Skip to main content
  1. Blog Archive/
  2. Sports Writing/

Jeter and racist mail

·1 min

I’m no fan of Derek Jeter (IMO a great offensive shortstop, mediocre defensive shortstop), largely due to the hagiography he gets - well, that, and he’s the face of the Yankees and all that. But this news about him getting racist hate mail is disgusting:

New York Yankees star Derek Jeter is the latest athlete to receive a threatening letter warning him to stop dating white women.

The letter was mailed to Jeter at Yankee Stadium and called him a “traitor to his race,” according to a story in Monday’s editions of the Daily News. It warned him to “stop or he’ll be shot or set on fire,” said a law enforcement source who the newspaper did not identify

Given that Jeter himself is the product of an interracial relationship, I’m not sure how dating a woman of the same ethnicity as his mother constitutes dating ‘outside’ his race - not that it should even matter in the first place. But then I don’t presume hate speech writers are very logical.

Come to think of it, I once made a short post on my main blog about Tiger Woods getting married, and I ended up getting a comment complaining that Tiger failed to “perpetuate the black family”.