Making a statement without saying anything
You know what happens when you try to please everyone? You do! And that's the end of the story forever.
The world is on fire, and for The Brands, it is time to step up. Time to let the people know exactly who they are, what they stand for, and what they think. Time to convince everyone that they’re not just corporations, they’re corporate citizens, here to live in the world with the rest of us and be a part of the healing process.
The Giants and their fellow baseball teams are no exceptions. The Giants released a statement on Sunday about current events, and boy, I hope it’s vague and mealy-mouthed!
This is, at best, perfunctory. This is an organization realizing that its fans expect to see a statement, so they are doing the absolute bare minimum that can be described as “a statement.”
“We don’t like racism,” the Giants are saying, as if an anti-racist statement carries any meaning beyond, “We as an organization are not entirely composed of avowed Neo-Nazis.” “We will support ending discrimination,” the Giants are saying, as if they’re not already doing that? What are they doing? What’s new here other than the team casually wagging its thumb towards Minneapolis and muttering, “Well, that sucks”?
Major League Baseball, after being criticized for days for having no official response, came up with a statement of their own, which was also, shall we say, subpar.
“We think that bad things are bad. We do not like those bad things. We will take unspecified actions against bad things. We will do a good job of this, and help end bad things.”
For a sport that parades its historic association with Jackie Robinson at every opportunity, MLB sure does pick its words carefully when it comes to today’s civil rights issues. Baseball made no real commitments to doing anything, didn’t list charities it would donate to, didn’t mention their opinion on whether black lives matter, didn’t hire marginalized voices or create any new positions, and didn’t even specifically name the thing — police violence against black people — that people are protesting. It’s nothing. What they provided was nothing.
And it took them three days to do it, meaning that when you finally did see that come across your timeline, it was in the wake of every other statement that you’d seen. It was the rich kid begrudgingly joining up with the nerds he’d definitely betray later because the script called for it. I’d say I don’t know why this exists, but that’s wrong: I do know why this exists, and I wish it weren’t so obvious that they said this because they thought they’d be criticized for not saying something.
Here it is! Here’s something. You’re welcome, everyone.
As much as I hate — absolutely hate it, like I find it abhorrent — to commend the Rays for doing something right, well, the Rays did something right that the Giants, the league office, and most other MLB teams didn’t.
They identified police brutality as a problem. They said that black lives matter. They supported the protesters. They pledged money every year (though admittedly have not yet said who the money will go to).
The Orioles did better too. They posted a tweet thread (only the first one is embedded below) that said what needed to be said:
There were ways to do this right. Yes, the Giants were among the first teams to release a statement, and you can praise them for that, but the content of that statement was sorely lacking. The man who owns more of the Giants than anyone else has gotten some headlines recently for giving money to Republicans with, uh, iffy records on race, so one would imagine that a more concrete statement would not have been to his liking. Even with presumably well-intentioned people in the organization, you can understand how this statement was the best they could do.
And yet, it’s not good enough. Not nearly, not close. It is nothing but hollow words, crafted carefully to avoid saying anything. It’s nice that the Giants wanted to be part of the conversation. It would have meant more if they’d actually said something.