"In this day and age, some would want us to believe that racism is a thing of the past. As a Native American, I know that not to be true and that disturbs me.

I attended my 12-year-old grandson’s baseball tournment this past weekend. We had a young man umpiring our game on Saturday, who I heard was director of umpires in the baseball league. He either didn’t know the rules concerning substitution or base running or didn’t care to be fair.

This next situation is what really upsets me. On Sunday, he was behind the plate again. At the start of the game, within earshot of one our young players who is Native American, a young boy who only wants to play ball and not fully aware of racism, the umpire states that he is not going to take anything from those (profanity) f------ redneck Indians.

With his racist attitude and lack of consideration for our youth, he should not be allowed to umpire any games anywhere. My anger was boiling when I was told what he had said. Most of us dads grew up with this type of racist attitude and had we been aware of it at the time, we would have dealt with it."

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Jim Jones: Baseball umpire shows racism is still around today (The Shawnee News-Star 4/19)