We are the only site on the web devoted exclusively to intellectual conservatism. We find the most intriguing information and bring it together on one page for you.

Barry Bonds, Racist
by Nicholas Stix
15 June 2005

In contrast to spoiled baseball brat Bonds, Hank Aaron actually did have to endure white racism.

Barry Bonds just hates white people.

In an excerpt from Ron Kittle's Tales from the White Sox Dugout, that appeared on May 31 in suburban Chicago’s Southtown News newspaper, former Chicago White Sox player Kittle quotes Bonds as saying, "I don't sign [autographs] for white people."

The setting was the visitors’ clubhouse at the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field home in 1993, when Bonds’ San Francisco Giants had come to town. Kittle, by then retired from the game, had asked Bonds to sign two jerseys Bonds had worn in games, so that Kittle could auction them for Indiana Sports Charities, his philanthropy helping kids with cancer.
I paid about $110 of my own money for them, so they could be auctioned off at the golf outing. I did that all the time for stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Derek Jeter and Roger Clemens. When I tell them how their autographs help the cause, every player gladly signs -- with one exception.

I walked up to Bonds at his locker in the Wrigley Field visitors' clubhouse, introduced myself and said, ‘Barry, if you sign these, they'll bring in a lot of money for kids who need help.

Bonds stood up, looked me in the eye and said, “I don't sign for white people.” If lightning hits me today, I will swear those were his exact words. Matt Williams and other Giants were in the room and they heard what Bonds said.

I stood there for a minute, and the veins in my neck were popping. I've only been that mad a few times in my life. I was going to beat the (heck) out of him, really kick his (butt), but Williams saw what was happening, so he came over and got between us. Matt said, “Ron, that's just the way he is.”

The Southland News reported that Bonds’ spokeswoman and a Giants’ spokesman both declined comment on the story.

I could see how some of my readers might doubt that Kittle is telling the truth. After all, those white devils just can’t be trusted. Besides, hasn’t Barry Bonds told us himself of his sufferings at the hands of white racism?

Indeed, Prof. Leonard Moore of LSU has informed us that a great many white people do in fact resent Bonds’ march through the record books.
As Katherine Corcoran reported in the March 30 San Jose Mercury News,

Still, there are many who argue that race is at the core of the San Francisco Giants super-slugger's troubles. They see a time-worn pattern of a federal government and a predominantly white media tearing down a strong black athlete -- who this time happens to be on the cusp of besting the home run mark of a beloved white icon.

"If you have a black man who's conscious and independent and on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth's record...that's frightening,” said Leonard Moore, a Louisiana State University professor who teaches a course on the history of the African-American athlete. “If you speak out, if you don't play to what white America wants, there will be persecution, scrutiny and unfair reporting.”

Apparently for Moore, “conscious” and “independent” are euphemisms for racist.

There are four things wrong with Leonard Moore’s statement.

1. Barry Bonds is not on the verge “of breaking Babe Ruth’s record,” because Hank Aaron broke it on April 8, 1974. Leonard Moore doesn’t seem to know anything about the history of black athletes in America.

2. Far from suffering from unfair, racist reporting, for years Bonds enjoyed a holiday from serious scrutiny.

3. There is no record of any whites being upset at the prospect of Bonds breaking Ruth’s “record.”

4. There is, however, a paper trail of blacks claiming that whites would be upset, if Bonds passed Ruth.

When Aaron was bearing down on the Babe’s ghost, some whites were indeed angry, and sent him hate mail, including death threats. (Not “frightened,” mind you, which is a cliché that sanctimonious white lefties and black racists invented to make themselves feel morally superior.) But when Aaron broke the Babe’s record, that was that. The reasons for conjuring up a record thirty-one years after it has been broken, are to steal Hank Aaron’s ordeal for use by Bonds, and so that racist frauds like Leonard Moore can claim that white Americans are as racist as they ever were, and black Americans are thus the same victims they were under Jim Crow. (Or is it slavery, this week?)

“Racist” reporting: In an unwitting self-caricature, in 2002, the New York Times sent well-connected lefty David Grann, who knew nothing about baseball, to do a puff piece on Bonds. Grann was so ignorant about the game that he thought that baseball teams were led by “head coaches,” and his clueless editor at the Times Magazine, Adam Moss, was no better. (Considering that even the Times’ token “conservative,” David Brooks, seems lost when it comes to our national pastime, I suspect that at Pinch Sulzberger’s Times, some sort of social cachet redounds to people who are ignorant about the game.)

Grann insinuated that Bonds and his late father, Bobby, were both victimized by white racism. The truth is, that while Bobby Bonds, may he rest in peace, had Hall of Fame talent, he lacked a Hall of Fame heart.

Most black public figures today enjoy a holiday from journalistic scrutiny, unless racist black activists or journalists have deemed them “insufficiently black” (e.g., Justice Clarence Thomas), in which case it’s open season on them.

The lack of scrutiny of black public figures and black social pathologies derives from black race-baiting and racist black newsroom enforcers and their white allies. Black celebrities employ intimidation, declaring in advance that the “white media” are racist. Consider singer Whitney Houston, for years the master of this game. Houston has repeatedly declared that the “white media” seek to break up her troubled marriage to singer Bobby Brown, all the while enjoying sycophantic puff pieces from that same, supposedly racist, white-owned media.

And as William McGowan has shown in his book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, black staffers and editors in every major newsroom see to it that black public figures and social problems get softball treatment. For instance, corrupt, black Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry got away with murder for years, because black staffers at the Washington Post refused to expose him. And when white staffers tried to expose corruption in the Barry Administration, black staffers and editors sought to sandbag them. If the white reporters got beyond the sandbagging to write their stories, black editors like Milton Coleman spiked them. In Jill Nelson’s memoir of her time as a well-paid Post staffer, Volunteer Slavery, the ebulliently racist Nelson referred to her older white superiors, such as socialist editor Ben Bradlee, as “white boys,” and bragged of having intervened to skew coverage of Barry, so that readers would not discover that a woman had charged the mayor with having raped her.

As William McGowan has written, the last thing a white, male, middle manager wants is racial trouble. As a result, when black media staffers cause trouble, white managers invariably roll over for them. Thus, black journalists enjoy a power in the newsroom vastly disproportionate to their numbers.

Racist blacks and their leftwing, white allies still push the myth of the independent, and thus persecuted, successful black man. In the revised, 1995 version of Andrew Hacker’s 1992 race book, Two Nations, the white political scientist suggested that a white conspiracy targeted successful black men such as Marion Barry, Mike Tyson, and O.J. Simpson.

You can’t make this stuff up.

So far from suffering under unfair press, in 2002, Bonds bragged to Grann that some sportswriters spy on their colleagues for him. So, if a sportswriter whom Bonds has abused does not publicly attack him, but privately complains about him, Bonds finds out about it -- and feels retroactively vindicated in his viciousness!

I’ve never heard of whites complaining that Bonds was going to break Ruth’s “record.” Leonard Moore got his claim about “frightened,” racist whites not from whites, but as my colleague Lisa Fabrizio wrote two years ago, from one Barry Bonds.

In July, 2003, Bonds announced,

755 isn't a number that's always caught my eye -- the only number I'm concerned with is Babe Ruth's. As a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out. That's it. And in the baseball world, Babe Ruth's everything, right? I got his (single season) slugging percentage, I got him on on-base, I got him on walks and then I'll take his (lifetime) home run record and that's it. Don't talk about him no more.

(Considering that in Ruth’s first career, he was the best left-handed pitcher in the American League; in his heyday, he hit more home runs than entire teams; that on a medical regimen of beer and hot dogs, he retired with a lifetime batting average of .342, almost 60 points higher than the pre-pharmaceutical Bonds; and that Ruth ran away from the home-run competition of his day the way Secretariat left behind the field at Belmont, I doubt people are about to stop talking about the Bambino’s accomplishments.)

White people were never concerned about Barry Bonds overtaking Babe Ruth; that was Bonds’ own obsession! Because Ruth was white, Bonds fancies that overtaking him would somehow drive white folks crazy. Bonds wishes to present himself as a victim/hero, and race-baiting whites inflates his already outsized ego. As I said, the man is seeking to steal Hank Aaron’s life.

The truth of the matter is that most white people have always treated Barry Bonds like a king. When he plays at Pac Bell Stadium, the people who pay to see him play and applaud him, are overwhelmingly white. The owners who have paid him hundreds of millions of dollars to play the game, have all been white. Meanwhile, black folks avoid baseball like the plague -- too many white faces on the field.

Bonds reminds me of another black racist who has always lived off whites, and returned their support with a slap in the face: Movie director Spike Lee.

I’ll tell you, though, this is one white man who would be plenty angry, if Bonds “broke” Hank Aaron’s record. In contrast to the spoiled baseball brat Bonds, Aaron actually did have to endure white racism; had to hit within a much larger strike zone, against pitchers who stood on a higher mound, in ball parks with much deeper outfields, with a ball that was not “juiced;” enjoyed at first none of the watering-down of pitching that expansion caused, and later, only a bit of it. And last but not least, Aaron didn’t get his power out of a syringe, bottle, cream or pill. His muscles were his own. If Aaron had had Bonds’ many advantages, he’d have hit over 900 dingers, instead of 755.

The racial significance of Bonds and Leonard Moore’s statements is that you had one black man, Bonds, express his hatred of white folks, and another black man, Moore, project Bonds’ sentiment onto whites, in order to twist the expression of Bonds’ black racism into an expression of white racism. And Moore’s racism, too, since he knew what he was doing.

I suppose that in an age in which black race hoaxes are produced as if on an assembly line, it would be hyperbole to call Bonds and Moore’s fabrication of “frightened” white racists a hoax. So, I’ll call it a hoaxette.

Imagine a white player making racist statements. But we don’t have to. When relief pitcher John Rocker made politically incorrect statements about the riders on New York’s 7 train, Major League Baseball forced him to undergo psychological counseling and publicly debase himself.

Actually, Rocker was never as openly racist as Bonds. (And if the people writing on Rocker had done any research, they would have known that his description bore no resemblance to the 7 train, which due to its heavily Asian ridership is known as the “Orient Express.” It sounded to me as if Rocker had never been on the 7 train.)

In the past, Barry Bonds has been compared (including by me) to another great but foul-tempered left-handed hitter, Ted Williams. It would be more fitting, methinks, to compare him to another of baseball’s most vile racists, Ty Cobb.

New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.

Email Nicholas Stix

Send this Article to a Friend