For Community’s Sake, Tell Your Kids to Leave Town

Leaving the nest; it's for the best.

This is going to annoy some people; some will be resentful, even angry. For others it might be extremely hurtful. But it needs to be said. For it is a truth; my truth. One I personally believe is universal because it affects all people. Rich and poor; white folks, people of color; Christian, non-Christian; disabled, nondisabled; young, old; smart, dim; liberal, conservative.

              The thing is this: parents should encourage their kids to leave town. Quit the place they grew up. For a time. No joke. It’s important, even vital; especially if they’ve lived the same place all their lives. Encouraging your children to live somewhere else for a while helps them to better appreciate and understand their hometown. It helps provide useful perspective on what’s good (and not so good) about the place they grew up, what’s unique and what’s ultimately the same – especially as it relates to folks who seem different from you.

              I count myself fortunate to have had this experience. I grew up in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, before finishing high school in the small city of Battle Creek and then living in East Lansing where I attended Michigan State University (a sizeable ‘town’ in its own right).

              As a kid, I spent a handful of summers on my mom’s sister’s farm in the countryside just outside Youngstown, and every year my parents, sister and I spent a week or so in the mostly rural confines of southern New Jersey, where dad was born and raised.

You'll learn so much.

              After earning my degree, I lived in the Texas city of Houston for a spell and later, smack dab in the midst of things in Los Angeles. Both were sprawling urban affairs. I also did a stint in the desert community of Indian Wells, California. All these places – large, small; hot, cold; fast, slow; progressive, conservative – all of them helped me see my hometown more clearly and relate to the people there in more human ways.

              Vacations can get at this; so can church mission trips, but there’s a trap. First of all it’s short-term; a snapshot. Second, a lot of people who travel to exotic locales stay where they can be around their own kind – places where they can remain within the social security of their familiar cultural bubble. Safe from experiencing other ways of thinking, living and being. It is a sameness that tends to affirm a person’s own way of being as the only right way.

              Yet in the end, doing so does their hometown a disservice. That’s why children need to go; because in order to understand and respect others – really understand and respect them – you must walk among them. In turn, it becomes easier back home to truly value neighbors and not merely tolerate and patronize them.

              It’s easy for some to live in a far (or not so far) off place. For others, less so. Most of us have been conditioned not to readily accept difference. Yeah, we talk a good game, but at best we tolerate it; at worst we ridicule or even persecute it. Because it’s not our way. It’s not what we’re used to. It’s far too alien from our own experience to want to even think about, let alone appreciate. Or understand. Or respect.

              But we’re hurting ourselves. And our neighbors across town. Or next door. That’s because by staying home, you never truly understand what it’s like to not be you or your kind. So for the sake of the community and your children’s cultural growth, encourage them to live for a time in another place. What they bring back might amaze you.

ESPN’s Pictorial Distorts What it Means to Have an Athletic Body

Which one is NOT an athlete? (Hint: it's a trick question)

Has anybody else seen last month’s issue of ESPN Magazine? It was the Body issue; photographic (not pornographic) portraits of sports professionals posing artistically in the buff. I love the theme, which celebrates athletic bodies. But there’s a major problem: the people featured within its pages are not very diverse.

               I’m not referring to race, creed or color. Nor is my beef centered on gender exclusion. In fact, the editors did a fair to middling job including young/old, male/female and people of color. The trouble with this tasteful yet ultimately disturbing pictorial is it only depicts one version of human beings.

               Now I get that this photo spread features athletes. That’s the theme. What I don't appreciate is that they only include bodies that are long and lean. Last time I checked, athletes (professional and amateur) come in all shapes and sizes.

               It’s disingenuous for the photo essay to depict athletes of only one physical type. At the very least, it’s myopic. It’s also insulting. You need only look on the football field or baseball diamond to find truer depictions of the many shapes and sizes of which athletes consist.

Slugger Fielder: seems athletic to me.

               Plenty of high-performing athletes (Detroit Tigers first baseman Prince Fielder, for one), don't look like the ones portrayed in the pictorial. Look at any football team; a lot of those guys carry significant size and girth. You want to be the one to tell them they don’t measure up? Be my guest.

               Those aren’t the only sports in which its athletes didn’t make the cut. Weightlifting and wrestling come to mind. Also glaringly missing are athletes with disabilities. Don’t tell me no Paralympic Games gold medalists were ready and willing. Why were they excluded?

               Just what were the criteria for being or not being included in this pictorial? Was it aesthetics? Star appeal? Something deeper? My guess is some athletes were not selected due to unconscious bias against certain physical types. Was it the editors’ fault? Or was it more a function of our own cultural attitudes about our bodies? A combination of both, perhaps?

               Not depicting professional athletes of all shapes, sizes and abilities sends a mentally and emotionally damaging message that there really is such a thing as the perfect body. Hogwash.

               If your body is naturally long and lean, then it might make sense to aspire to the kind of physical bodies depicted in the magazine. Then again, if your physique is naturally rounder, stockier, minus a limb or whatever, it's unreasonable – check that – it’s ridiculous to aspire to something you just cannot physically attain.

              

Kiprotich: Olympic champ too skinny to make the cut?

This ‘aspiring to the unachievable’ extends to the fashion model world where the men and women are supposedly the ‘ideal’ size. That’s just as dishonest and destructive. Long, lean women and tall, buff men represent a very narrow segment of the natural human condition. Yet we are saturated with these unrealistic depictions of so-called perfection, and can disrupt our sense of what is and isn’t acceptable.

               After railing vehemently about ESPN The Magazine and its one-dimensional portrayal of the human form, here’s a disclaimer. This is the first Bodies issue I've seen and from what I understand, eight other issues with this theme that have been published. That means there are eight other magazines that might feature physical types other than ‘long and lean.’ I hope that’s the case.

               In any event more needs to be done, in media and in society, to celebrate all the various physical forms that humans come in. Not to do so forces us into mental boxes that not even the strongest of us can break out of.

Living (Surviving?) in a Post Trayvon World

My sons are not expendable

Thanks to George Zimmerman, a man whose toy cop zeal initiated a chain of events that led to him shooting dead Trayvon Martin, my unborn son gets to be birthed in a country where the life of a dog seems to have greater value than that of an African American boy. (People go to jail for running a dog fighting business.)

               As a result of the literal interpretation of Stand Your Ground statutes in Florida and other states, the eight-year-old kid I regularly mentor has to grow up learning early- and mid-20th century post-slavery survival techniques, in addition to reading and writing and arithmetic.

               Because of those statutes, combined with Right to Carry gun laws, my young adult son gets to raise his own kids with the possibility that someone who looks like him can be bullied, then gunned down for no reasons other than the color of his skin, being in the wrong place, and/or having an uppity attitude – just like 100 years ago.

               As for me, I get to grow old knowing my sons are considered by a lot of people as largely expendable. That they can be gunned down out of someone’s fear of their black skin or in anger – and our court system just might not hold anyone accountable, shrug its collective shoulders and point to the letter of the law.

               Admittedly, there has been significant progress in some quarters as it relates to racism at the individual level. Yet young African American males still remain the pariah of a nation that regularly exports values like liberty and justice for all around the world but systematically curbs and in some cases ignores those same rights on our own soil.

               People claim incidents like what happened to Trayvon Martin are ‘complicated’ and ‘tragic’ and insist ‘race played no factor.’ Yet this historically familiar scenario plays out time and again for African Americans on the wrong side of a gun. Or not too long ago, a noose.

Trayvon Martin vigil at Sojourner Truth monument

               Why do laws and human rights always seem to be a moving target when it comes to justice for people of color? While some white people are fed up, others crack jokes like Zimmerman’s defense attorney Don West did after a trial in which someone lost his life. Still others, such as Florida State prosecuting attorney Angela B. Corey, play politics by delivering a losing side ‘thank you speech’ that featured all the pompous platitudes displayed at a post-Super Bowl press conference.

               Thanks to the Zimmerman verdict, my sons have to contemplate which white man (or woman) with a gun on his hip might follow, intimidate, harass and then shoot them. And wonder what are the chances the shooter will bear no significant consequences for his actions. Especially if there are no witnesses. After all, African American males seem to be considered suspect in general. Zimmerman’s exoneration implicitly suggests that if followed by a strange white man, black men and boys have no right to fear for their lives, talk back or take action when challenged on an empty street.

               My sons get to re-live a time when keeping your head down, saying, “yes ‘um,” and never, ever losing their temper to any white person increases the odds of survival.

               And me? I get the chance to hear people say, “You’re overreacting and paranoid. None of that Jim Crow stuff could ever happen again; this is America.” But it’s already happening, in obvious and not so obvious ways.

               Still, I believe we all can do better; we just need more people talking about and addressing issues of race, rather than insisting no problem exists. Do it for your children. For my sons.They are not expendable.

Keep Relationships on Track by Listening for Understanding

Holy hearing, Batman!

I have really good hearing. No joke; it’s 20/20, or whatever the equivalent measurement is called in the world of sound. Sometimes I believe my great hearing is divine compensation. That is, it’s an unexpected benefit of my having no sense of smell. Either that or I just pay attention to stuff sane human beings don’t bother listening for. In any event, that’s not what makes this ability of mine so interesting. Rather, it’s my uncanny power of filtering. I suspect others possess this unique if not dubious skill too.

Strange how often my self-described superior hearing seems to fail when it wants. Or is it when I want? It tends to happen at the most opportune moments – like when somebody’s telling me something I don’t particularly want to hear. Bad news for instance. Example: I’m preparing to go mountain biking and get reminded of unfinished household chores. Funny how that can disrupt my auditory senses. Then again, maybe I am hearing; it’s just that I’m not listening.

It’s especially annoying that this can happen when a person is telling me about myself. Maybe they’re sharing with me something I said or did – perhaps a word or phrase I uttered that was insensitive or worse, offensive. There have been times when such a thing occurred that my ability to listen has been derailed. Ego is usually the culprit; my mind rejects the other person’s assertion because I pride myself on being an open and tolerant individual; one who works hard in the world to see and respect each and every human being I encounter.

What did you say?

Problem is, I’m human too.  As such, I am subject to my share of gaffs and boo boos. Some the likes of which could surely make your toes curl. Sometimes these goofs come in the form of clowning that goes too far. In other cases, I simply get lazy and carelessly mouth off without thinking. I like to think the times I do this are far and between and that they are decreasing in frequency the older I get. I also like to credit all the various learning labs, seminars and other trainings I’ve been through over the past several years. These opportunities supposedly educate and raise my awareness of practices related to various -isms (racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, etc.). Pick your poison; I’ve studied it.

The thing of it is I can still get things wrong. All that learning and supposed enlightenment and I can still slip up. What’s worse, sometimes I stubbornly try to defend my use of a word or phrase, rather than accept what was said as inappropriate, condescending or marginalizing. From there, it’s usually downhill and not in a good way. And it’s all because I’ve stopped listening to the one who has been ‘injured,’ instead, wrongfully focusing on my insistence that I’m a good person or that injury was not my intention.

I'm listening

The solution? Just listen. Listen closely and learn. For instance, when someone says you’ve said or done something harmful, be slow to jump to the, “I meant no offense” defense. And for heaven’s sake hold in the urge to tell someone to just, “Get over it.” That is, if your heart really is in the right place.

Rather than insisting that your intentions were right and honorable, instead seek to understand the impact of your words. That way, you just might find yourself with less egg on your face. Take it from one who has experienced these things, such an approach will go a long way in helping keep relationships from being unintentionally derailed.