up this issue as host Jeff Passan brought it up on X/Twitter.
Robinson became the "first African-American player in the 20th century to take the field in the American or National league," says the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Robinson also served in the U.S. Army as a 2nd lieutenant, and trained as an officer, said NBC News.
Passan asked the Pentagon why the article on Robinson was removed, uncovering it was related to President Donald Trump's ban on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
"As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke (sic) cultural Marxism that has no place in our military," Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said in the statement
"It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly," the statement included.
The Pentagon later restored Robinson's story.
An accompanying statement read, "Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others — we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like [every] other American who has worn the uniform."
Just for those who. don’t know — Jackie Robinson is kinda famous.
12 years ago there was a major Hollywood movie about Robinson called “42” — where Robinson was played by the now late Chadwick Boseman — as the first black American in Major League Baseball. He was assaulted in numerous ways, threatened, opposing players would try to slide so that their cleats would cut into him, he was attacked in the press and he was repeatedly goaded to react, to fight back, to act out, to get angry.
All so they could paint him as an “angry dangerous negro” and throw him out of the game, but he didn’t take the bait. He kept his calm, he kept his cool and he broke records. He wasn’t the best player from the Negro Leagues to be granted a slot in the Majors, but he was the right person with the right temperament.
Please note that Baseball great Reggie Jackson has said he was still dealing with this same shit openly in the 70s and 80s.
So Mina Kimes managed to speak up about this — she dared to talk about “History” and this was just far too much for some people.
ESPN injecting identity politics into sports? I’M SHOCKED
umm, you’re chinese
Blah blah blah, nobody cares what you have to say. DEI IS DEAD.
You’re a fucking race baiting clown. Not shocking you work for @espn
Race baiting pig, I’ll never watch @espn again or give @DisneyPlus a penny of my money. FYI: Most people can’t stand @minakimes, you should look into blackballing her from corporate media spheres.
you leftists put politics everywhere, sports, schools, military, entertainment industries like Hollywood, private/public companies, etc. Why?
Sports shows on TV should be about sports not politics
shut your cakehole and make me a sandwich
so tired of hearing about racial discrimination. Is that all you talk about, it’s 2025.
Thank God we have Mina around to remind us how bad white people are. We might have gone 1...hour without being reminded if it wasn’t for her bravery.
I may shock some by saying I think some of these people have a point. I’m tired of talking about Racism too. I wish I didn’t have to. I’m sick of dealing with it.
Yes, it is clearly annoying and frustrating to be constantly told that “You Are Bad!” To be constantly reminded of the Evil that your people have done. It would have to sting. It would have to burn. It might make you hate [other] White People. It might make you hate [some of] America.
Except that that is exactly what it should do.
Segregation was bad. It was Evil. You should hate it.
Slavery was evil. Jim Crow was evil. Sharecropping was evil. RedLining was evil. The Tuskegee Experiment was evil. Convict Leasing was evil. The Massacre and Firebombing of Black Wall Street was evil. The Terrorism and Strange Fruit left behind by the KKK was evil. The Trail of Tears was evil. The Chinese Exclusion Act was evil. Forced Racial Sterilization was evil. The Native American Boarding Schools were evil. Operation Wetback was evil.
Watch just a few minutes (skip ahead to 40:00) of this video about the NeoSlavery and Convict Leasing that most people don’t know about which continued openly in the country AFTER the Civil War until at least 1945 and you’re eyes will be open to the deepest evil possible.
If you can watch that and not be outraged and infuriated — you are suffering from severe empathy deficit disorder. Understanding that the Justice system was used to turn innocent people into slaves for almost 100 years after Reconstruction is not a story that has been told. Being convicted in court for minor petty crimes renders you subject to indentured servitude and slavery — and that continues today with the advent of private prisons and convict workers who are used to undermine unions and as a source of outsourcing to undermine wages. Our entire justice system — and mass incarceration — is intended to feed this money-making machine with bodies they can profit from.
Convict Leasing
It still happening, right f-ing now.
These practices were implemented by laws that in most cases are still on the books.
This is why it’s repeatedly assumed that black people are “Criminals” even though the rate of crime — especially murder — is higher in Red States, and also higher per capita in rural areas — particularly with property crime, gun suicides and substance abuse — than in the cities. [And yet Black people are stopped and arrested 2.5 times more often for simple traffic offenses, they get assaulted and killed by police about 3 times more often and sent to prison for drugs at a rate that is 5 times greater than Whites even when they use and commit drug crimes at almost exactly the same rate] The perception of “cities filled with black crime” persists because that presumption feeds the criminal justice system and private prisons. This is why Black neighborhoods were deliberately impoverished and neglected, their schools were defunded, and law enforcement has been heightened to be hyper sensitive to the slightest violation while completely ineffective at actually solving violent and deadly crimes.
But let’s not talk about or fix any of that, eh?
This is not an accident, this is part of long-term plan that was formed during Reconstruction and has been implemented over the past 150 years.
Lunch Counter Protests
And yeah, anyone who was a part of that or who has helped perpetuate that system — should be fucking ashamed. It should be annoying. It should be infuriating. They should be enraged.
Secondly, almost no one who is alive today should feel personally insulted by what other people did 50, 70 or 150 years ago. People today didn’t do it. Saying that it was wrong or evil isn’t a personal attack on them. It’s not a direct attack on White People today or even then because frankly, there were just as many White people who were against Racism as there were for it. The fact that we did eventually get to Brown v Board, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act should be a point of pride for them. It was mostly White people who were in charge and mostly White people who implemented those corrections. Good for them.
We wouldn’t have had progress if many White people hadn’t marched in solidarity with Blacks, and voted their convictions to make change. We wouldn’t have had progress if the Freedom Riders, who were trying to get people registered to vote, had not been assaulted and murdered and several of them were White. Honestly, White people deserve as much credit as they may deserve blame — they were on both sides of the issue.
But that’s only true if you think what was done to fight bigotry back then was a good thing. Some people don’t think so.
These people are reacting normally — kinda — except that instead of standing up and saying “This Is Wrong and Should End”, we’re “happy and proud that it’s mostly better now” and “we can make it better still”, they’re saying “Stop telling me about it!”
“Stop reminding me. Stop bothering me. Stop blaming me. Don’t talk about it anymore.”
Is this screaming woman your mother? Your grandmother?
This is why people argue that Derek Chauvin should be pardoned and why Black Lives Matter plaza in DC has been paved over. They don’t want to be reminded.
The people responding to Kimes don’t want to feel responsible even if only in a second-hand way. They don’t want to be asked to lift a finger. They don’t want to do anything about it.
That — is also evil. That is how it all continues today.
This is why they don’t want CRT — which explains how systematic racism continues to work even without any specific racists involved — to be taught and why they don’t want DEI — which widens to pool of applicants so that anyone qualified has a chance of being hired or promoted — to be implemented.
They have the amazing privilege not to have to think about racism on a day-to-day basis — which is a luxury that many (but not all) white people have. They can sit back and ignore all that. It doesn’t have any impact on them, so why should they care?
They don’t care. They don’t want to care. They don’t want to be asked to care. In fact, they don’t think you should care either. If you do, they assume you must be “obsessed” with race and that means you’re the “racist” for daring to complain about racism. They don’t even “see” race, so clearly they can’t be racist at all.
Any reminder that America has ever Fucked Up is too much for them.
“America is perfect, leave it alone.”
Except it also somehow needs to be “great again.”
The truth is that most White people were not racist back then, even in the midst of the KKK rampages. Most of them weren’t moved by the subject at all, they just wanted to be left alone. They didn’t see this as their own personal issue. They sat on the sidelines and didn’t get involved. When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died he was seen mostly as a rabble-rousing and troublemaker, not a hero. Just like these people attacking Mina Kimes now — and that’s exactly what has allowed this evil to continue to be perpetrated.
These people didn’t personally take Jackie Robinson off the Pentagon website, but then they don’t want to hear about it happening either. They won’t lift an eyebrow to fix it, but they will scream their head off about being told about it.
“Don’t inject politics into my sports.”
Yeah because there’s nothing racist about Jackie Robinson’s career and legacy is there? Sure.
That is some amazing white fragility there isn’t it? Being told someone that looks like you did something racist is apparently worse than suffering from the impact of racism itself.
Oh, how White people have been pained by people talking about racism.
Sure, we passed a couple of laws a few decades ago to let people file a lawsuit if they felt discriminated against or were blocked from voting — doesn’t that solve everything? [Trump and Musk each had two discrimination lawsuits filed against them didn’t they? All of which they lost!]
I’m sure neither of them would ever discriminate against anyone ever again, amirite? They’ve learned their lesson and must have totally fixed the problem. They wouldn’t ever dare do it again. And it’s not like we still have voting rights lawsuits (except that we do!)
We passed a couple of laws (while the Voting Rights Act has been crippled for a decade and Trump has now shut down every Civil Rights enforcement agency in the Government and is threatening Civil Rights law firms — he’s actually going after schools and businesses with criminal charges for having implemented DEI) so we don’t have to fix their neighborhoods. We don’t have to fix their schools. We don’t have to fix law enforcement or our court system. We don’t have to actually hire them to work next to us.[NO more DEI] We don’t have to do anything about the poverty they live in after having most of their generational wealth systematically stolen by big banks using subprime loans during the Great Recession. We don’t want to live next door to them. We don’t have to put up with them. We don’t have to do anything to repair the damage done to them over the last two centuries.
Just leave us alone. DEI is Dead.
And now America will be “great again.”
Right?
And If any of these people want to know what they would have done during the Civil Rights movement or during the slow march to fascism in 1938’s Germany.
They’re doing it right now.
