The Atlanta Racists' Championship Parade Will Be In Two "Phases", One In The Mostly White Suburbs & One In The City Where Many Darker-Skinned Fans Reside

The Atlanta Racists will have their Championship Parade on Friday, November 5.

According to this blog:

The parade route will begin at the corner of Marietta Street NW and Peachtree Street and travel North up Peachtree to 10th Street. The second phase of the parade will then continue through Cobb County on Cobb Parkway, beginning at the corner of Riverwood Parkway and culminating at Circle 75 Parkway.

Craig Calcaterra (Cup of Coffee) notes that the above details of these "two separate – but equal, I'm sure! – parade routes" are "pretty damn telling":

. . . one in the city they left a few years ago but whose name they retain for marketing purposes, one for the suburb they have used as a piggybank/white flight haven and which they presently call home.

How on-brand is it for the club which moved out of Atlanta because it did not think its white suburban fans wanted to go into a majority-Black city for baseball games to hold two separate parades so that they did not have to even travel into the city for one morning lest they feel unsafe?

A recent CNN article about the team and its relationship to the citizens of the greater Atlanta area quoted Rev. Michael Clayton Harris, who described his experience at a recent baseball game as sitting in an overwhelmingly white crowd in a predominantly white suburb while a soundtrack of mostly rock and country music played over the sound system.

When you go to the game, it has a Trump feel to it with the fan base.

The perception in Atlanta is that the basketball Hawks and the football Falcons are the "Black teams" and the baseball team is the "white team". CNN's John Blake observed:

The crowds for Falcons and Hawks games, in the city's downtown, are filled with Black and brown faces. But the throngs of Braves fans who passed through on their way to Turner Field were noticeably whiter. And some White fans looked palpably nervous as I watched them navigate Black crowds on their way into the Hawks' arena and Falcons' stadium.

Bruce Levenson, the former majority owner of the Hawks, sold his interest in the team in 2014 after some of his emails to other Hawks executives were made public. In one, Levenson said blacks attending Hawks games had "scared away the whites". As Robert Weintraub (Slate) wrote:

This message that the Hawks owner apologized for delivering – that white fans are more valuable than black ones – is the exact one the Atlanta Braves have been broadcasting for the last several years.

The baseball team's 2017 decision to move to a smaller ball park in mostly white, suburban Cobb County was an echo of "white flight", the mass migration in the 1950s and 1960s of white people from racially or ethnoculturally diverse areas to more homogeneous areas. 

In addition to the offensive nickname and vile racism, the team's new stadium deal forced Georgia taxpayers (without their consent) to be on the hook for about $400 million (the team screwed their fans by also raising ticket prices by 45%) in what Vice described as "an all-around train wreck of the highest order" that might be "the worst sports stadium deal ever". The Cobb County Commission approved the team's financial plan (and green-lighted the robbery of Georgia's taxpayers) by getting together in hallways to avoid holding actual meetings at which, by law, there had to be public debate.

How, then, do we compare [Atlanta's] deals to Arlington, Texas's plan to spend $500 million on a new Texas Rangers stadium (plus a bunch of free land and property tax breaks on parking lots, plus maybe even more money if the Rangers' revenues aren't enough to pay off their share of city bonds) just to get the team to move across the street from the last stadium Arlington built for them, a distant 22 years ago?

For that matter, does the Cobb County deal stand up to the nearly $1.2 billion dollars in public cash and tax breaks that the Steinbrenners are getting for the new Yankee Stadium right next to the grave of the old one -- crazy enough since the New York Yankees were never going to move out of New York and give up the cable TV windfall that comes with the territory, and crazier still when you consider that more than $300 million of that comes via a creative dodge to evade federal bond taxes, meaning Boston Red Sox fans helped pay to move the Bombers to the other side of a Bronx street.

 In short, the Atlanta team and MLB can fuck all the way off.

. . .

Braves Honor Native American Past With Deadly Forced Championship Parade To Oklahoma https://t.co/ISPrybOkOh pic.twitter.com/WDhqFxI7YB

— The Onion (@TheOnion) November 3, 2021