Though she is the 18th girl to play in the Little League World Series, Mo’ne Davis is singular. She set popular media outlets ablaze by riding her 70 mph fastball to a complete game shutout in her team’s series opener, prompting a series of talk show invitations and endorsement requests. At only 13, she has far surpassed her female Little League predecessors in both achievement and notoriety. But while the public conversation has elevated her celebrity, it has focused far too much on her gender while downplaying her objective talent and success.
With Davis’s team now eliminated, the major news outlets’ coverage of her rise merits review. Headlines alone are sufficient to establish the pattern of the many Davis-centric stories. The New York Times published a story on Aug. 21 called “Mo’ne Davis, A Woman Among Boys at the Little League World Series.” CNN released an article on Aug. 25 entitled “Mo’ne, sweet revenge for yesterday’s sidelined girls.” And, most embarrassing (and trivial) of all, the Huffington Post issued a piece with the headline “Mo’ne Davis Can Dominate Boys on the Basketball Court Too” on Aug. 26.
The above titles are not only regrettable for shifting the focus away from Davis’s electric pitch repertoire and six inning masterclass in favor of passé girl power stereotypes; they also illustrative how general media coverage of gender and minority success stories only perpetuate inequality. News outlets treating the success of a female athlete — whether it’s Mo’ne Davis, Danica Patrick or Billie Jean King — in a male sporting event as a novelty only ensures that the general populace continues to view it as such, thereby defeating any gender equality progress otherwise achieved.
Those on opposite sides of the political spectrum are perpetually at loggerheads over whether America has advanced beyond gender and racial prejudice, or whether it still has pervasive problems in those areas. One thing is clear — when mass media discussion of minority triumphs assumes the tenor of the Davis stories, proponents of both arguments lose credibility. Those who aim to rectify perceived lingering prejudices hurt their cause by magnifying the minority aspect of racial and gender success stories, ergo painting them as rarities in the public’s eye. Others who claim that American race and gender biases are bygone belie their assertion simply by calling attention to the race or gender of a public figure in their treatment of a minority success story. A society cannot transgress gender and racial boundaries by continually redefining them, nor can it truly be rid of them if they are perpetual topics of conversation.
Davis is not the only highly accomplished public figure to elude a merit-based appraisal due to a general focus on her minority variable. The professional and academic pedigrees of President Barack Obama were largely overlooked during his 2008 campaign. Major outlets instead opted to fixate on the implications of his bid to become America’s first African-American president, novelizing that prospect and perpetuating the political racial divide. To this day, most do not know that Jackie Robinson won an MVP award and had a lifetime batting average above .300, as every mention of him relates to his breaking baseball’s color barrier. Countless other examples abound.
Mo’ne Davis deserves to be remembered as a dominant pitcher with a phenomenal arm, not as a girl who beat up on boys against all odds. We do our society a disservice and exacerbate cultural divisions by emphasizing these attributes over others.