Jewish World Review July 15, 2003 / 15 Tamuz 5763

Clarence Page

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Consumer Reports

Deeper realities of Baker's dust-up


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | I thought Dusty Baker was putting us on with his recent comments about skin color and heat tolerance, until he mentioned his mother.

Believe me, when a black man brings up his mother, he is serious.

Well, OK. Not always. I don't want to overgeneralize. That's what got Baker into trouble. Baker launched his dust-up July 5 when he said during a routine pregame chat with reporters that black and Latino players are better suited to play in the sun and heat than white players.

"You don't find too many brothers from New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Right? We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over here because we can take the heat?"

He must have been facing some awe-stricken faces at that point because he kept going.

"[Blacks'] skin color is more conducive to heat than it is for lighter skin people, right?" he said. "You don't see brothers running around burnt. Yeah, that's fact. I'm not making this stuff up. Right? You don't see some brothers walking around with white stuff [sun block] on their ears and noses."

Maybe Baker hasn't been where I've been. My complexion is similar to Baker's, but I've been putting sun block on ever since a 1982 vacation at the Martinique Club Med that I shall say no more about.

And if black folks couldn't tolerate cold weather, you never would have had the Chicago blues or Detroit soul, among numerous other contributions that cold-weather black folks have made to modern life.

I, too, used to think that black folks couldn't take much cold. Then I visited Fairbanks, Alaska, to speak at the university there. I was surprised by the moose, the dog sleds and the spectacular views. I was surprised by the parking meters that had electric cables to help prevent vehicle engines from freezing overnight.

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And I was surprised to find black folks. The mayor of Fairbanks was black. The local cable TV outlet carried BET. Out of 82,000 people in Fairbanks, about 7 percent were black, according to the 2000 census. Not bad for a cold place.

"I thought black folks didn't like cold weather," I joked with my mixed-race audience. They laughed. Most of Fairbanks' black community came there because of the military and stayed because they liked it, several told me. Take that, Dusty Baker.

Yes, I thought Baker might be kidding, as I was in Alaska. But then, three days after his earlier remarks, from which he refused to back away, Baker brought up Mom. "My mother was a black American history teacher in Sacramento," he said. "... A lot of people don't know history, that's what it sounds like to me."

Baker's remarks turned legions of sports reporters into anthropological researchers, which probably didn't do them any harm. Contrary to commonly held suppositions, the preponderance of research shows no major correlation between complexion and heat tolerance. Dark skin apparently does have lower skin cancer rates, but some studies show blacks actually have lower heat tolerance than whites.

Most important, there's no scientific reason to discriminate between the races one way or another based on weather conditions.

Nothing much happened to Baker after his remarks, except for a lot of angry commentaries. If Cubs managers have learned to put up with anything over the years, it is angry commentary.

A white manager probably would not have gotten away with his remarks. Baker did not argue with that. "But as a black manager, I can say things about blacks that a white manager can't say," he said, "and whites can say things about whites that blacks can't say."

Maybe so. Although Dusty wasn't talking just about black folks, it is hard to imagine who might have been genuinely offended by his remarks. Let's just hope that he sticks to his players' stats, not their skin complexions, in making his personnel decisions on the field.

That's the danger of generalizing too much about people. It takes away their chance to prove themselves as individuals. But I don't think Baker should be punished, any more than I thought CBS sports personality Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder or Dodgers general manager Al Campanis should have been punished for their own similarly controversial remarks about race and the abilities of minorities.

In 1987, Campanis said blacks lacked the "necessities" to be baseball managers or general managers. The next year, Snyder said blacks were better athletes than whites because they were bred that way during slavery.

Like Baker, they were wrong, but their gaffes and subsequent uproar revealed something important about how little the races still know about each other. The best remedy for such ignorance is candid dialogue. That's not easy for us to have as long as people are worried about being penalized for raising the wrong questions.

As with other matters of race relations, we need to be less punitive and more informative.

Besides, it is hard to imagine an appropriate punishment for Baker, although wintertime community service in the Upper Peninsula sounds about right.

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