You'll find Josh Gibson's name on Baseball Reference's major league record lists now, and Oscar Charleston's, too. Satchel Paige is all over the strikeout category. Many others.
This is because Baseball Reference added the stats of Negro League stars to its exhaustive compilation of numbers this week, a clear admission of an obvious truth: That the Negro Leagues, born of racist exclusion, were just as major as the major leagues, and therefore deserve the same consideration. So Josh and Oscar and Satchel 'n' them are right there alongside the Babe and Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig and Walter Johnson, and in some cases ahead of them.
The less charitable would call that political correctness or revisionist history or (the new bogeyman of the right) Critical Race Theory, fetish terms the less charitable use to defend the illusion that history is an exclusive club with a single inviolable storyline. Historical narratives that run counter to that storyline need not apply.
In which case this was a bad week for those folks.
Baseball Reference's inclusion of Negro League records, after all, happened the same week America finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, something it should have been all along. It is not just a black holiday, commemorating the day in 1865 when African-American slaves in Texas -- the last to get the word -- were finally informed they were free. It is as American a holiday as July 4, when we celebrate an independence for which black Americans had to wait another 87 years.
Their Independence Day is June 19, 1865. The U.S. Constitution, crafted by white Americans for white Americans, made that a done deal by declaring Americans of African descent only 3/5 of their white counterparts.
And so what Juneteenth teaches us, what Baseball Reference's long overdue inclusion of the Negro Leagues teaches us, is that there is no such thing as American history. It is, rather, many histories, all of them existing side-by-side and in conjunction with one another. It is not a single stream but a series of eddies and oxbows and riptides, all with their own influence on the course of that stream.
That's why, when those of a certain political bent say it's revisionist history to teach our children anything but one American narrative, they are being truer than they know. By its very nature, all history is revisionist. What Bruce Catton wrote about the Civil War is not what a Jay Winik or Jon Meacham or S.C. Gwynne would write today, because 70 years have passed since Catton and new source material and perspectives have since come to light. That's simply the way these things work.
A classic example of this phenomenon, and the way it gets some folks riled up, is the subject matter of "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of An American Myth," currently occupying the pole position on my nightstand. Co-authored by a non-fiction author, a Texas journalist and the former communications director for the mayor of Austin, it traces the historical roots of Texas' birth and how the accepted Alamo narrative came to be.
Needless to say, the accepted narrative is exclusionary, viciously racist in some aspects and pure hooey in many others -- the classic example of the victors getting to write the history. The hysterical pushback against any alteration, or the inclusion of other valid perspectives (particularly those of Mexican-Americans), is a testament to just how entrenched that narrative has become.
Even if those other perspectives would provide a truer, more complete picture.
"Revisionist history," see, is not the cuss word some make it, but simply history better and more fully illuminated. The great irony here is at the same time Juneteenth finally was given full recognition as an American holiday, state legislatures, fleeing from the Critical Race Theory bogeyman, are passing laws that would continue to whitewash the narrative Juneteenth represents.
And who benefits from that?
Not our children, certainly. And not our history.
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