The Boston Red Sox won the baseball World Series in 1918 but they didn’t win another one until 2004. The Red Sox traded their star player, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees in order to raise money for an investment in a Broadway show. It is commonly believed that this transaction was the source of a curse that the Red Sox labored under during many years of failure. The appeal of this legend is quite obvious, but a case can be made that Boston’s curse results from a far greater sin.

Contrary to popular belief, baseball did not desegregate overnight when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In fact, the Negro League teams lasted until the early 1950s and many major leagues had no black players until the late 1950s.

The Boston Red Sox have the dubious distinction of being the last major league baseball team to sign a black player. A Red Sox scout even passed up the chance to watch the young Willie Mays play. In 1959 Elijah “Pumpsie” Green became the first black man to wear a Red Sox uniform. Green wasn’t even a good player. When the Red Sox made history they did so grudgingly. If it is true that the Red Sox were cursed, perhaps it is the curse of Pumpsie Green, not Babe Ruth.

Honest discussions of the history of racism in the northern United States are rare. Massachusetts’ history isn’t Mississippi’s, but that is damning with faint praise. Massachusetts played a key role in the history of American slavery. Not only did New England states have a substantial slave population, but their leading families, such as the Boston Faneuils and Browns of Brown University, earned their wealth from the human cargo in the holds of slave ships.

Massachusetts gave us a Thanksgiving holiday created to give thanks for genocide of the first Americans. Boston’s fights over school desegregation were among the worst in the nation. The ugliness of racism in that city was personified in the photo of a white mob using an American flag to attack a black man during an anti-busing demonstration.

Massachusetts’ Republican Governor Mitt Romney has shamefully resurrected a racist statute to fight gay marriage. A court decision made gay marriage legal in that state but the governor found a way to keep the Bay State from being a nationwide magnet for gays with family values.

The law, passed in 1913, does not allow non-Massachusetts residents to marry there if the union would not be legal in their home state. The law was enacted to keep interracial couples from the south from marrying there.

How many legally married interracial couples lived anywhere in America in 1913? Were hordes of them going to inundate Massachusetts? There certainly were not enough for anyone to have given them a second thought, but the proper Bostonians of the early twentieth century didn’t want to take any chances that mixed race couples would pull up stakes and head to their bastion of enlightenment. Governor Romney is surely reveling in the Red Sox victory, but he doesn’t realize that the worst curses result when wrong is called right.

Baseball history notwithstanding, Boston is no more cursed than the rest of the country. America is cursed because it believes itself to be morally superior when it is anything but. That self deception explains howls of indignation when 1,000 Americans are killed in Iraq, but a deafening silence when it is revealed that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed by Americans.

Speaking of American curses, the curse of sanctioned police violence is alive and well. Police violence is meant to kill black men, but those curses can behave strangely. They become uncontrollable and kill unintended victims.

When Boston defeated their arch rival New York Yankees in the American League pennant, a white, female college student was killed by police when a pepper spray projectile hit her in the eye. The young woman was innocently reveling in the victory with her friends, and yet she ended up dead. Curses do boomerang.

The Boston lesson is this. The behavior of the worst among us should never become a standard of measurement. A Massachusetts liberal shouldn’t be given a pass. Anyone who fits that description should be judged by the highest standards, not by the lowest. The demands should be just as stringent and the protest should be just as loud if he forgets himself and acts as the yahoos do.

Actually, if Governor Romney has his way Massachusetts will be as wretched as the less exalted regions. He is attempting to reinstate the death penalty in a state with one of the lowest murder rates in the nation. That is another problem with curses. They only get worse when they aren’t acknowledged. If Bostonians aren’t careful, the Red Sox will go another 86 years without a World Series victory, and half of the population will have been killed by the police.

Of course, they can just own up to their history and resolve to do the right thing. On that day, no one will be cursed any longer.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in   Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City.  She can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected]. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/

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