Here are the pertinent facts: 1) In 2021, a youth baseball nonprofit in Wichita, Kansas erected a life-sized bronze statue of Jackie Robinson—the player who broke the color barrier in major league baseball—in McAdam’s Park. 2) This year, on January 25th, after midnight, a couple of assholes cut that statue off at the ankles, loaded it onto a pickup, and drove off. There is surveillance footage of the vandalism and theft. 3) Five days later, the day before Jackie Robinson’s birthday, the Wichita Fire Department responded to a fire in Garvey Park and found the remains of the statue.

I’m appalled by this, but not terribly surprised. Open racism and hatred has become more common in the Trump era. And just to be clear, I’m not saying Trump himself is responsible for the hatred. I’m saying Trump essentially gave permission for existing racists to be more openly racist. Trump’s hate and rage made other racists feel comfortable in expressing their hate and rage.

What DOES surprise me, though, is the reluctance of so many people and so many news outlets to say what’s so plainly fucking obvious. Which is that this was clearly a hate crime. Local law enforcement officials haven’t offered an opinion about the vandals’ motive, but that’s essentially to protect any future prosecution. But how to you explain Bob Lutz, the director of League 42 (the nonprofit that installed the sculpture) saying, “Nobody can understand why this would happen.” Really, Bob? I think everybody can easily understand why it happened. Just ask around, Bob.

And then there’s Mike Freeman in USA Today. He wrote:

What happened? Was it a prank that went too far? Was it an act of racism? We don’t know yet.

We KNOW what happened. And Jesus suffering fuck, it was obviously NOT a goddamn prank. Since the two assholes involved haven’t been identified or arrested yet, we don’t have any direct admission that it was an act of racism. But given the fact that it was a statue of Jackie Robinson and that it was stolen and destroyed around his birthday, I think we’re pretty safe in saying there’s a really really really high probability that racism was the motive.

The statue will be replaced, of course. The money to replace it has already been raised. Although the original sculptor, John Parsons, is dead, the mold still exists and is viable. So the statue of Jackie Robinson will return. He’ll be back in McAdam’s Park, hand on hip, confident, smiling.

But the racism that destroyed the statue in Wichita still exists.

Here’s another ‘but.’ A more important ‘but.’ BUT there are at least seven other statues of Jackie Robinson scattered around the US.

Here’s the thing about statues of real people: they’re not really a celebration of that person. They’re actually an endorsement of the values that person stood for. That’s why we’ve been tearing down statues of Civil War generals. That’s why we’ve put up statues of Jackie Robinson.