We've Come Some Way, Baby

From "You don’t have to be African American to owe Jackie Robinson your thanks" by Dylan Hernandez's nemesis, Giants beat writer Henry Schulman:

I was in the lobby of my hotel getting coffee yesterday when the overhead television was replaying a TV interview with Jackie Robinson from the 1950s. The questioner, a white man, asked Robinson to respond to the notion that must have been widely held that "the Negro" wanted too much equality, too fast, and needed to be more patient.

Quite calmly, Robinson answered that he believed the Negro had been very patient, saying, "It seems to me the Civil War has been over for 99 years."

I choked up. I wanted to reach into the television and hug a man who has been gone for 40 years. [...]

We have come a long way, of course, but not all the way, of courses. I'm not going to lecture you about the state of equality in America, but I can provide one anecdote. As I sat in the first few rows at Wrigley Field yesterday waiting to hop onto the field after the final out, Pablo Sandoval was on deck and some loudmouthed idiot started yelling at Sandoval in fake Spanish gibberish before telling him to "learn English."

The stands at Wrigley are extremely close to the on-deck circle. Sandoval had to hear this piece of barely human crap and his crap comments. I would have turned to the man and told him to shut the hell up, but I didn’t feel like seeing a photo of myself on Deadspin pounding a Cubs ticket-holder.

(For the record, Sandoval took English lessons and his command of the language is very good.)