In my elementary school, during free-time PE, the boys would play a unique version of softball. There would be fielders, a pitcher, catcher and batter, but no teams. Because there weren’t enough children or time for two teams to play, the game was intended to be based on individual effort. The roles of players would rotate, based on a set of rules. If the pitcher struck out the batter, that batter would be out, and the pitcher would bat. However, it was underhand, slow-pitch softball where the ball was relatively easy to hit. A batter could stay at the plate for a long time, so there were other ways to rotate batters. Kids would spread out over the field and attempt to catch hit balls. A ground ball was worth a certain number of points, and a fly ball was worth more. Over time, a player could earn enough points to become the batter, the most coveted role. If you dropped balls or caught no balls, you wouldn’t get points. So the key to becoming a batter was to get to where the balls were and catch them.
There was one other rule: If someone touched a ball but didn’t catch it, the ball was considered “dead” and not worth any points. If a fielder caught a ball that had been already touched by someone else, that catch wouldn’t advance the fielder to the batter’s box. Someone could say, “I touched that one” to any ball, and the fielder who caught it would get no points. To an adult watching on the sidelines, this all apparently looked like a nice, fair game that allowed everyone the opportunity to participate. A meritocracy, right? Ostensibly, everyone would get a chance to bat.
I loved baseball as a kid. I’d stay up late at night and listen to scratchy broadcasts of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett calling Dodger games over the radio on a 50,000-kilowatt station from 400 miles away. I wanted to grow up to be Willie Mays so badly that when I played in a league, I always wanted to be center fielder. Despite what adults told me about how to catch a ball, I insisted on making a basket catch (Mays’ signature move) whenever I could. As a Black kid living in an all-White community, players like Mays, and by extension baseball, became an important connection to my identity. But as a Black kid in an all-White community, I learned about unfairness because of what the adults watching our play time chose not to see.
Like many activities which purport to be merit-based, this one never rewarded everyone’s merit evenly. First, you had to get to the ball. That meant that the most valuable spots were in a line just outside the infield between second and third base. Since most batters were right-handed and most balls were hit on the ground or not very far beyond the infield, those players always caught the most balls. The most aggressive boys and their friends quickly took those positions. It was tacitly understood that those places were for certain people – all others were excluded. These boys eventually all batted. The ones left standing farther in the outfield got little opportunity unless they caught a fly ball that went over the heads of the ones standing at the edge of the infield or caught a ground ball hit too sharply for one of the closer players to make a play for it.
I discovered how the game was rigged whenever I tried to stand at one of the coveted positions on the field. Other boys would come and stand directly in front of me and, over time, subtly push me father into the outfield. Then there were times when I stood in the outfield and caught a ball hit clearly over infielders’ heads or well beyond the reach of any of them and someone would yell, “I touched that one” to deny my opportunity to bat. No one ever directly told me that I wouldn’t get to bat, but it became clear that was an unwritten rule. After that occurring repeatedly, I remember being angry enough with the unfairness of it all to throw down my glove and curse loudly enough for a teacher to hear and scold me. No one saw the transgressions I experienced, but my transgressions were always visible. After a while, I stopped going on the field completely and chose other activities where I could play alone since, as it turned out, all the group activities were similarly rigged to exclude me. It was one among many elementary school experiences in unfairness I had as the first Black child to attend that school from kindergarten through sixth grade.
So life can sometimes be unfair. What’s the big deal? And why am I telling stories about a children’s game? As it turns out, childhood games teach us about life. On my childhood playground, I wasn’t the only one excluded. The school community had already determined a hierarchy of power and privilege that gave everyone a specific status – a status they were expected to accept. The unfairness of a rigged process is a lesson that I, and all others around me, implicitly learned on the playground. And I suspect that by the time we reach adulthood, far too many people, regardless of race or ethnicity, learn to expect unfairness as normative. Some even see advantages because they’re the person who gets unfairly rewarded. When children get so inured to the lessons of inequity which favor a select few, they learn to accept that system of unfairness as adults. That becomes so normal that they can’t see those systems that perpetuate inequities. It all becomes just the way things are. And that’s the problem. It’s a ”big deal” because too many people have become accustomed to asking “what’s the big deal?” when they see inequities. So maybe it’s not just a children’s game if the game teaches people to accept inequities – especially as those patterns extend to systems that, when applied to a whole society, decide such important outcomes like who gets educated, who has political power, who gets appropriate health care, or who succeeds economically.
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to make that statement. The U.S. didn’t get here by accident. A nation where only wealthy, landowning men were franchised to vote at its founding excluded most citizens’ engagement for most of its history. My African Americans progenitors weren’t even considered fully human during much of that history. Only in the past six decades has the nation had any serious conversations about being fully inclusive. As a result of its history, much of the nation developed passivity toward unjustness as a norm. However, such a passive perspective is contrary to the demand for justice that needs to be at the center of a vibrant democracy. If the daily lessons of life teach us to passively accept injustice, then we can be assured that injustice will continue. It’s not just a children’s game if the lesson that children learn is the acceptance of injustice – whether that injustice is on the playground or a courtroom. I fear that too many of us have learned acceptance instead of resistance.
This all gets borne out in the statistics about who gets ahead and who doesn’t in the society. However, it’s at the individual level, too. People see someone unfairly maligning someone else, and they remain silent. It’s as if they justify their silence because they didn’t create the injustice. They see an unfairness being pushed onto someone or a group, and they say nothing – perhaps because they don’t see themselves as the perpetrators of that unfairness. The problem is that silence is complicity. People who refuse to confront injustice silently participate in that injustice.
In other words, for inequity to exist, it takes more than the actions of people who create and benefit from the inequity. It takes tacit acquiescence from everyone. The teachers who watched the rigged game that frustrated me as a child didn’t pay close enough attention to see what was happening – or they didn’t care. And any other children on the playground who were as excluded as I was had already learned the lesson of compliance. “That’s just the way things are” was a lesson that they’d already absorbed. It took the inaction of authorities, as well as those affected, for that injustice to continue. We now see that happening on a national scale. We have multiple reports of Republican leaders who privately complained about the 45th President when he was first elected and as he grifted his way through four years of his presidency. Some found their voice briefly after the January 6 insurrection. Yet they were quickly silenced into compliance and inaction.
The term “inaction” is key. If you know something is wrong, yet you don’t act, it’s like you’re standing in a town square yelling “Fire!” and just holding a water hose while the buildings burn around you. Declaring any problem with no offered solution is always inadequate. When the topics are injustice and inequity, a commitment to action should be at the start of any discussion. The end of the discussion should bring a plan of action where people hold each other accountable for those actions. That plan must include leaders and the communities they lead. Everyone needs to be accountable not just for knowledge of the problems, but, more importantly, for their participation in actions that resolve the problems. Being actors against inequity is what children should learn instead of the passivity that children with whom I played learned – the implied lessons that are still too prevalent today.
As Republican leaders have now discovered, the time to act is when you first see the problem. With time, the problem can become too overwhelming to address. Go out and look for other people and organizations who share your concerns and who have a history of upholding rights. Be part of collective action that counters this latest affront to justice. Take an active role by volunteering your time and energy to those people and organizations. If you’ve always been someone who expected that either someone else would do this work, or that nothing can be done, you need to change that perspective. This is the time to act as if there is no other time in the future to keep our rights unless you act. Unlike the childhood games that might have taught us passivity and compliance, inaction now has serious consequences for our future.
Living with injustice is a learned habit, so acting for justice must be, too.
