by Charles Memminger
Friday, October 4, 1996
We are still allowed to do that, aren't we? Hang out with whomever we want? Isn't there, like, some constitutional hanging out amendment? Or is there some law now that says whenever a bunch of people get together to hang out for any reason, the gathering has to reflect the community's ethnic, economic, cultural and gender makeup?
Hey, come on. Our country was built on people being allowed to hang out with whomever they wanted. Those Mayflower folks came all the way to North America to hang out together. True, the Indians, who had been hanging out together there first for quite a while, weren't keen on the idea.
But then other groups showed up, Puritans, Quakers, Atheists, Agnostics, Acoustics, Dianetics, Dodgers, Giants, Mets ... you name it. You think the Puritans let any Quakers play in their baseball league? No way, bub. And the Atheists couldn't even get into the Indians league, even though they had a guy who was batting .350 at the time. And that was when they played with dirt clods and hickory branches and the center field fence was somewhere near Kentucky. The man could hit. But he couldn't play because, one, Atheists didn't actually believe in baseball, and, two, he refused to stand up for the National Anthem, which at that time consisted mainly of grunting and throwing dead muskrats at the spectators and ended with the umpire yelling "Play clod!"
Come to think about it, there is a real connection between Americans' obsession with hanging out and baseball.
History shows that all these different groups of people who wanted to hang out together spread out across the country and hunkered down in their own little living leagues.
While many of these separate leagues may have had wildly different philosophies, they shared one common trait: the color of their skin, which, in a word, was white. That doesn't mean all of the white-skinned leagues got along well. Life in America was particularly tough on the Irish Potato Famine Immigrants League. They never experienced a "no-hitter." In fact, they were hit often and severely. Life in the Mormon League was no picnic either.
BUT the whites did insist that other races, like the Chinese, Japanese and Africans hang out together, which caused a certain resentment.
I don't have the space to go into everything that happened after that. Eventually, many leagues, either on their own or by government, uh, persuasion, opened their doors. Let's just say that the AJA league in Hawaii is one of the last vestiges of a racial group that wants to hang out together.
Yes, it seems wrong in these politically correct times. And it has a slight aroma of payback for the days when Japanese Americans weren't allowed to hangout in the Caucasian leagues: sports, business and social.
But they have a right to do it. And history is on their side.
Eventually, all the AJA old-timers who feel they have a moral duty to keep at least one racially pure baseball league going in Hawaii in remembrance of both the contributions and past discrimination of Japanese Americans will die out. Then the young baseball players probably will open the league to all players.
I think the change will and should occur within the AJA league and not from outside pressure. One thing we've learned over the years is that it's a lot more fun to hang out with people you have something in common with. And baseball players like to hang out with baseball players, no matter what league their ancestors came from.
Play clod!
