Tim Anderson knows the importance of 'Jackie' and Black trailblazers – but some still don't get it | Opinion

New York Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson has apologized to Chicago's Tim Anderson. Mostly apologized. Well, kinda did. Apology adjacent?

Donaldson was suspended for one game by MLB after he called Anderson "Jackie" which was a referral to a 2019 quote in which Anderson compared himself to "today's Jackie Robinson."

Anderson believed the remark was racist. He is right to believe that.

We can analyze the hieroglyphics of Donaldson's aPoLUgY another time. For now, there's a lesson to be learned, one that I think many fans, some players and media, and others, have missed. It is a blunt lesson, a historic one, an old one, and it speaks to the way Black people view the trailblazers who came before us.

What Donaldson missed is how important Jackie Robinson is to Black people. He isn't a hashtag or a patch on a uniform to most of us. Even if you never saw Robinson play, Black people know instinctively what he represents.

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He is the person who absorbed the vitriol and the ugliness. He is the player who was called the N-word, had his life threatened, all so he could integrate the sport of baseball.

He is the person who endured all of that so the people who followed, mostly, wouldn't have to.

DONALDSON'S APOLOGY:Josh Donaldson says he has 'mutual understanding' with Tim Anderson, apologizes to Jackie Robinson family

MORE:Suspending Josh Donaldson was easy. Overcoming hateful speech in baseball will be harder

Anderson understands this. Most Black people do. Names like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley Chisholm, and so many others are part of our genome. Why? Because they endured hell so we didn't have to.

“One of the things that stood out to me immediately was Jackie, when he was alive, was treated awful, by a lot of people," said Dr. Louis Moore, who teaches African American, civil rights, American and sports history at Grand Valley State University.

"A lot of people in baseball didn’t like him. Now it seems like a compliment, but it wasn’t a compliment in real time. Jackie was treated very bad by a lot of folks around baseball."

Moore, in his interview with USA TODAY Sports' Josh Peter, added: “To be clear, what Tim Anderson has to go through is not what Jackie Robinson had to go through. There’s a reason why Martin Luther King said he was a sit-inner before the sit-ins and a Freedom Rider before the Freedom Rides. But Jackie did that so Tim Anderson didn’t have to go through that, and I think that that’s the major point that Tim Anderson was making a couple of years" ago in the Sports Illustrated story.

“Even Jackie felt like he couldn’t play a certain way," Moore said, "and Tim understands because of everything that Jackie and others went through, he has some leeway to be able to bring change to the game this way.’’

Anderson clearly knows history, and not just history, but Black history, and Black baseball history.

Donaldson clearly understands none of this.

Dr. Yohuru Williams, director of the Racial Justice Initiative based at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, also believes Donaldson used the "Jackie" reference as an insult.

He told USA TODAY: “In a lot of ways when we think of this situation, it’s both in ways an affirmation of the mythology of Jackie Robinson and the challenge for us to kind of view Jack in a very different context. So I do think Donaldson meant it as an epithet.

"It’s a way of putting the other player down and saying he represents this more submissive view of Jackie Robinson that people have, the Jackie Robinson that didn’t fight back, the Jackie Robinson who was Branch Rickey’s boy, so on and so forth."

Williams co-authored with Michael G. Long the forthcoming book, “Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter.’’ He served as the Chief Historian and Vice President for Public Education and Outreach at the Jackie Robinson Foundation from 2012 to 2014.

He believes this is a teachable moment.

It is.

The lesson is that Black people know about the people who came before us and the sacrifices they made. Those people are cherished.

It is a lesson Donaldson missed.