Roberto Clemente on the Black/Brown Color Line

Abstract

When Afro-Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955, baseball writers identified him as another in a long line of Black stars remaking the game. When he died at the end of 1972, they remembered him as something else: a great Latin athlete. Clemente had traveled from Black to brown. Most historians trace the emergence of a panethnic Latinx identity to a post-civil rights convergence of social movements, federal agencies, and ethnic media organizations. But baseball had, by then, already introduced millions of fans to the concept of three mutually exclusive racial categories: Black, white, and brown. The national pastime led a shift from the Black/white binary of integration to the Black/brown binary of an uncritical multiculturalism that served, above all, the interests of white capital and management.