Warning: This post contains inflammatory language, because I am mildly inflamed after a weird week of stupidly arguing about politics with everybody, eating too many sandwiches, and getting zero work done.
A few weeks ago, a young man at the boxing gym came into my office, very agitated about the unit they were doing on slavery. He is African American and he told me that his teacher was white and that he thought the class was racist. He was so angry that it took a while just to calm him down enough that we could go over the ridiculous handouts he'd been given.
Two sheets: one about the transatlantic slave trade, one about the slave trade during the Ottoman Empire. The writing was extremely strange, like they had been cobbled together from multiple sources, alternating between language you'd find at the Civil Rights Museum "this sweeping tragedy of human rights" and weird shit you'd find in a 1950's textbook "the strong, robust African was the ideal field laborer."
The trans-Saharan handout mentioned how highly prized eunuchs were, which it euphemistically defined as "men subject to mutilation." Now, this kid is 16. Unless he's reading all the Game of Throne novels or getting into the Anne Rice back catalogue, I don't think he needs to know what a fucking eunuch is, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.
His assignment, I shit you not, was to write an essay saying which slave trade was better or worse and why.
This kid's reading comprehension and writing skills need work. I told him he didn't have to do the assignment but could write an essay saying that both were wrong and why. But I said we'd have to do a great job, because sometimes, when you challenge authority, you have to be even better than if you follow the rules. He never showed up to finish it.
Last week he comes in with a new assignment, this one on the movie 12 Years a Slave. To my alarm, I found myself correcting sentences like: "He rape and beat his slave's." I had intentionally avoided this movie, but I made myself watch it and have spent all week haunted. I'm still shaking my head at the thought of this teacher making 16-year-olds watch this and then just releasing them back into the world.
I hated my middle school Social Studies teacher with a burning passion. I think his name was Tom Fleming. He had worked in the Peace Corps in Central America and was like one of the characters in this old SNL chestnut.
I went to the kind of Quaker school that had out gay teachers (this was in the 80s and so that was pretty remarkable) and held an assembly when the Gulf War was declared so everyone could express our feelings and cry.
I was down with all that, but Tom was so self-righteous and really almost sadistic, making us sit through film after film about the stages of radiation sickness in Hiroshima and a day in the life of an Auschwitz prisoner. Almost everyone in that class was white and rich. I was one of the few scholarship kids. I remember arguing with Tom, but, like that kid at my gym, I didn't have the sophistication to articulate my critique.
Why did he need us to feel a certain way about history? Was this really education or was it something else?
Shep Fairey
Shahirah, who has been doing amazing reporting on the Rohingya, has been sending me terrifying articles about the policing of identity politics in fiction. Kirkus recently retracted a star from one of their YA reviews after readers complained about the novel's depiction of Muslim characters through the eyes of a white protagonist. A writer who dared to ask, "I'm Indian. Can I Write Black Characters?" has been eviscerated on the blogosphere, where the consensus answer seems to be: "No. Stay in your lane." She writes:
The debate about whether writers should create worlds and characters based in cultures other than their own is an important one. At its core, pushback in this area serves as a corrective to centuries of colonialism, stereotypical portrayals and racist caricatures. But I worry about how we balance pertinent questions about appropriation with the creative freedom to push boundaries and take risks that are essential to good writing.
I worry about this, too. Sometimes I worry so much that I can't write. My YA manuscript has a biracial heroine. It is filled with people of diverse backgrounds and off-color humor, because it's a boxing book and that's the boxing world.
I'm far more worried about the response of adult gatekeepers than the sensibilities of my young readers. I have confidence in my ability to reach young people. I have no confidence in my ability to deal with the morality police in art. That's why I left the academic world after four years at Brown and did anything else I could to survive: cooking, yoga, boxing. The academy didn't teach us to keep an open mind or make things of value. It taught us to win arguments. It taught us contempt for the opposition.
I was so lucky to find boxing. And I was lucky to be there for the rise of Claressa Shields, the greatest woman boxer of all time. It was a wild ride, and I want to take people on that ride. My novel has to be "problematic," in the true meaning of that word (not the way Kirkus uses it nor the way we used it at Brown), because boxing itself is problematic.
From Merriam-Webster:
Most importantly, my novel has to be fun, because boxing is fun, and because what I most want to do with my words is make people laugh and cry. Not win, except maybe in the sense of winning the endless battle against shame.
via @jfagone on Twitter
I got mad at so many people this weekend. My wonderful boss, who voted for Trump and yet does extraordinary good for the youth in New York by running our free gyms, posted an argument suggesting that our program was an antidote to anthem protesting.
The great thing about our gym is that it brings together so many different kinds of people. I've had kids tell me, proudly, "In my country, we throw gay people off mountains." I've heard boys say things about girls that I cannot retype for fear of spontaneously combusting. Yet I've also been treated with more genuine respect there than at the cocktail parties of the liberal elite to which I once fancied I belonged.
The bottom line is, we learn from each other. As that kid who got into Stanford by writing #blacklivesmatter over and over again as his application essay told the Washington Post, "It really is so hard to hate someone you know."
Heather Hardy, via Facebook
My next rage attack came from comment threads on boxer Shelly Vincent's page about Heather Hardy. Hardy and Vincent are top female featherweights who have made opposite choices about how to market themselves. Shelly's fans were being quite vicious and slut-shaming about what Heather wore to weigh-in for her Bellator MMA fight. I wrote to Shelly complaining about it, and she was kind enough to respond.
Both women are rape survivors. Both value their roles as mentors to young women. Both are devoted to their sport. They legitimately don't like each other, which is good for business, but sometimes we forget there's a real person on the other end of the Internet. And that she isn't the real enemy.
Heather lost by bloody TKO in the 2nd round.
I fought with two more of my friends.
L. and I argued about whether a woman writing about being abused by Harvey Weinstein constitutes Art. I took the negative position.
J. and I argued because she said, like it was completely obvious, "You're not a feminist, Sarah." Hearing one of my girlfriends say this about me made me feel sort of like Krzysztof Włodarczyk after Murat Gassiev landed a double left uppercut to his face and ribs.
photo: Gabe Oppenheim
J. wouldn't come out and say exactly why I'm not, in her estimation, a feminist, but I think it has something to do with sex.
I like what Caitlin Moran wrote in How to Be a Woman:
There is currently this idea that feminists aren't supposed to bitch about each other...Well, personally, I believe that feminism will get you so far, and then you have to start bitching...
Because the purpose of feminism isn't to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right "types" of women is what's screwed feminism for so long -- this idea that "we" wouldn't accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with POWERED BY FAIRY DUST! bumper stickers, birds in burkas, or birds that like to pretend, in their heads, that they're married to Zach Braff from Scrubs and that you sometimes have sex in an ambulance while the rest of the cast watch and, latterly, clap. You know what? Feminism will have all of you.
What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy, and smug they might be.
Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
photo: Jean Manon
On Saturday I went to the aforementioned Murat Gassiev slugfest in Newark, where I had the enlightening assignment of helping the ring card girls climb the ring stairs in their precarious heels. I held the ropes open for them as they ducked through, graceful despite their restrictive black miniskirts, and stood on the apron as they made their darling rounds, elbows hyperextended, permasmiles affixed. Whistles rained down from the Poles in the upper balconies. It was the best view I have ever had of the ring during a pro fight.
Mia and Janine were gorgeous and gracious and industrious and smart. They had to stand center ring during the introduction of the main event, holding aloft the Russian, Polish, and American flags throughout the ring walks, fighter introductions, and three national anthems. Taking into account the height of their heels and the unwavering brilliance of their smiles, this was arguably a greater athletic performance than Steve Bujaj delivered in the main supporting bout.