Yesterday I turned on ESPN and heard that a banana peel had been thrown at a black baseball player. This kind of behavior happens sometimes at soccer matches in Europe, proving, I always thought, that the Old World was less mature, at least in matters of race, than the United States. I then heard that someone had vandalized a statue of Jackie Robinson.
One of the network's talking heads said exactly what I was thinking: that we seemed to be reverting back to a place that everyone assumed we had left. But I thought about it a little longer and came up with a more optimistic explanation. There will always be bigots, but in 21st Century America they are becoming increasingly outnumbered and ostracized. And in their loneliness and isolation they are lashing out.
