Last week, Major League Baseball issued its punishment to Atlanta Braves closer John Rocker. The pitcher was suspended through May 1, fined $20,000 and ordered to undergo "sensitivity training" before he returns to the mound.
Major League Baseball has made two grave mistakes in its handling of the Rocker affair. The first is doling out a punishment that is similar in nature to the punishment given to players who commit violent acts. The second is treating Rocker's problem as a psychological ailment that requires therapy.
Baseball has set a consistent precedent for dealing with violent players and coaches. In 1977, Texas Ranger Lenny Randle was suspended for 30 days for beating up his manager, Frank Lucchesi. In 1988, Pete Rose was suspended for 30 days for pushing an umpire. And in 1932, Bill Dickey was suspended 30 days for breaking Carl Reynolds' jaw. By suspending Rocker for as long as these men-plus all of spring training-Commissioner Bud Selig is equating an act of speech with an act of force. But speech and force are fundamentally different, no matter how offensive the speech, and should be treated as such.
Rocker has no ability to hurt anyone with his comments. Every person who Rocker insults can reject his comments as invalid and pay no attention to them. The victim of force has no such option.
Take the example of Rocker's comments about foreigners. "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners," he told Sports Illustrated. "You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English.... How the hell did they get in this country?" No foreigner in America has to pay the least bit of attention to John Rocker. Since his act was merely one of speech, it can be evaluated as invalid and ignored.
But imagine if Rocker, instead of making comments to Sports Illustrated, had beaten a Vietnamese man. Then Rocker's idiotic beliefs would have real and harmful significance to the man. The man can choose to ignore Rocker's speech; he cannot ignore Rocker's fist-just as Frank Lucchesi could not ignore Lenny Randle's, and Carl Reynolds could not ignore Bill Dickey's.
To fail to distinguish between speech and force is a disastrous mistake by Major League Baseball.
As unfair as baseball's suspension of Rocker is, it will not do nearly as much damage to the pitcher as the required sensitivity training. The rationale behind sending someone to sensitivity training is that racism is a psychological problem. It is not.
Racism is the result of bad philosophical premises, it is not a mental disease curable by therapy. Racists are racist because they believe that skin color determines one's values, ability and character. They either choose to absorb these beliefs from others around them, or are racist as the result of several observations they have made followed by flawed reasoning. For instance, Ku Klux Klan members often justify their belief in the inferiority of blacks by comparing test scores or crime rates of black and white Americans.
Racism is irrational, but this is not obvious knowledge. That is, that racism is an irrational position to hold cannot be assumed arbitrarily, nor arrived at through divine insight. It must be arrived at through a process of reason. To judge racism as wrong requires the understanding that men's characters are determined by their exercise of free will and their rational capacity-and not by external physical characteristics. This, in turn, requires identifying the essential characteristics of man (conceptual knowledge, free will) and the insignificant ones (skin color, national origin, height). Any response to racist beliefs must be an intellectual one if it is to have any success.
Sensitivity training is completely anti-intellectual. It tells its subjects-without justification-that all cultures and ways of life are of equal merit (Sensitivity trainers tend to be cultural determinists, and equate race with culture). In effect, it tells them to throw away their powers of judgment, as the idea that all ways of life are equal is contradicted by everything they see in reality.
Unfortunately, the technique of silencing those who make offensive remarks is not limited to professional baseball. It occurs on campuses and workplaces throughout the country. The word "ethnoviolence" is now used to designate speech that minorities find offensive, and acts of "ethnoviolence" often receive punishments as steep as those for real violence, eliminating the crucial distinction between speech and force.
Racism is a fundamentally irrational form of collectivism that deserves to be repudiated and refuted whenever it occurs.
However, if those who are racist are to be reached, it must be done by refuting their comments instead of silencing them.
Alex Epstein is a Trinity sophomore and publisher of The Duke Review.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.