Leave it to Baseball to Create a Racial Controversy Where the Most Common of Sense Could Tell You That One Doesn't Exist

Cubs investigating fan's alleged white power hand gesture, threaten lifetime ban

Details ➡️ https://t.co/8FOwnmLxmF

(□ via @Flipkin) pic.twitter.com/geBdXYAX7e

— Yahoo Sports MLB (@MLByahoosports) May 8, 2019

In the same vein of "me thinks the lady doth protest too much", the MLB being so overly sensitive to racial issues that they mistakenly manufacture them (See: Tim Anderson's suspension for using the n-word towards a white pitcher) where they otherwise wouldn't exist truly speaks to a harrowing history of pale players being preferable. They are like a dog owner repeatedly stepping in old shit that's spent decades festering because they failed to do an adequate job picking it up the first time, if said old shit was actually just the aftermath of an entire extensive era of dehumanizing segregation. 

Granted, I could totally see the Tiki torch types being incredibly unoriginal in adopting the long-standing sign language of six year olds as their call to frail and fearful arms, but does Wrigley Field not have WiFi? My sense happens to be quite common so I've never had to look it up, but I'd imagine you'd need not more than one single Google search to learn that a gesture so harmless that it has it's own goddamn emoji on Apple products has no legitimate affiliation with actual white supremacists. Personally, I would think said gesture would be universally understood as part of the decidedly non-discriminatory circle game by now. That said, even if it's not, assuming that an 'a-okay' sign ironically stands for intolerance solely because it's being shown over the shoulder of an African American analyst makes the Cubs, above anyone else, look bad. 

I suppose there's about a 1-3% chance that a fan who purchased a front row seat tried (and, more importantly, failed) to pledge his allegiance to the Aryan Nation once he got within a black man's camera shot. Theoretically, it's not impossible that was moronically meant to be a proud display of prejudice. In execution, however, no one with a brain capable of spelling 'context clues' saw it as such. Therefore, even if the person who flashed it was being racist, he doesn't even deserve the publicity of an investigation aimed at outing him as a racist because he flat out stinks at being racist if he got trolled by fellow racists into using a non-racist gesture for racist purposes. 

​If he wanted to show a little courage and conviction in his caucasity then he'd deal with the repercussions of showing up behind home plate in a pointed white hood next game. Until he does, I'm just going to assume that he was innocently messing with the television audience, like hundreds of thousands of teens before him, regardless of the skin color of the person from which they happened to be receiving insight at the time.