The disrespect toward Jackie Robinson’s legacy isn’t new. It’s always been this way.

If you’re upset at the recent attempts to diminish who No. 42 was, sadly, you’re most likely part of the problem.

The back cover of a Jackie Robinson comic book. (Library of Congress)

By Carron J. Phillips

Convenient outrage is useless. That’s why the recent outcry about the attempts to diminish Jackie Robinson’s legacy is performative.

Last month, the Department of Defense removed and restored a story to its website highlighting Robinson’s military service. Days later, a book about Robinson was on the chopping block at a library as part of the Trump administration’s fixation on removing all things DEI—or Black.

People, especially baseball fans, were upset. But don’t focus on the understandable anger. Pay attention to who was mad. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, the majority of baseball fans don’t look like me.

White people have a long history of being temporarily upset when it comes to things that affect them or the people they act like they admire—when, in actuality, the majority serve as the antagonist. The powers that be in baseball (owners/managers/media/networks) make up the same electoral pool that elected the person in office who’s doing the attacking.

When Robinson is discussed, it’s clear that people have no clue as to who he actually was. Because if they did— especially Major League Baseball fans—they’d be infuriated by what’s happened to the game he loved.

In 2022, 81 players were named to the All-Star Game. Only five were Black Americans. Opening Day rosters that season were only 7.2 percent Black American. In 2021, the number was 7.6.

Do you know what was so “special” about the 2022 season for Major League Baseball? It marked 75 years since Robinson broke the color barrier—and those horrific numbers are how they thanked him. That was also the first year since 1959 that the Philadelphia Phillies didn’t have a Black American player on their Opening Day roster. Later that season, there wasn’t a single Black American player who touched the field in the World Series—for the first time since 1950.

“Nah, don’t tell me that,’’ Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker said at the time. “That’s terrible for the state of the game. Wow! Terrible. I’m ashamed of the game.

“Quote me. I am ashamed of the game.’’

If you were wondering what the numbers were for this season, I have the answer for you: Black American players made up only 6.2 percent of 2025 Opening Day rosters, which was more than the 6 percent from 2024.

You can’t just be mad at Donald Trump. Be enraged at the entire system.

For instance, did you know that in 2018 Major League Baseball donated the legal maximum ($5,000) to Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith?

If you Google her name, you will be reminded that she’s the woman who once publicly said, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” (MLB at least asked for its donation back.)

But wait, there’s more.

In 2018, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross was named the Robie Award Recipient by the Jackie Robinson Foundation. Later, Ross made headlines when he made members of the team stand instead of kneel in peaceful protest during the national anthem.

FYI: Robinson wasn’t a fan of the anthem.

“As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem,” he wrote in his memoir. “I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Laughably, Ross continues to be a member of the Board of Directors for the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

If you still don’t “get it,” let me simplify it even more for you: Robinson faced opposition as a player, in retirement, and in his death. There has never been a moment in which his legacy wasn’t under attack. This is why the recent outrage holds no weight. Don’t try to protect Robinson in 2025 if you stood silent when the disrespect occurred in the past—and for decades. Especially when his words from back then shed light on what’s happening today.

“A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy... I know it is true because I have felt it and experienced it as I lived through the unbelievable hours of the National GOP Convention,” Robinson wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Tribune in 1964. “If I could couch in one single sentence the way I felt, watching this controlled steam-roller operation roll into high gear, I would put it this way, I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

In February, oddly enough, Trump held a Black History Month Reception at the White House. At the event, Trump announced that Black American icons like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Kobe Bryant, and Robinson would be featured in his plans to build a National Garden of American Heroes.

Again, it was performative. And it wasn’t just because Jackie Robinson—like other Black heroes—far too often have their legacies and images hijacked and used as propaganda for “progress.” It was because Robinson predicted the move decades ago.

“(Some) whites are expert game-players in their contest to maintain absolute power. One of their time-honored gimmicks is to point to individual blacks who have achieved recognition.”

Carron J. Phillips is an award-winning journalist who writes on race, culture, social issues, politics, and sports. He hails from Saginaw, Michigan, and is a graduate of Morehouse College and Syracuse University.

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