There's something in the underbelly of this year's World Series though, that is eating at me. Like so much of American life, there's a lot on the surface to get excited about. But you don't have to go too deep to expose something ugly, the racism and classism which are unfortunately as ubiquitous a part of our national experience as our love of sports.
Cleveland's baseball team is named, "the Indians," of course, which in and of itself isn't great. Some teams with that name have shown a way to work with it. Cleveland's Chief Wahoo mascot however, is embarrassingly racist. The picture of the smiling Native American, reducing hundreds of tribes, and rich cultural traditions to a cartoon stereotype? Come on people. It's the 21st century for crying out loud. It's time to retire Chief Wahoo for good.
And the Cubs? Nothing wrong with their mascot of course, but the Cubs are not Chicago's only baseball team.
Chicago is a divided city folks. It's a city divided by race and class. The neighborhoods have changed over the years, but there's still defacto segregation in many of them. Nothing illustrates this clearer than Chicago baseball. On the North Side, it's overwhelmingly white, and Cub fans, and the suburbanites tend to identify with them. Then there's the South Side, overwhelmingly Sox fans, overwhelmingly black and Latinx. There are a few Sox fans in the 'burbs, but it's mostly Cub fans.
The White Sox won the World Series in 2005, but you'd never know it when you hear from national sports commentators about how Chicago has waited so long for a World Series.
What bothers me is the ways that baseball fandom here allows us to camouflage the city's divisions into a sports rivalry, rather than bring these issues into the open and talk about them as real and important. It's socially acceptable to talk about how the Sox ballpark (which should always be called Comiskey) is in a "dangerous" neighborhood, or it's somehow scarier for suburbanites to go to a Sox game, than to visit the "friendly confines" of Wrigley Field. (For the record, this isn't scientific, but I've visited both ball parks and enjoy them both. I've only ever seen someone get arrested at Wrigley.)
Assumptions about race and class are all around us in metro-Chicago. Living as a white person in the 'burbs, it's assumed I would be a Cubs fan. When my wife and I were first moving here, a white person in Washington state asked where we were going to live, quickly adding, "north side, of course," as if there were no other option for middle class white people. I've deliberately avoided picking a side in the Chicago baseball rivalry, because, well, I gotta stay loyal to my Mariners, but I don't like the ways this rivalry further deepens the divisions of an otherwise great city.
I wish we could talk about the fact that Chicago is a different city for people of color vs. white people--in where they live, in where they work, go to school, and how they interact with the police and other city services. We ought not be able to so casually disregard the differences between North side and South side as if it's nothing more than a baseball rivalry. The divisions in this city are serious, and they are deep. They deserve our thoughtful and focused attention.
Maybe some common ground can can start the conversation. Can we talk about the sorry state of the Chicago Bears?
