As baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, here’s why some want to tar his legacy | Opinion

To know anything about Jackie Robinson — the civil rights leader, businessman, columnist, political adviser and all-galaxy athlete who desegregated and then dominated American baseball — is to understand that he lived a life worth remembering. But as the major leagues celebrate Robinson on Tuesday with all players wearing his No. 42, the clearest proof Robinson was one of the most consequential people in American history is that nearly a century after he changed baseball, the same cowards still want to shut him up.

As Donald Trump’s regime continues its obsession with stripping away, symbolically and materially, public recognition of minorities, his Department of Defense’s latest attempt at muzzling was scraping the Army veteran’s biography. (Robinson also served during World War II, as if he needed another hyphenate.) The article is as tame as you might expect a blog hosted by a government website would be, bearing more in common with an eighth-grade homework assignment than a radical text.

For a day, it was replaced with a broken link updated to include the phrase “deisports,” whatever that means. (I’m kidding: You know exactly what that means.) After a day of public outcry, with ESPN reporter Jeff Passan one of the loudest critics, the Pentagon buckled and restored the article.

Hearing the news reminded me of his widow, Rachel Robinson, and their daughter, Sharon, and the thought of them learning that the man who integrated the Major Leagues would find his history segregated in his death. I started flipping through my collection of Jackie’s biographies to attempt a case for his inclusion.

Now, I’m embarrassed. Defend Jackie Robinson’s legacy? I’d rather “defend” the ocean’s right to crash into the shore. Entertaining the idea degrades us all: those who think they need to hear a defense and me for considering it worth offering.

Jackie’s legacy is secure. There are not enough books to ban, college courses to condemn or articles to erase his memory. So, instead of constructing an elaborate tribute, I’d rather discuss the legacies that you need to understand — and that’s the kind of people who thought a couple of keystrokes could erase his life.

War against diversity, ‘woke cultural marxism’

The foot soldiers and generals of the DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) war want you to believe that celebrating contributions from those who struggled for full equality is a waste of your time. They want you to accept this premise to persuade you that whenever a — well, I guess they’re calling us “deisports” now — gets the job, the promotion or the public adoration, they stole what was rightfully yours.

Meanwhile, men like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have lost multiple past leadership roles due to mismanagement and alleged sexual harassment, a history of women so concerning that he may be the first with a face not even a mother could love, confirm the suspicions of curious and angry onlookers that they’re running a meritocracy.

“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEl is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” wrote the military’s best poets, “a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.” They defended scrapping the Robinson post praised the military’s “rapid compliance” but hedged on the possibility that maybe, one of the people who bootstrapped their way to the top of their meritocracy screwed up.

“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.”

Then came the second response, so dishonest, it would have been more consistent to just call Jackie Robinson woke and leave it there.

“Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima,” it read, mentioning other historical figures slapped with DEI tags and removed. “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.”

But what Jackie, the Tuskegee Airmen or the Code Talkers — who leveraged a language preserved by a nearly exterminated indigenous tribe for the war effort — accomplished is impossible to understand apart from what they overcame and why they had to overcome. For example, before fans called Jackie terrible racial slurs and opponents threw their cleats at him, he was court-martialed in the Army because he refused a driver’s orders to move to the back of the bus. The “prism of immutable characteristics” illuminates. Which is why they’re obsessed with turning the lights off.

Clumsy, but not accidental

Take solace that the incompetence is eclipsed by the cowardice. Twenty-five minutes after the second statement, apparently released to fix the first statement, and a day of public pressure, the Jackie biography reappeared.

Some might be eager to dismiss this as a clumsy mass purge with good intentions gone horribly wrong. After all, during a Black History Month event, Trump said the White House would build a statue of Jackie Robinson along with other deceased black athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant. During Trump’s 2020 campaign, he even used Robinson in a campaign ad.

It’s all clumsy. But none of it is an accident.

Trump would love a neat, tidy version of Jackie — who died right around the time prospective tenants started accusing Trump of discriminating against minorities in his real-estate business — as a bronzed, silent but visible Republican voter rather than the dynamic, loud and unrelenting dissident who vigorously opposed the Republican Party’s shift away from civil rights in the 1960s. Jackie’s image matters more to Trump’s regime because, if disambiguated from his actions, it works as signal of the president’s virtue.

In other words: Trump only wants Robinson if he can be the worst stereotype of a DEI hire.

Sharon Robinson and the Jackie Robinson Foundation saw right through it, which is why they demanded Trump remove their father’s image because the president “was in opposition to all that Jackie Robinson stood for and believed in.”

So, I don’t have to be defensive. Their words do all the validating I could ask for, giving a generation possibly unfamiliar with the legacies of Jim Crow and segregation a brief and bitter taste of the kind of losers Jackie dealt with.

The DoD debacle renewed my confidence that this anti-DEI crusade will fail, eventually. Not because I have an unshakable faith in humanity — knowing the America Jackie suffered sobers me quickly. But the arrogance, stupidity, and insecurity that led to this transgression exceed the power of their contempt. A few feeble and futile keystrokes could never strike him out. We learn a lot about Jackie every time we learn a little more about you.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the military branch where Robinson served.

This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 11:39 AM with the headline "As baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, here’s why some want to tar his legacy | Opinion."