Jeremiah Chapman is a high school baseball player at Charles City High School, in northeast Iowa. On June 27th, Charles City was playing Waverley-Shell Rock in Waverly, also in northeast Iowa. Chapman is the only black player on the Charles City baseball team. Throughout the game Chapman, who plays center field, heard taunts from a Waverly-Shell fan section in the outfield bleachers.

The first taunt was ‘Colin,’ after Colin Kaepernick, the black former quarterback of the San Francisco Forty Niners. Kaepernick became famous and infamous in 2016 for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans. In a speech in 2017 in Alabama President Trump said of NFL players who kneel.

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!

The second taunt was ‘you need to go back to the fields to do your job.’

Then came the third taunt.

‘You should have been George Floyd.’

Jeremiah’s story was posted by a Facebook friend a few days ago and I have heard from several other friends who are familiar with the story. Response by these friends fell into two categories of questions.

Some asked, how can this be in America in 2020? We’ve come so far, haven’t we? America ended slavery, at a cost of 600,000 lives. We ended legal discrimination with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Barack Hussein Obama was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012.

Others asked, how could this not be, in America, regardless of the year? Racist taunting is simply a softer version of something that is a natural part of America, as its history of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the killing by American police of unarmed black men like George Floyd. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts this view of America this way.

“Racism has been part of America’s cultural DNA since before the ink dried on the Constitution. Dominant in some and recessive in others, it’s a gene that has mutated over time yet remains part of the inheritance weighing us down, one generation to the next. The damage it has done is systemic and goes all the way down to the cellular level.”

And this is only the African-American experience and says nothing about historic inequities regarding women, Native Americans, Asians or members of the LGBTQ communities.

How should we think about race or reform of any kind in America, in light of the George Floyd and Jeremiah stories, that put human faces to the still significant racial inequities in the areas of criminal justice, wealth, education, and, as COVID – 19 reminds us, health care.

Professor Timothy Snyder, an American historian that specializes in Central European history and the holocaust, suggests that in analyzing any contemporary situation it is necessary to see how it “represents both change and continuity.”**

Recall my friends’ responses to the Jeremiah Chapman story. The ‘America has come so far’ is the change story. The ‘America is naturally racist’ is the continuity story. Let’s apply this continuity and change template to Chapman story as reported in The Courier.

Continuity

Racist language, apparently without condemnation by other fans, like the killing of George Floyd and all the other racial inequities in America in 2020, are linked to a long American history of racist ideas and policies in the service of powerful white interests.

Change

Jeremiah Chapman described the taunts to an umpire and the umpire asked Jeremiah if he wanted him to stop the game. Umpires now have the authority to stop games under these circumstances.

The Waverly Shell Rock School district confirmed the incident, is continuing to investigate, and issued the following apology.

This behavior is unacceptable. We make no excuses, because there are none. We do wish to make a sincere apology to the Charles City School District and community and, in particular, the young man towards whom these comments were directed.

The Charles City School District said the incident has been investigated and corroborated by sources. The superintendent put out the following statement.

The overwhelming evidence was it absolutely happened and unfortunately it wasn’t the first-time racial remarks have been heard at visiting games.

Racist taunting at America’s sporting events, including high school sports, is a constant. However, in 2020 these expressions of racist ideas are treated differently than they would have been even a decade ago. Game officials can stop games, school districts take these incidents seriously, and bar perpetrators from games. America’s media puts these stories front and center for all to see.

Just as America’s police keep killing unarmed African-Americans but now are being fired, charged with murder, and, perhaps more importantly, this social fact is recognized by a majority of Americans as a genuine problem. And athletes and others all over America and the world are now taking a knee. In the picture below, the entire Des Moines Roosevelt High School baseball team takes a knee during the National Anthem before their first game, June 2020.

The most productive way to think about race in America today is to hold its racism and antiracism in tension, through America’s twin stories of continuity and change.

Seeing only continuity leads too easily to cynicism and hopelessness and these scourges favor the status quo.

Seeing only change leads too easily to self-congratulations and innocence and these scourges also favor the status quo.

Think about Jeremy Chapman. Its hard enough playing center field and being 17, under the best of circumstances. Imagine words as vile as ‘you should have been George Floyd’ spat at you when you were 17. For Jeremy, America is better than it was but not as good as it can be.

What can you and I do today and tomorrow and the next day to move America closer to that “more perfect union” described in the Preamble to the American Constitution?

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

*This quote is taken from a story in The Courier

**Thanks to Fulbright colleague and Professor Bill Issel for the Timothy Snyder change and continuity idea, from Snyder’s Black Earth.