Jack Nicklaus' incomprehensible justification for supporting Trump proves that being a sports "icon" doesn't mean one is free from serious moral failings

 

As hard as it is for some of us to believe, there are people who because of their accomplishments in life we somehow expect to be similarly respectable in their political and social views. Some people regard Jack Nicklaus as the greatest professional golfer of all time. We rarely hear of his political and social views, so he seldom gave people reason to reconsider their putting him on his pedestal. But “heros” do on occasion let their fans down. In 2005 with the continuing success of Tiger Woods on the PGA tour, a reporter for a Vancouver, British Columbia newspaper asked Nicklaus why there were so few minority players on the tour, and if the PGA could do more to attract more minority golfers. This was a fair question to ask, given the golf’s reputation and history as a country club sport for privileged white people.

Nicklaus said “Blacks have different muscles that react in different ways” as a means of explanation for why he and other white golfers had no responsibility for opening up the game to young minorities by not playing at golf clubs that ban minorities. In fact he said he didn’t “buy” that he or other white golfers should do more to open up the game to minorities. Nicklaus only put his foot further in his mouth when he tried to “explain” his comments to Sports Illustrated:

"I said the kids today are gravitating to the sports that best fit their body and the environment where they're growing up. The white society to a large degree is becoming non-functional. (Whites are) spending time in cars, they're sitting behind desks, they're not out exercising, whereas the young black kid is in an environment where he is exercising. His muscles develop, and they develop to the degree of that type of sport. I think the opportunity is there for young black kids to play golf, just like the opportunity is there for young white kids to play basketball. But I don't think they're gravitating to the same level."

What made these comments so particularly out-of-touch was that Woods was burning up the golf world and leaving white players mostly in the dust. Maybe that is what he was afraid of; Woods had appeared on the Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2, and on That's Incredible at the age of 5, looking as if he could play better than most white adult amateur golfers. His father pushed him to learn to play golf at an early age; there were no “opportunities” there otherwise. Nicklaus could at least have been honest about the racist world that had spawned and supported his career. But that had been forgotten, until now when Nicklaus posted this on social media: 

 

I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this, given Nicklaus' aforementioned comments. If Trump has been attacked from “many directions,” it is because he deserved to be. Doing the “right thing” by the country? Is doing the “right thing” trying to take away a health care law that is the only thing that stands between us and insurance companies that will not provide affordable insurance to individuals or those with preexisting conditions? What has Trump actually done for “average” people? Nothing, but feed into paranoia and prejudices against immigrants; everything else he has done is to benefit those of his “class.” It wasn’t just “strong family values” that helped Nicklaus, but a 1940s and 50s society of white privilege that discriminated against minorities and denied them opportunities--the society that white nationalists who are Trump's most vocal supporters want to return to.

Nicklaus seems uncomprehending about how thinking people cannot look past Trump' insulting anyone who disagrees with him or his racist attacks on minority groups vulnerable to his bigoted, insular base. Most people may be loathe to call an “icon” like Nicklaus a racist, but it is difficult to reconcile his support of Trump’s racism unless there is an element of racial insensitivity in himself. It turns the stomach to read that he actually believes that this racist “loves” everyone in this country; Trump only “loves” those who share his insanity. The fact Nicklaus believes that far-right conspiracy theory that Democrats want to create a “socialist” society is despicable, and symptomatic of a person still very much defined by his rearing during a time of racial separation and an "us" against "them" culture.

It is appalling to believe that supposedly “intelligent” people can can look past the horribly real flaws of Trump and be completely blind to the division and hate that he  and he alone is responsible for and feasted on since he started that “birther” bullshit, and even before that with the Central Park Five case; today we learn that Trump and his ICE thugs are so eager to deport asylum seekers that they are simply tossing children without parents across the border without regard even to what country they actually came from.

This is the monster that Nicklaus is telling us to vote for. Don’t listen to this morally flawed individual, or anyone else who shares his skewed vision of the world that Trump has wrought.

If Trump is reelected, Stephen Miller is ready with a plan to make the right to discriminate an American "ideal"

 

We found out yesterday what Doctor Evil has in store for prospective asylum seekers, especially those with Spanish names, if Donald Trump is reelected: “In a 30-minute phone interview Thursday with NBC News, Stephen Miller outlined four major priorities: limiting asylum grants, punishing and outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, expanding the so-called travel ban with tougher screening for visa applicants and slapping new limits on work visas.”

TIME magazine recently published a story on the on-going Trump administration efforts to disguise its race-based immigration policies as “merit-based,” with “merit” being entirely based on educational and economic level, rather than labor need. The racists in the Trump administration do not seem to understand that when jobs in production and manufacturing go wanting, those are the first jobs that end up going overseas. Furthermore, every economist agrees that immigration at every level fuels economic growth; I mean, are “tech” people going to “demean” themselves by doing “essential” work?

But then again, Donald Trump, Tony Pham, Chad Wolf and Miller are not economists; they only care about their own personal bigotries, as do Trump’s mass of massively uninformed supporters. By the way, that 33 percent “record” quarterly growth that Trump is boasting about comes on the heels of that record 33 percent quarterly decrease in economic growth--which evens out to “0” growth. There were 750,000 new unemployment claims this past week--still higher than the highest pre-COVID high of 695,000 in one week in 1982.

TIME noted that the Trump administration--with the backing of the right-side of the U.S. Supreme Court--“gives U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers greater authority to deny certain green-card and visa applicants who have limited financial resources.” The Trump administration expanded “the definition of a public charge to include applicants relying on combinations of certain benefits like Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance for more than 12 months in a 36-month period, and even those whose circumstances suggest they may need aid in the future.”

Immigrants who apply for green cards after this past Feb. 24 “will be scored on their English, educational attainment, health and income. Factors like medical conditions could be weighed negatively against an applicant, while an income of at least 250 percent of the poverty line would be weighed in a household’s favor.” This is, of course, a standard that was never applied to the European “huddled masses” who came to populate this country--not even after the 1924 immigration law; the “public charge” rule was most stringently enforced during World War II to prevent war refugees--particularly Jews--from immigrating to the U.S.

And for those whose knowledge of American history is fuzzy, the 1929 amnesty law for the millions of Europeans who were illegally in this country after 1924--the larger number from Italy--was eventually extended to 1948, allowing many millions of Europeans illegally in the country to remain.

TIME points out that the insidious nature of the new rules: “While just 27 percent of recent green-card holders from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand would have had two or more negative factors, 60 percent of recent green-card holders from Central America and Mexico would have as many.”

Europeans and Australians are not breaking down doors to immigrate to the U.S., but “high-wage” immigrants on H-1B visas are being welcomed with outstretched arms, the majority of them from India. Most educated Indians speak English to varying degrees, mainly a legacy from the British colonial period when--because of the size of the population--the British needed to employ millions as civil servants to help run the country, so they already have that “merit” in their favor.

But as I talked about in a previous post and what The Washington Post reported on in the past week, some of what is being brought to America is not only not “meritorious,” but goes against the grain of what this country allegedly stands for: that all persons are created equal in the eyes of the law, and deliberate discrimination is illegal:

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.”

 Of course if you are not white or a high-caste Indian--like, say, black or Hispanic, you might also have “problems.” The Post continues:

Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by White and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another type of discrimination to fester. And Dalit engineers like Kaila say U.S. employers aren’t equipped to address it. In more than 100 job interviews for contract work over the past 20 years, Kaila said he got only one job offer when another Indian interviewed him in person. The legacy of discrimination from the Indian caste system is rarely discussed as a factor in Silicon Valley’s persistent diversity problems.

A group of Dalit female engineers filed a lawsuit against a half-dozen tech companies charging that they tolerated caste discrimination that has a familiar ring to it: “We also have had to weather demeaning insults to our background and that we have achieved our jobs solely due to affirmative action. It is exhausting. We are good at our jobs and we are good engineers. We are role models for our community and we want to continue to work in our jobs. But it is unfair for us to continue in hostile workplaces, without protections from caste discrimination.”

The Post notes that the “tech industry has grown increasingly dependent on Indian workers,” although some dispute that there are not enough American workers to fill these jobs, and charge that Indian managers prefer to hire other Indians and make inflated requests for work visas, rather than hire Americans they consider “difficult.” Large tech companies do not typically distinguish between East and South Asians in its diversity reports, and certainly have made no effort to distinguish Indian workers by caste, while allowing it to fester in practice. Most Dalits in this country do not attempt to make too many waves in regard to the discrimination that most Americans find difficult to believe exists, since Indians are “all the same” to them; but nothing could be further from the truth. Like any race-based society, Dalits are usually darker-skinned than “higher” caste Indians, and this usually is the first thing that exposes them when they try to conceal their position in the caste system.

The Post also reported that caste discrimination was a problem identified by Microsoft back in 2006:

Internal Microsoft emails from 2006 obtained by The Post indicate that caste bias is a long-standing problem within the industry. That year,after the Indian government announced affirmative action measures for marginalized castes, a debate broke out on a company thread about whether the bar was being lowered for Dalit candidates and about their inherent intelligence and work ethic. HR intervened but only to temporarily shut down the thread.

No employee was disciplined for this, and “If anything, it’s probably gotten worse since then because of the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister, whose administration has tried to roll back protections for Dalits, according to one anti-discrimination activist. ‘A lot of the previously repressed ideas, now South Asians feel more emboldened to say it out loud.’” A lawsuit currently against Cisco by a Dalit worker is hoping to become the first case to recognize caste discrimination in the private sector, according to The Post.

Furthermore, “Indian engineers said they did not always trust that Americans would comprehend the power dynamics underlying caste oppression. In interviews, many Indian engineers referenced journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents which argues that treatment of black people in the United States is the result of a caste-based hierarchy”; “caste” is not merely based on skin color, but is a “system” where certain groups or “ethnicities” whose classification by”occupation” and social “position” has been cut in stone over hundreds--if not thousands--of years of practice, and that is what we are “importing” to this country.

So, what we see here is that the Trump administration is not only practicing deliberate discrimination in its immigration policies, it is welcoming into this country the practice of discrimination by those it regards as having more “merit” than others. As I pointed out before, some groups in this country have fought discrimination and prejudice for centuries, and now the country is “importing” more of it--and not just from India, of course, but from East Asian countries unused to “diverse” societies and do not understand the concept of equal opportunity. The Trump administration’s discriminatory immigration policy is thus causing more harm than most people realize--not just in matters of race and numbers, but the values this country allegedly stands for, and the precepts of the rights enumerated in the Constitution.