America is much better than its president

Early in the 1947 baseball season, the Brooklyn Dodgers played a series against the Philadelphia Phillies. Ben Chapman, the Phillies manager, led his players in viciously taunting the Dodgers’ rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, whenever Robinson came to the plate.   

The bigotry Robinson faced on the field April 22, 1947 is chronicled in an iconic scene in the movie “42.”  

Robinson later recalled that “of all the unpleasant days in my life, [that one] brought me nearer to cracking up than I ever had been,” according to “Jackie Robinson: A Biography.” 

After the game, in response to swelling outrage, Chapman insisted “I am no bigot” because, as he pointed out, he had also used epithets against Joe DiMaggio, who was of Italian descent, and Hank Greenberg, who was Jewish.

{mosads}Ben Chapman came to mind recently. At a White House meeting with congressional leaders, President Trump objected to immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and African nations but not from predominantly white Norway (Trump denies using those words but admits to “tough” language). As the outrage mounted, Trump insisted, “No, I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”

But after years of racial demagoguery by Trump — targeting the first black president, a judge of Mexican ancestry, a Muslim Gold Star mother, and black football players in the National Football League — the “shithole countries” remark rubbed America’s festering racial wound so raw that it finally ended the debate. Yes, Donald Trump is a racist.

Trump’s comments and tweets are just as hate inspiring as Chapman’s taunts against Jackie Robinson. Consider Trump’s recent retweet of anti-Muslim videos and his retweet during the 2016 campaign of a white supremacist with the twitter name “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which was linked to a website with a pro-Adolf Hitler documentary, and had its location as “Jewmerica.” Or consider his claim that there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan at the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

So, we find ourselves in the equivalent of the ”Upside Down” of the Netflix drama “Stranger Things” — a dark, chilling alternate history where American racial progress is strangled by vine-like tendrils emanating from a shadowy Oval Office. The country may need another Reconstruction once Trump is finally gone.  

In the meanwhile, we certainly need to look elsewhere than the White House for evidence that Americans, by and large, are a good people. There are lots of inspirational role models for American tolerance to sustain the rest of us until the end of the American Dark Ages.

Personally, I favor a baseball player named Eddie Stanky. Stanky was a Brooklyn Dodgers teammate of Jackie Robinson that ugly day in Philadelphia.

After listening to Ben Chapman race-bait his teammate Robinson — who was under strict orders from Dodgers owner Branch Rickey not to even show emotion in moments like this, let alone fight back — Stanky confronted Chapman and the other Phillies. “Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards, why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back?” 

The same should be said to the president now.

The Phillies’ racist taunts got Chapman fired and he never managed in baseball again. What will come of Trump?

Stanky understood better what it means to be an American than Trump, on his best day, ever will. 

Gregory J. Wallance is a writer, lawyer and former federal prosecutor. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Woman Who Fought An Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring.” Follow him on Twitter @gregorywallance.