I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Sidney Wang lately.
Ja’han Jones is the blogger for Reid Out, the MSNBC race-baiting show (well, one of them) starring Joy Reid. As such, the fact that he has such a bone-headed and biased position regarding diversity is like finding out that water is wet, but it is still surprising to see anyone who can put his shoes on (I’m assuming Ja’Han can) write something as ignorant and idiotic as “The decline of Black players in MLB should be a warning about the war on DEI.”
If DEI proponents keep making arguments this bad, eventually even the dimmest members of the public will figure out that it’s a hustle. (Won’t they? Don’t they have to?) Another rule Ja’Han seems to have missed is “Don’t write about subjects you know nothing about when a lot of your readers do, because they will figure out that you are a fake.”
To summarize one of the worst published screeds I have read in a long time, this supposed “futurist,” journalist and pundit argues that Major League Baseball needs DEI programs to increase the percentage of black baseball players. (Baseball’s number of black players has been declining for a welter of cultural, financial and attitudinal reasons, none of which involve discrimination.) It’s difficult to know where to start a rebuttal of an argument that is only worthy of “What the hell are you talking about?” Might as well just dive right in…
The only time Major League Baseball made its decisions about what players should be on baseball teams based on race or ethnicity was before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. That form of DEI was called “racism.” After that self-destructive stupidity was over with, baseball teams, with some notable laggards like the Red Sox, chose its players according to which ones were able to get the most hits, hit the ball the farthest, through the ball the fastest, make plays in the field and run fast. This whole concept of a merit-based system is apparently beyond the ability of Ja’han to grok. See, all fans care about is winning, not the color of the players who are responsible for the wins. Similarly, baseball is a business. Good baseball makes money, bad baseball doesn’t. The best players make good baseball, and thus more money for the owners. Choosing players who are not the best players for any reason, including “diversity,” is known in the sport as “stupidity.” This isn’t, as the saying goes, rocket science. No team that loses will get credit from its fans because it is diverse.
Listen to this fool: “Institutions where there’s a declining emphasis on diversity are, over time, likely to see their number of Black participants go down as well. And at a time when diversity programs have come under attack from right-wingers, MLB’s failure serves as a cautionary tale of what we stand to lose.” Lose what? Inferior baseball players? I can say with 100% certainty that every baseball team and its fan base would be thrilled to have an all-black, all-Asian, all-Hispanic, all-white team, all-female, all pygmy, all Down Syndrome team if it won the World Series. The game wants more blacks who are great athletes to play baseball rather than football or basketball so they enhance baseball’s talent pool, not because of “diversity.”
Is this cretin accusing the NBA of not seeking enough diversity because 70% of the players are black? Baseball is the most diverse major sport by wide margin, and more diverse than at any time in its history, with white players, black players, Asian players from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, Mexicans, Cubans, South Americans, Dominicans, Caribbean islanders, Pacific Islanders and increasing numbers of Europeans. All Ja’han cares about is blacks because he is black, and, of course, he works for Joy Reid, a racist.
There is a ray of hope coming out of this Great Stupid embarrassment: the column has received over a thousand comments from readers, and if even one thinks Jones has a valid point, I couldn’t find it. A representative reaction: “This article is actually the evidence that DEI and equity was a false model in the first place. Baseball is based on performance and if you perform, you will be welcomed with open arms no matter what your race is. That is a concept that MSNBC just can’t understand.”
Among others…
Ethics Alarms 
EA broached this subject in July 2021: Baseball Says It Wants More American Blacks In The Game But Chooses To Ignore A Likely Reason Why there Are Not
That post was due, in part, to an (arguably) brilliant @EA commentator (whom modestly prevents me from revealing) referencing an (IMO) shockingly well-titled Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture study Called Out At Home
Was Ja’han Jones just too breathtakingly clueless to have allowed that to cross his desk, or did and just ignored it?
My money’s on the former.
PWS
So, the breakdown I found that seems most reasonable is
White 57%
Hispanic 32%
Black 8 %
Asian 3%
Others had a much higher percentage of whites (up to 80%) but that seems to be because our government doesn’t view hispanic as a ‘race’ but an ‘ethnicity’, so hispanics are either black or white. What this Ja-hah Jones is really saying is that there are too many hispanics in baseball. This is because the only group overrepresented vs the population here is hispanics.
it also doesn’t count black Hispanics as black, because they aren’t “African Americans.” I regard David Ortiz as much black as Mookie Betts.
This just reminds me of my undergraduate days when the ‘people of color’ thing was just starting. The Black Student Union was using it to claim that 35% of the students on campus were people ‘of color’, so the Black Student Union should get 35% of the representation in student government. The hispanics and Asians were not pleased, but they couldn’t say anything about it without being shouted down as racist, sexist, and homophobic (in that order, always in that order).