Heights

So I came upon a LinkedIn post this morning, extolling the achievements of LeBron James. I won't link to it, because this isn't meant to be a call-out, and the poster meant well. But what was intended to be praise for Mr. James for overcoming obstacles read like a litany of stereotypes about African-Americans, especially men. And some of them seemed nonsensical in context. Of course Mr. James didn't have a college education. He was a first round draft pick out of high school. I wouldn't have gone to college either of someone had instead offered me a professional job with six-figure salary. After all, my reason for going to college was get a good job.

Mr. James is an exceptionally skilled basketball player. He's also too tall to walk through my front door without stooping. That overcomes a lot.

But so does simply living life.

Lots of people grow up with single parents and little money. They don't go to college. They do go on to have productive lives. They don't have trouble with the law. They're good parents. No-one thinks that college courses should be taught about them. Because the majority of Black people are just people, who, for the most part, simply do their day-to-day under the radar.

Mr. James is different from most Black people (like myself, for instance) in the fact that he's married. And he's different from pretty much everybody in the fact that he's a top-tier professional athlete. And he appears to be good with money (or good at finding people to help him manage it); it would be surprising if he, a few years after retirement, was bankrupt, a fate more likely to befall athletes than the rest of the population.

In the end, I get it. Everyone loves a rags-to-riches story, especially one centered on a Good Guy and that's built on a lot of work, natural talent, good fortune and a bit of help from biology. But it's a good story (if not exactly an attainable one) without needing to focus on the negative portrayals of Black people in America. It would have been just as remarkable had Mr. James been born wealthy and headed for the Ivy League. Lifting people up doesn't require pushing others down.

Scrub-a-dub-dub

"LIV, Laugh, Launder: The Morality of Sportswashing" is one of a proliferating number of articles about the idea that the merger of LIV Golf, and the Professional Golfer's Association Tour, and how this is intended to burnish the image of Saudi Arabia.

Fair enough. I just have one question: How is this intended to work, exactly? According to Sports Illustrated, sportswashing is "the use of sports to present a sanitized, friendlier version of a political regime or operation." In "LIV, Laugh, Launder," the author defines it as "a practice used by states to launder their reputation and distract from less savory activities and human rights violations." Okay, but does that actually ever happen?

Who, precisely, forgot that Saudi Arabia has been accused of unsavory activities, including the out-and-out killing of a critic of the government, simply because they wanted to watch some golf on television? China hosting the Olympics didn't seem to make a dent in anti-China sentiment (deserved or not) here in the United States. Sure, there have been some statements from golfers that seemed to downplay Saudi Arabia's myriad failures to live up to what one might loosely call international standards, but I don't know anyone who takes their cues on human rights from golfers. Or Olympic athletes. Or professional sports leagues.

As I understand it, the problem with sportswashing seems to be that it gives people other things to talk about than what human rights and good government activists want talked about.

The goal of sportswashing is to reduce scrutiny applied to negative actions by essentially using sport as a distraction.

But this makes an assumption that I'm not sure is true; that absent this or that sporting event, the people who would have been watching or paying attention would have been examining the negative actions of the nation or organization that put on the event. It's true that when I'm watching, say, a rugby game (a sport that I immensely enjoy when I happen to catch it, even though I have no idea of what's happening on the field), I'm not looking deeply into the human rights records of whatever nation or nations the teams playing hail from. But I'm not looking into those concerns even when there isn't a rugby game on to watch. A rugby game is much more likely to come between me and housekeeping than it is to come between me and human rights activism. Mainly because human rights activism very, very, far down my current list of priorities.

And the people I know who are motivated to be activists for human rights or good government? They're so on the lookout for anything that may "distract" me (or others) from their cause that the only thing they have time for, when it comes to many sporting events, is, well, making accusations of sportswashing. So I'm not sure that sportswashing has enough real-world effectiveness to actually be a thing. It may be more likely that some people just like the idea of owning a golf tour.

All Aboard

So I was watching this video on YouTube, posted by Wired, about this young woman who does indoor skydiving, and competes at it. I had not realized the remarkable things that people can do in wind tunnels. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments. While many of them were positive, there were quite a number of them slamming Wired for showcasing a young, attractive, White woman, many of them dismissing her because her family was "obviously" quite wealthy. (This, it seems, was based on the fact that indoor skydiving is fairly expensive.)

It struck me as an illustration of how perceived inequality erodes social trust, and how that erosion can quickly become self-sustaining. Nothing was said in the video about the young woman's finances, those of her family or how she funds her training and competitions. So people simply assumed a certain level of wealth, and proceeded to publicly (although mostly anonymously) look down on her for being born into it.

Signalling like this is a form of status seeking. It's a way that people seek approval from others whose esteem they value. And reading some of the comments on this YouTube video reminded me of the fact that being disdainful of others, if a way of seeking approval, and thus, status. And then, like any echo chamber, there forms a race to demonstrate to everyone else one's worthiness of approval by being the most trident. And so you wind up with a bunch of people taking pot-shots at a fourteen-year-old for having the temerity to be featured on YouTube for being good at something unusual.

Masked

It was a simple enough question, if entirely random: (We had a lot of time on our hands when I was in college.)

"So, aliens are attacking the Earth, and appear bent on destroying humanity. What would you do?"

Ever the misanthrope, I answered: "Ask if they're taking applications."

I've mellowed to only being mildly cranky in my old age, but I still find that the tendency to see humanity as a blight upon existence lurks in corners of my mind, waiting to re-assert itself. And Ta-Nehisi Coates, over at The Atlantic, tends to know just how to awaken it.

As Bomani Jones noted back in 2006, Donald Sterling has long been a practitioner of racism and the NBA could not have cared less. Jones is rightfully apoplectic at the present response. That is because he understands that the NBA, its players and its fans, don't so much object to Donald Sterling's racism—they object to his want of elegance.

Like Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling confirms our comfortable view of racists. Donald Sterling is a "bad person." He's mean to women. He carouses with prostitutes. He uses the word "nigger." He fits our idea of what an actual racist must look like: snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant, gauche. That the actual racism that Sterling long practiced, that this society has long practiced (and is still practicing) must attract significantly less note. That is because to see racism in all its elegance is to implicate not just its active practitioners, but to implicate ourselves.
This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist

The words resonate with me, and the misanthropic impulse stirs. Part of me wants to welcome it back. But Mr. Coates makes is clear than ownership of the present circumstance belongs to all of us. So I have to own up to my piece of it, too. I spend a lot of time not caring about issues that I really wish would go away, but am not interested enough in to actually want to see them go away. And through that disinterest, I am implicated.

Owning that is a difficult thing because we've always been taught that only in blamelessness is there morality. Sometimes, even as tenuous a relationship as a single shared belief is enough to mark you, and so we argue against the association. We become caught up in a need to be free of anything that the people around us may find objectionable. And eventually, as we realize that it's simply not possible to completely unshackle yourself from anything that might be less than ideal, we become saddled with an acute understanding of human imperfection.

And when we see those imperfections as transgressions against us, anger sets in. Sometimes, it's anger at a subset of humanity. Sometimes, it's anger at the species as a whole. Always, I think, it reflects on the requirements that we've placed on our own self-respect.

Owning up to the idea that I would likely turn a blind eye to a deal that injured someone unlike me for my own benefit is hard. I don't want to be a bad person. I don't want to be snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant and gauche (although I am, to be sure, left-handed, which I suppose makes me sinister, as well). But it's the very unwillingness to see these things in myself, and to uncouple them from the economics of my life that allows me to be, whether I want to our not, a racist. Racists are no more intentionally evil than potholes. They understand themselves to be every bit as justified in their actions as everyone else, and so they rationalize.

The only way to not do evil is to recognize that one is capable of evil, and to be okay with oneself anyway. It is our inner critic, pushing us to live up to the impossible standards it sets that drives us to do those things that we should not do, and then rationalize having done them. While, at the same time, prompting us to sneer at those who mirror our feared selves back at us and to envy those who don't.

I've mellowed in my old age because I now understand that I am not owed a certain standard of treatment by anyone. And that includes myself. They are not bad people. There are no bad people. There are only choices.

Somewhere, entwined together, are unconditional respect for others and unconditional respect for self. I don't know that I'll ever find them. I don't know that I'll ever be free of the hint of misanthropy - or the hint of self-anger that goes with it. But I continue to strive for it (and work not to become caught up in the striving). Serenity in the face of oafishness is difficult. But without it, what we have is self-deception, masquerading as elegance.

Lessons Unlearned

Watching the United States side make the same mistakes over and over again throughout the World Cup (Do these guys understand what the word defense means?), I wonder if it isn't a metaphor for the nation as a whole.

Sometimes I feel that we make the same mistakes over and over again, refusing to take accountability for things constantly blowing up in our faces. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, perhaps the whole country has gone crazy.

Who Let These Guys Play?

You know, it occurs to me that if South Africa was barred from participating in the World Cup for 20 years due to Apartheid, why are the North Koreans allowed to participate?

Maybe no one wanted them to miss out on suffering through the annoying swarm of bees sound of those blasted vuvuzelas.

Second Best

We tend to use the term "second-best" as a pejorative, describing something not worth having or someone not worth being. But after watching Andy Roddick spend more than four hours vainly trying to put away Roger Federer, I think that we'd do well to remember that sometimes second-best means "kicked every ass but one."

And that's nothing to sneer at.

Bummer

The Cards gave it a good run, and nearly made history, but they had too many penalties and their defense couldn't hold on...