Life & Wisdom Quote by Ishmael Reed

Reed’s line lands like a dirty joke told with a straight face: if America insists on treating ethnic life as a national pastime, then it also rigs the standings. Baseball isn’t just a metaphor here; it’s an American civic religion built on myths of fair play, merit, and “anyone can make it.” By dropping Black Americans into the role of the Chicago Cubs - a franchise long synonymous with lovable failure, cursed luck, and endless rebuilding - Reed punctures that fantasy. The wit is in the casualness: “a sort of contest like baseball,” as if this were all just sports talk, when the real subject is structural disadvantage masquerading as competition.

The subtext is about how pluralism gets reframed as a tournament. Ethnic groups are encouraged to perform identity, hustle for proximity to power, and measure progress in comparative, scoreboard terms: whose neighborhoods are “improving,” whose culture is “mainstreaming,” whose pain gets legible to the state. In that setup, Black people aren’t simply losing; they’re cast as the team everyone expects to lose, year after year, with failure explained away as tradition, temperament, or bad breaks rather than a league designed to keep them there.

Context matters: Reed, a central voice in post-1960s Black arts and political critique, spent decades skewering liberal pieties as well as conservative racism. The joke targets both. It mocks the sunny multicultural story that treats America as a level field while quietly normalizing Black dispossession as part of the game’s charm - heartbreak as heritage, injustice as entertainment.