Overnight, statues of two more sports operators with well-documented racist acts have been condemned to slag. Well, now we've cleaned out 50-year-old racism in sports, and good for us.
Washington's George Preston Marshall, who was for 35 years the most openly anti-black owner in the NFL, finally had his likeness condemned and removed by the team, no doubt without anyone wearing anything with the team name or logo that makes more people crazy. And Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith, who interestingly operated the Twins while they were in Washington and moved north and west because there were fewer troublesome non-whites, is losing his statue as well. Presumably at some point the Dodgers will deal with Walter O'Malley, who took the team out of Brooklyn because he thought black folks in Brooklyn were scaring away white customers and was prevented from moving the team a stadium in Flushing. The NCAA is using the power of its wallet to protest the continued use of the Stars and Bars on the Mississippi state flag, unpleasant songs are being excised from college in-stadium playlists and well, yes, all of it.
As long as we remember that it isn't America's racially retrograde past that's the problem, but its racially retrograde present.
While it is self-evident that every sports organization should be noting the shameful parts of their history and disavowing any approval thereof (and yes, that includes The Masters), the problem of the day is that we still struggle with the notion that too many current social structures remain examples both active and otherwise of what Marshall and Griffith and O'Malley, et. al., maintained openly during their years in power. The statues and flags are easy. Changing our own beliefs and prejudices and stupidities and unconscious habits are the far more difficult task and duty, and the real value of what we can all learn with the elevation of Juneteenth as a national milestone.
America's history is every nation's history to one extent or other, with the most notable difference being that we signed up for "all men are created equal" 244 years ago. In other words, our forefathers talked it, and we don't walk it nearly well enough, even now. So while we may be congratulating folks for pulling down statues and folding up flags like some sort of crazed neighborhood association looking for decorating violations, the men and women who took to the streets to protest the present and their futures in a fractured country didn't have Jerry Richardson foremost in their minds. They are demanding change in the present because they see an increrasingly untenable future for too many of them, and they see too many police using unwarranted violence to defend the overlords of that increasingly untenable future.
They're demanding the better life we said they'd have, and statues ain't got nothin' to do with it. Well, okay, they have somethin' to do with it. The first step in dealing with the future is dealing with the past, even going back to Christopher Columbus, who San Francisco dealt with Thursday. After all, finding North American centuries after the Vikings or Chinese isn't really that big a thing even before you excise the diseases his ships brought with them.
That said, we'll run out of dead racists to decommission soon enough, and then we will have to confront the here and now, and that will take much longer and be far more difficult. If melting some bronze provides comfort, then absolutely -- blowtorch away.
But just remember -- it's not the statues that were destroyed that matter. It's the ones that will be built in the future that will define us, and whether those likenesses personify societal progress for everyone, or the kind of abject sectarian failure that will destroy us all.