I’m writing this down to get it out of my head. I saw this and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the script both of these characters are acting out although neither may have been aware of their roles. Just to be clear, I could also be projecting this script onto these bodies because of my penchant for pattern recognition and vulnerability to black and white thinking. What script do you see here?
I see a White Savior (WS) getting embarrassingly honest with a Black Boy Saved (BBS). Southwest Florida Prep is a credit recovery school built around a football team. Most of the boys in the school are Black, and it’s pretty easy for the casual race theorist to guess how they were put in a position to recover credits for a high school diploma. Luckily for WS, the boys still have eligibility to play football as they finish out high school and hope a college will put their athletic performances over their academic ones.
If the BBS being yelled at and apologized to is the same person as the one speaking in the video at 3:24, he hopes to use his time at this Florida “prep” school to bring his GPA up so that he can play for the University of Rhode Island.
So much has been written about football dreams as an escape valve from a future written for us by a history of American race-based policies. Contrary to popular belief, we are not “naturally” built for the athletic domination anyone can see on any given Sunday. We are disenfranchised, desperate, and dangerously vulnerable to anybody who can get their hands on enough of some philanthropist’s pocket change to start a team and build a school around it. The crimes I see in the first video have nothing to do with anything Coach Jenks said, but can we still talk about…
Gangster with the hard R. Specifically, “You want to be a gangster? Let’s do some gangster shit.” One can only wonder how this BBS’s misbehavior can get coded as “gangster shit.” Is he a member of an organized crime ring who still wants to play football? Was he caught hazing teammates in a violent ritual that looked getting jumped in (thanks a lot, Gangbanging in Little Rock, for this image none of us can shake)? Or was it his language, shaped as much by the cultural marketplace as this coach’s rant?
Even my “read” is shaped by the cultural marketplace and a few pretty easy indicators of racial animus. “You’re a pussy-ass bitch! You’re a bitch! You’re my bitch!” reeks of racial scripting. An embarrassing admission of desires that bloom in the dark. I’ve been trained in racial scripts since the tender age of 10. Probably earlier. The past was handed to me as a protective shield I needed to understand why some boy said the word he said. It became a special interest of mine, a pattern I needed to learn to navigate a public school system fraught with readers of scripts. Critiquing Coach Jenks is almost too easy. Child’s play. An easy distraction for a brain that really, really, really needs to be focused on ways to pay my daughter’s tuition.
You know what’s easier than stepping out of one’s social place long enough to secure private school tuition money? Facebook snooping.
I had a chihuahua for a year. I gave it back to the Humane Society because for the short period of time I was a “dog person,” I had outbursts similar to Coach Jenks on a daily basis. I didn’t recognize myself. I should say more about that but it’s too embarrassing. When I shared Coach Jenks’ grief to my Facebook page to jump on the bandwagon of righteous outrage, I didn’t immediately make the connection to my own gone dog. Instead, I surmised that the coach’s grief was the “real” reason for his loss of control with his student. If I’m being honest, I mocked his grief a little, noting the irony of an “I kiss my dog in the mouth” type being inhumane to a human being.
The truth is, I never let that dog kiss me in the mouth. I was triggered by his pooping in corners and zooming around the house to expel extra energy when I was too depressed to leave the house more than once a day. I yelled out all the memorized scripts I’d suppressed in my own childrearing, bolstered as I was by books like “There’s Got to Be a Better Way.” My big brother once joked about the irony of sitting this book on my pregnant belly while on a family vacation paid for by my parents– the ones who’d shown me the original way. My brother died the year before we got this dog. Maybe my judgment of the coach was just my projection, my release valve from own guilt. Maybe I hoped that whoever was judging my story (namely, the child who named the dog, witnessed my descent into madness, then cried on the way home from the shelter) would stretch my own grief wide enough to cover with grace those moments of calling a dog “motherfucker” for doing things dogs do.
It’s easier to call out racism than it is to gaze at (let alone clean) one’s own navel. A navel is a wound you can ignore, washing and rinsing everything around it until you notice its dank smell and remember that, unlike Morrison’s Pilate1, you were branded with evidence of the way you stayed alive before you even imagined the world outside your mother’s womb.
Coach Jenks also has a navel. A mother wound. An undeniable connection to the script that England wrote. In the comments below his Facebook apology, his friends assure the public that he doesn’t see race. I believe them. I believe that in order to do the work he does and still feel good about it, he commits himself to blindness every morning, suppressing the scripts he’s grown up reading to convince himself he is not reciting them.
In summation, here are some things that are easier to do than rewrite a script:
- recognize a script (i.e., race consciousness)
- ignore a script (i.e., color-blindness)
- point out other people’s adherence to a script (i.e., pop culture criticism)
- point out the motivation of the original scriptwriters (i.e., racial historian)
This is as good a time as any to come out as a transracial scriptwriter– kind of like Rachel Dolezal except I don’t have any access to generational wealth. Another difference is that I have no interest in physically or surface-culturally passing in the space I transgressively occupy. Still, a similarity I can’t deny is my intentionality. Like Rachel, I’m not picking up just any transracial script. After all, she chose to pass as a talented tenth Negro– the kind that goes to Howard and becomes the president of the NAACP. I, too, am choosy. I want the upper-middle class white script, the one with a lifestyle simple enough to identify with “the people” but with financial roots deep enough to have parents who can afford to “gift” me a house downpayment so substantial that my mortgage is less than 20% of my take-home pay. I want to stand in the script that includes finding and affording the best school for my kid– the one that fits their personality and not their class status. And for that, I’ll need the help of those who like my brain. A sort of tit for tat. I organize things well enough for you to walk around the museum and you stop at the giftshop on the way out.
The one thing I sell in my giftshop: A signed copy of my forthcoming book that will more than double your investment after my post-fame death. I have the agent, am looking for the buyer, and just need a few upfront investments to afford my kid’s tuition, the mountain that stands between me and a blank, productive page.
- In Song of Solomon, a character’s aunt Pilate was born without a navel. ↩︎
Make a one-time donation
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Too Heavy for the Lobe 