Free to be you, me – and someone else

October 8, 2016

Culture vulture that I am, I somehow missed the cultural appropriation wars that have erupted. That’s what you get for going on vacation and unplugging.

First, novelist Lionel Shriver apparently set off a firestorm at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival with a defense of artists using other people’s races, ethnicities, sexualities, etc. in their creations. Then Claudio Gatti outed the comfortable Roman translator Anita Raja as the author of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante novels about the friendship between two poor Neapolitan girls.

Meanwhile, Bristol University cancelled a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” because students protested white people playing Egyptians and Ethiopians. ...

Humayun Khan, Donald Trump and that ‘winning’ spirit

August 1, 2016

In the games men play, Donald Trump has consistently defined himself as a winner. It’s what suits him most to the presidency, he has said.

But what does it mean to be a winner? In the scriptural readings for Mass this past Sunday, both the Book of Ecclesiastes and Jesus warn against those who build up material wealth with either no concern for their spiritual development or the reality that someday what is yours now will belong to someone else.

Trump, of course, would not see himself in this admonition. He says he has sacrificed much, because he employs thousands upon thousands of people.

But can such a sacrifice be compared to that of Capt. Humayun Khan, the Muslim-American soldier who was killed on June 8, 2004 in the early days of the Iraq War protecting his unit from a suicide car bomber? ...

The hair up there: Trump and the age of transition

July 17, 2016

We live in wondrous, terrifying, complex, fascinating times. In the United States, we are about to embark on two political conventions – the Republican July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic July 25-29 in Philadelphia – that offer productive change and stasis, the future and the past, though not in the ways you might imagine.

The motif of the presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, represents the same old-same old inside Washington, while Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the fresh, brash outlier. But in fact, we’ve been looking in a mirror, and it’s the opposite. Clinton and the Dems, with their inclusive approach to race, gender and ethnicity, signal the future, and Trump – with his appeal to angry, white, working-class men – the past. ...

Thoughts on Dallas

July 11, 2016

The death of five police officers in Dallas – coming after the shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota – overwhelms. How to make sense of the incomprehensible? How to know what to do?

“That was horrible,” people said definitively over and over again in its wake. “People are tired of being lied to," my cousin told me by way of explanation.

But I don’t think this has anything to do with people’s disgust at being lied to unless they are fed up with the lies they tell themselves. ...

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

April 10, 2016

I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.

I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...

SI’s Sportsperson of the Year, round two

December 19, 2015

Well, now we have the backlash to the fallout from Serena Williams being named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year.”

How dare she be picked over fan fave American Pharoah, went the fallout.

How dare anyone compare her to a horse or pick an animal over an African-American female athlete, went the backlash.

Let me try to make a nuanced argument here, not the Internet’s forte. Williams was chosen as much for what she symbolizes – African-American female athleticism in a racially troubled country – as for what she has accomplished. ...

Serena Williams and the triple standard

December 14, 2015

Serena Williams has been named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year,” and, predictably, all Hades has broken loose.

Let’s forget those who voted successfully for American Pharoah in the fans’ poll. I voted for AP, though I knew SI staffers would never give the award to a four-legged athlete. (No word from the Pharoah on any residual disappointment. Given his lovely demeanor, my guess is he’s already tweeted Serena his congrats on his big new iPhone. So much easier to type on with hooves.)

Would that his two-legged counterparts were as gracious. That SI picked a tennis player other than Novak Djokovic sent up red flags among those who saw reverse prejudice. ...