Chicago's Jackie Robinson West Little League Team Deserves Better Than Lawyers Blaming Racism

We have real racism. Serious problems that keep producing horrific results. Deaths. And we look for answers or just some evidence—even if it's just symbolic—that things can get better, that it doesn't have to be like this.

That's what Chicago's Jackie Robinson West Little League team meant to this city, my city, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country: a team of African-American kids won the Little League national championship, which is portrayed as the seat of Americana. Heart and confidence had faded in Chicago when news images of black children always involved pools of blood.

Spike Lee is making a movie here this summer about black-on-black murders on Chicago's South Side. The film's title? Chiraq.

Last August, the entire city fell in love with the Jackie Robinson West team as they won the championship. The entire city. Kids playing baseball. They told such a story of community and togetherness, even love. Of course, our politicians sidled up to take pictures.

And when it turned out that the grown-ups around the team had brought in all-stars from other communities, ringers against Little League's eligibility rules? Well, the team was stripped of its title, of course, but Chicago didn't blame the kids. Chicago clung to the warm feelings.

On Wednesday, team officials ruined it all. They announced they were suing Little League to get the championship back. And that was all fine, as far as the messy, litigious business of adult life goes, right until team attorney Victor Henderson also said, "Do I think race is at play? Yes, I do think race is at play.''

Look, we have real racism. Real racism, structural and systemic, historical and current. We have it in Chicago and we have it in America. To ignore or downplay it is madness. But to get caught cheating and then cry racism, cynically leveraging society's real problems and our culture's real pathologies for public relations purposes, just to get people on your side?

That is the worst, most divisive kind of claim.

It's a little hard to see what the team is arguing now. Henderson seems to be saying that Little League International officials and Jackie Robinson West had already had discussions before the World Series about whether the kids were eligible. And once the kids were allowed to play, that should have been the end of it.

There also is the sense that other teams have cheated in the same way. So maybe the complaint is in why this team is being singled out. And maybe all of that is fair game for a lawsuit.

But this team is not the victim of racism. It was simply caught cheating. The evidence was overwhelming and required action. To use these kids this way after what they meant is ruinous. The kids just wanted to play baseball, and even though they did it on the South Side in a black neighborhood—maybe because they did it that way—they brought a whole city together and raised spirits more than anyone could have imagined.

Henderson wouldn't even say in the press that team officials didn't cheat. "We're not here to tell you that no mistake were made," he said.

So what is it, then?

"We want to make sure that when mistakes were made, we're being treated like everybody else, according to the rules.''

Treated like everyone else? Bullshit. Sounds like another racism claim, albeit more subtle. There are rules. The team broke the rules. There are consequences.

On Wednesday, the reporter who broke the news and found the evidence that Jackie Robinson West was cheating, Mark Konkol of DNAinfo.com, was escorted from the premises of Henderson's press conference. The team didn't want him there. Meanwhile, Henderson talked about wanting to know more about who turned in the team—unsurprisingly, it was a guy who runs a competing team—and who made the decision at Little League to take away the title.

For what purpose? Team officials cheated. It doesn't matter who caught them. And the truth is, this fight isn't necessary. It won't bring back anything. A trophy doesn't mean anything at all. Chicago already accepts these kids as champions.

You should have seen that parade and rally last August. It started at the team's home field on the South Side and went along for roughly 70 blocks, mostly along Halstead Street, with kids waiting on the curb outside of schools, then old people sitting on chairs outside senior centers, then daycare workers and kids, and it went all the way to downtown, where tens of thousands of people, including plenty of business people in suits over lunch break, waited at Millennium Park. No matter where that parade went, what the community looked like from block to block, the excitement was the same.

"There aren't many parades down Halsted Street; none in my memory,'' Illinois appeals court justice Terrance J. Lavin told me that day, as I wrote about the team for The New York Times. Lavin grew up on the South Side playing Little League. And now in his job, he said at the time, he deals daily with "guns, gangs and drugs.''

"Remember when President Obama said that Trayvon Martin could be his son?'' Lavin said. "There are thousands of Chicagoans, white and black, thinking that about these amazing kids.

"They are medicine for a municipality dulled into a sort of crime stupor because of all the shootings. We are better than that. And these kids are a living, breathing symbol of that.''

In February, the team's title was stripped, as it had to be. It was using ineligible players and that wasn't fair to the teams it defeated, the ones that followed the rules. Still, Lavin and others kept their neighborhood pride. I wrote about the lost title for Rolling Stone, and Lavin told me, "It is a dirty shame, but sometimes adults make mistakes that wind up embarrassing kids. To me, it may sully the adults guilty of the malfeasance, but it does nothing to mar my view of those wonderful, jofyul and pure kids.''

And now, in the wake of the lawsuit and Henderson's accusations of racism?

"The great thing about this team and this story is how each managed to transcend the inevitable race card,'' Lavin told me Thursday. "It was an all-black team that was embraced by everybody. They are kids from intact families, coached by hard-working dads in a nice middle-class community full of hard-working people who were nonetheless bedeviled by drugs and violent crime.

"This was a story of transcendence. Now it's at the other side of the pendulum swing.''

Lavin reflects the evolution of people's thinking here in Chicago. He went from emotionally overjoyed to defending the kids to disappointment. I suspect most of the city has dropped a few levels below that.

"It's unfortunate to see the race card being pulled from the deck here,'' Lavin said. "Don't think for one minute that the racially intolerant haven't been fairly celebrating the team's troubles.

"The one thing that will never change for me is the joy that I felt in the achievement of these kids. Their pure youthful spirit is still in my heart despite the failings of their adult supervisors. They still made every pitch, hit every ball and caught every fly ball and grounder. They are still winners in my book.''

Jackie Robinson West visited the White House and met President Obama, played on ESPN, was cheered by an entire city. The team became community heroes, doing the incredibly important work of building a bridge that often seems a bridge too far. They played baseball and changed the world, or so felt in Chicago for at least a little while. Only now the adults seem determined to change it back, teach all the wrong lessons, exploit real racial problems to regain some silly trophy, show the city and the country that, sorry, but it does have to be like this. In doing so, they are throwing away the bigger prize. The one that already had been won.