Satellite

My family wasn't big on professional sports when I was growing up. If my father had any favorite sports teams, I wasn't aware of them, and my own interest in sports was somewhat borrowed from my peer group. Accordingly, I would like teams based on the colors of their uniforms or whether I liked the sound of their name. Being a native of Chicago, I eventually settled on being something approaching a fan of the White Sox, but living in the suburbs of Seattle, I cheered along with everyone else when the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. If I watch a game with friends, it's more about socializing with them than it is because I care about what's happening on the field, court or rink.

The new season of Michael Lewis' Against the Rules podcast is about sports fandom, now that he's finished with the Sam Bankman-Fried story, and I was listening to the first episode. I found it informative, mainly because I (like, I suspect, a lot of people who aren't sports fans) think of fans as being randomly crazy but don't give it much thought outside of that. But if this first episode is any indication, it's going to be an interesting look into the dynamics of group identification.

My own group identities tend to be rather weak. While some three-quarters of Black Americans "say being Black is very or extremely important to how they think about themselves" I'm in the other quarter. Being a transplant to the Seattle area, I don't identify strongly with it. And while I, like most people, have a clear partisan lean in my voting behavior, I don't have a real partisan identity.

Being content in these rather distant orbits, I haven't taken the time to understand why other people find their much closer connections to their chosen groups important to them. With any luck, Mr. Lewis has done this work for me. I look forward to finding out.

Stand-Ins

It's a familiar story; a media company takes a property that has a large and devoted fan base, makes some or other change designed mainly to appear to modern sensibilities, a bunch of said fan base becomes upset, and this is taken as proof of their hatefulness on the part of those fans. Whether its a Black elf in The Rings of Power, or Scooby Doo's Velma Dinkley crushing on a girl, the pattern is always pretty much the same.

So as to not have any elephants in the room, I'm going to mention that when racial or sexual minorities are recast as straight White people, any anger is considered justified. But that's not really what I'm concerned with here.

What I'm interested in is the switch from this being considered "tokenism" to being "representation." Personally, I'm old, and so a lot of these instances still feel like tokenism to me. I find them lazy, mainly because they take advantage of the fact that so many fans are desperate to see someone like themselves in certain media properties that companies can rack up points more or less instantly with these sorts of insertions, which don't call for actually doing any of the world or character-building work that building these sort of characters would normally entail. Granted, in some instances, it can be made to make sense. In the various iterations of the Scooby Doo franchise, the characters have always been more or less sexless, only the Cartoon Network crossover with Johnny Bravo having any indication that the characters even knew was sex was, let alone had active attractions to other human beings. The various Scooby Doo shows were, after all, children's television, and any mention of sexuality tended to be strictly verboten. This is what made Cartoon Network's winking nods funny, the absurdity of adult characters being so chaste as to be effectively neuter.

Of course, the problem is that while there are minority and queer elements to many fandoms, they aren't particularly large. In the nearly 30 years since Milestone Media was founded, its comic universe has barely made a peep. Only one character, Static Shock, managed to find any mainstream success, and, if my last trip to a comic-book store is any indication, he's faded back into obscurity. I know that I, as a Black comic book fan, didn't find the characters to be particularly compelling. For me, the miss was that they were Black super-heroes, rather than being Black super-heroes. Sure, Marvel and DC tended to trade in tired tropes and stereotypes in their characters, but at least the things the characters were doing were worth reading.

But I'm an outlier in that sense; questions of Black identity, and the difficulties of fitting those questions into a world with superhumans in it don't really intrigue me. But there are, from what I understand, a lot of people for whom those sorts of stories are supposed to be compelling. Why were they not buying these comics?

There is a part of me that sees various groups seeking representation, even in small ways, in popular media properties, not because they want to see themselves, but because they want other people to see them. Legacy media properties have built-in audiences who are going to see a Black elf in Tolkien's Middle Earth, or a bisexual/lesbian Velma in Scooby Doo.

In in a situation like that, a new character, or a new franchise, simply doesn't have the pull required. Black people may not have purchased Milestone titles in large numbers, but White comic fans could be forgiven for never even knowing the company existed. This made their titles poor vehicles for increasing the audience for Black characters.

It's going to be a while before the people in various media properties are allowed to simply be people, in all of their disparate traits and confusing contradictions. Right now, many of them are being pressed into service as ambassadors, in the sense that they are not only representations of various groups, but also the representatives of those groups. Personally, I find it an awkward fit, and I look forward to when it doesn't seem so forced.

Avoided

So was reading a piece about The Black Panther that included the following:

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored.

As much as I understand that I cannot access what so many other people hold so dearly, to call it The Void seems pretentious in the extreme. Mainly because I perceive no such yawning chasm in my life. And while this may be due to an indifference to what would lie on the other side, it also strikes me that many other people live with this same sort of phenomenon without seeing themselves as desperately incomplete.

As I understand the world, The Void is a function of an American (although likely not limited to the United States) concept that centers identity as much, if not more, on prior generations, than the here and now. In other words, people are understood to be not simply the product, but a continuation, of some arbitrary number of prior generations into the past, depending on when they finally lose interest in their genealogy. And while it's true that for many Black people in the United States, the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed their ability to trace their family trees back as far as they might like, we are not the only people in this boat. There are any number of people, whom, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to trace their family trees back as far as they might prefer. And in areas where genealogy is less important to identity, they don't perceive a yawning darkness where their understanding of their selves should be.

In the end, I realize that my own lack of perception of The Void comes from the fact that genealogy wasn't a big deal in my family. The focus was more on the present. My parents never spoke of their grandparents and to this day, I don't know my mother's birth father's name. He may as well have never existed. Being cut off from much closer generations in this way meant that my identity didn't extend much beyond my own parents. And while some people would clearly see this as a loss, I view it as a benefit, if for no other reason than it leaves me unwounded, psychically or culturally, by The Void.

Women and Men

I was reading Peter Beinart's The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism at The Atlantic, and something stood out for me. A quarter, or maybe a third, of the way into the column, Mr. Beinart makes the following observation: "But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists."

While this is a common formulation, it misses something important - a definition of "equal." And that omission is important, because equal doesn't mean the same thing to all people, as I often find when I discuss Steven Pinker's social trilemma; that a society cannot be simultaneously "fair," "free" and "equal." Oftentimes, people are adamant that a society can be simultaneously "fair," "free" and "equal." And they can demonstrate that this is true - they just have to use different definitions of "fair," "free" and/or "equal" than Mr. Pinker himself does.

One of the things that I find separates the stereotypical Liberal from the stereotypical Conservative understanding of equality is the degree to which it is correlated with identicalness. The stereotypical Liberal position tends to posit a very high degree of correlation between the two. For instance, despite the common wisdom on the gender wage gap, many detailed analyses tend to place the overall difference at a few pennies, once you start controlling for certain factors. And in many cases, even that remaining difference comes down to flexibility in work - that is that people who require flexibility in their working hours tend to earn slightly less than people who have their schedules dictated to them, even when doing the same work. While it's relatively easy to see how this might be a workable trade-off, for some people, pay is equal only when paychecks are identical. If that means robbing people of some flexibility or making others effectively pay for flexibility they don't need, then so be it.

While the stereotypical Conservative idea that men and women are different, yet complementary and equally important parts of a greater whole is seen in some sectors as simply a cover for entrenched sexism, it makes perfect sense to them, likely because many things in the world work this way. Generally speaking, we understand that two things can be equal, without always being identical. A simple example would be two cars. We can understand that two cars can have the same feature sets, gas mileage and price, yet be easily distinguishable from one another.

To be sure, an article on whether partisanship has an impact on views of gender equality may not be the best place to hash out what has been a contentious argument on exactly what makes two people "equal." But it's still worthwhile to recognize the idea that not everyone defines equality identically. Simply writing off the Republican understanding of what it means to be "equal," in favor of the Democratic one doesn't make the argument any stronger. It simply shows a substantial portion of the population that they aren't being listened to.

Transdefinitional

For people who are trans, or who express their gender in non-stereotypical ways, gender is part of their personhood. When the parents and kids of William Fremd High School tell a student who identifies as female that she is a “biological male,” that is a denial of who she says she is.
Emma Green. “America’s Profound Gender Anxiety”

There have always been conflicts between who we say we are, and who other people say we are. Gender and transgenderism are simply the current battlefront in the fight over which of the two viewpoints is more “real.” And it's worth keeping in mind that people can come down on one side of that in some areas, and the other side in different areas. While it's often considered rude to the point of hatefulness to contradict someone's self-identified view of their gender, consider the following statement: When people tell Rachel Dolezal that she is “White,” that is a denial of who she says she is. Is that any less true than the quote that I lead off with? If not, why is being “transracial” any less a thing than being transgendered? Especially given the widely held idea that “race” is more a social construct than a biological one. Why is race something to be imposed upon a person by accident of birth in a way that gender is not? Is allowing someone to freely chose their race really that much more threatening? How long will we consider those who see themselves as something different be labeled fools or even obscene?

Not forever, I suspect. Although now, the politics of race do not align in the same way as the politics of gender, it seems unwise to presume that it will always be that way. For right now, race is something that one cannot own - it may not be legitimately given away in favor of one that better suits one's understanding of oneself. But we would have been nearly unanimous in saying the same of gender not too terribly long ago.

When we will see more similarity on social views on such issues is not for me to say. I could speculate, but there's little profit in it. But it’s likely that the battle will move from place to place, as people seek more and more to have society bow to their definitions of themselves, rather than being made to bow to society’s definition of them.

Identified

Somewhere along the line street culture became confused with black culture, which became confused with black (and, to some extent, Latino) identity, which created a set of expectations that dooms many young people to mediocrity, that makes them, in short, become the "knuckleheads" who get Cosby so riled up.
Ellis Cose Does Cosby Help? Newsweek. December 26th, 2004

(Now that Bill Cosby has fallen from grace, and is perhaps on his way to becoming a convict, one wonders if anyone will take up his crusade to separate street culture from Black identity, or if it will be indelibly tainted by the current public perception of him.)

Not having been brought up in a Black (or even really integrated) neighborhood, I grew up with an understanding of Black identity that was based entirely on skin - my Black identity was the result of the fact that people identified me as Black. The idea that you would need to actually do anything, or behave a certain way, to be true to that identity then, struck me as weird. It wasn't until my father decided that I was going to attend a Historically Black College/University that I began to understand there was a difference between being Black and Being Black. (Which is, to be sure, part of the reason why my father decided that I was going to an HBCU in the first place. That, and I wasn't a good enough student to have any chance at an Ivy League school.) Unsurprisingly, I wasn't any good at Being Black, and my classmates let me know that in no uncertain terms.

Not being terribly familiar with street culture or broader black culture, I wouldn't have told you that the two were converging. Instead, I experienced it as a rejection of things considered White. Which was something of a problem, because the way I spoke, the way I interacted and the way I looked at life in general had all been shaped by growing up in a nearly entirely White neighborhood in a predominantly White suburb. Predictably, there was conflict, and I viewed things in much the same way Ellis Cose did - the people who were so put out by my supposed Whiteness were dooming themselves to lives of mediocrity by rejecting the things that allowed people to be successful in life.

As I grew older, I came to realize that this was the wrong way to look at it. While many of my classmates viewed me as a sellout, there was a subtext there, that I don't think that any of us were self-aware enough to understand at the time. As far as they were concerned, I was the one destined for mediocrity, because I was insisting on playing a game that was openly rigged against me. The fact that I "spoke White" and "acted White" simply meant that I'd be allowed to have scraps from the table of people who, while they may have been flattered at my imitation of them, were never going to see me as one of them.

The "knuckleheads" that Bill Cosby referred to were people who looked at the world around them and saw people like him, and me, for that matter, as losers who didn't realize that playing someone else's game was a fool's errand. They didn't see themselves as mediocre, because they simply rejected the idea that the judgements were the same for all people. They'd created their own set of norms, and sought to be the best they could at them. Despite the charges of classmates, I'd never bought into "respectability politics." I simply acted in a way I'd become accustomed to acting; in the same way that they likely hadn't consciously bought into identity politics.

Looking back on it, although it was a miserable freshman year of school, I sort of wish that I could experience parts of it again, so that I could better see and understand the competing forces at work. And maybe better explain it to others. For while many people don't make a distinction between excelling at something different and being mediocre at the things that matter, maybe it's that very outlook that's the root of the problem.

Bridge-Building

I can see how it seemed like a stupid question.

"Do you think it’s fair that Hillary’s hair gets a lot more scrutiny than yours does?" interviewer Ana Marie Cox asked.
"Hillary’s hair gets more scrutiny than my hair? Is that what you're asking?" Sanders clarified, before asking Cox whether she had any "serious questions."
Here's Bernie Sanders' Response To A Question About Hillary Clinton's Hair

But it WAS a "serious question," even if somewhat inelegantly asked. It's the serious question of whether or not Hillary Clinton in specific, and female candidates for elective office in general, are given a fair hearing in most media outlets and by the public.

I can defend that as a serious question. There is a gendered reason —
When the media worries about what Hillary’s hair looks like or what my hair looks like, that’s a real problem. We have millions of people who are struggling to keep their heads above water, who want to know what candidates can do to improve their lives, and the media will very often spend more time worrying about hair than the fact that we’re the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people.

It’s also true that the media pays more attention to what female candidates look like than it does to what male candidates look like.
That may be. That may be, and it’s absolutely wrong.
Bernie Sanders Has Heard About That Hashtag

While Senator Sanders may feel that "it’s absolutely wrong" for media outlets to pay more attention to the appearance of female candidates than male candidates, and his supporters may feel that the line of questioning reveals Ana Marie Cox to be "another tool who has no idea what journalism is" or the media to be "trying everything they can to 'gotcha' him," what stood out for me is what may shape up to be the primary problem for the Sanders campaign - being so wedded to the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats that they miss the fact that some of those boats may not be in the water. The United States joining the club nations that have some form of guaranteed health care is not going to change the fact that women are expected to look after their appearances and lose certain social benefits (known as "the Makeup Tax" for not doing so.

The current disconnect between the Sanders campaign (and Sanders supporters) and the Black Lives Matter movement falls along similar lines. Shifting income and wealth away from the 1%, or the .1%, may pay dividends for the 40% of African-American children that Sanders identifies as being in poverty, but it won't, in and of itself, put an end to the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement - or the idea that Black America brought this sad state of affairs on themselves due to rampant criminality and an eschewing of "character and values." After all, people are just as capable of judging the wealthy by the color of their skin (or their gender) as they are the poor.

After the first debate between the majority of Republican candidates, Sanders referred to them as "out of touch" because they didn't place issues like Citizens United vs. FEC or student loan debt front and center in the moderated forum. But Sanders himself comes across as only speaking to the issues that are important to certain constituencies after very public confrontations. And his supporters are often critical of those who feel that Senator Sanders doesn't speak to their concerns, holding him up as self-evidently the best chance that those concerns have of being addressed.

If Senator Sanders does become the Democratic nominee for President, it's unlikely that Black and/or women voters would consciously decide to withhold their support. But an enthusiasm gap can be just as damaging. To bridge it, I think that the Senator will have to learn to understand both the issues that various groups find important, and how they talk about them. And he does have time. But he doesn't have forever.