October 4, 2021
On Self-Respect
In January, I was attending a virtual book club discussion about my latest novel when one of the attendees mentioned a particular Goodreads Review of my book, and I didn’t know anything about it.
And here’s the thing: I really didn’t. This isn’t just me trying to seem above-it-all, like someone who doesn’t google myself on a regular basis. While my character is overwhelmingly constructed of hundreds of strung-together disciplinary lapses, in this one single area I’ve managed to be resolute. Goodreads is for readers, and it’s not for me, and there generally isn’t anything helpful or constructive that the site’s users can tell me about myself or the work I do.
But it’s taken me three books and several years to reach this point. When my first two books came out, I was so absolutely craving anything in the way of feedback that I read every single Goodreads Reviews, and “liked” them, even the critical ones. Desperately seeking validation, of course, an acknowledgement that my art existed and therefore I did. I was hungry for feedback, the same way any of us is hungry for feedback when we make anything. A response from the question we put into the universe: “Is there anybody out there? Does anybody care that I am here?”
Lately, however, feedback has become less interesting to me. A symptom of being in my 40s perhaps, and caring much less about what others think. But this lack of interest is also because of how feedback functions as a distraction, as noise that keeps me from hearing/knowing what I think about things and forming a deeper understanding.
Lately, feedback has become less interesting to me.
I think about this in particular in connection to politics and social justice, where the shallow memeification of activism serves to simplify complex issues and attempts codify the correct way to think and speak, which I don’t think is a bad thing per se (“cancel culture” or “political correctness gone mad,” yawn), but instead the function of a movement created by young people, and my main problem with it is just that such directives serve to obfuscate my own thoughts and ideas, and I would like to continue the never-ending project unpacking, interrogating, of getting to the bottom of it all.
A while ago, the author Deryn Collier (whose thoughts on creating and creativity I appreciate so much) shared an Instagram post with the line, “We do not need artists to have thick skins.” About how being sensitive to the world around us was essential to the labour of creating art, and thick skins only serve to protect us from feeling.
But I, of course, had been thinking a lot about this idea of feedback and noise, and so spun the idea off in that general direction. And determined that no, it is true, that a rhinoceros hide is not what anybody needs, save for the rhinoceroses, and instead what we people need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core. Not solid so as to be unmoveable, unchangeable, because we’re human after all, but still, something intrinsic that can remind if us who we are and what we know.
In a recent blog post, my friend Amy Rhoda Brown declared this “something intrinsic” as trust.
“I’m not sure if fear needs an antidote, actually,” writes Brown in this post about fear and survival, about venturing into a dark place and ultimately finding light:
“An antidote neutralizes, and maybe fear shouldn’t be neutralized. Maybe it should be seen and respected and understood.
What fear needs is a companion, something that can make scary situations easier to face, failures easier to recover from. Something that can turn risk into opportunity.
I think the best companion to fear is trust.
Trust in yourself that you can recover when — not if — things go wrong. And trust in the people who love you, that when you fall, someone, or many someones, will be there to help you get back up again.”
Which was precisely what Joan Didion was writing about in my favourite of her essays, “On Self Respect”: ““To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is to potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”
What we need most to respond to the world and its overwhelming messaging—telling us who we are and what we ought to think about the things we make, and about the kind of world we want to live in—is something solid at our core.
Didion goes on, “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”
(And my favourite line, “[C]haracter—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”)
So how do you cultivate it? Didion, who prides herself on specificity, is uncharacteristically vague in this one aspect, although she gives a hint in the line, “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”
And so for answers, we to turn to Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird, one of my favourite reads of this year, a book I first borrowed from the library, and then I bought a copy for myself, and even purchased another for a friend currently undergoing cancer treatments. Subtitled, “A Memoir of Finding Joy When the World Goes Dark,” Phosphorescence is literally about finding that light from within, about locating that intrinsic core, that trust, one’s very own compass points. It’s a book about the uses of awe, connection, of purpose, of learning to listen and to see. And it’s wonderful.
“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors,” Baird writes.
And that’s the secret, I think, to uncovering that trust, that necessary self-respect to be a human with a solid core. Not navel-gazing, not at all. The secret is awe, and wonder. It’s remembering to look up, and to ponder the nature of the universe, its infinity, and to be continually bowled over by what a miracle it is that any of us get to be a part of it at all.
“After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outward, beginning to find others again, and the brilliance of the world outside our doors
Julia Baird
July 7, 2021
Grinding Sharpening
For years, the knife sharpening van has existed on the margins of my experience, an uncanny ringing in the distance, slowly moving up and down the streets of our neighbourhood, slightly sinister. The idea of waving him down with a handful of knives always seemed awkward to me, and so I never have, and so all of our knives are dull dull dull.
The knife sharpening van makes a cameo appearance in my first novel, Mitzi Bytes, underlining the danger inherent in ordinary lives.
We were having a conversation about the knife sharpening van, its elusiveness, and our dull kitchen knives as recently as yesterday.
And then tonight we heard the tell tale clang clang clang, and ran out the door, knife wielding maniacs. “Stop, stop!” And he did!!
WE CAUGHT THE KNIFE SHARPENING VAN.
And it did not even open up a portal to another dimension.
It did, however, generate considerable sparks.
And someone is likely to slice open their hand in our kitchen within the next few days.
It was really and truly magic.
March 12, 2021
There is No Fake Spring
There is no such thing as “fake spring.” There is only now, and if you’ve been given the gift of a beautiful day, you ought to take it, instead of hedging or apologizing, instead of deciding not to get too comfortable. It’s a funny meme, the idea of fake spring, and I understand it entirely, this being my 42nd March in the northern hemisphere, but I am also tired of the way that meme culture leaks into ordinary life rendering all of us cynical and blase about such extraordinary events as golden sunshine and blue skies, the stupefying certainty of despair. As though everyone is afraid to be hopeful, mostly because they’re afraid to be wrong, and it’s just easier to decide that nothing good can ever happen. As though we ever know more than the world does, with the miracle of its cycles and changes, all its secrets and mysteries, expansive capabilities. And while there indeed still stands a very good chance of there being ice storms at the end of April, why is that any less of a reason not to glory in the sun today, or require such glory to come with a caveat? Like those people in England who used to reply, “We’ll pay for it later,” anytime somebody commented on the weather (which was often) and the weather was pleasant (much rarer). As though fate were two columns of debits and credits, as though balance were the point, as though it’s bad luck somehow to take your win, accept your gift, to take a moment to stop and be thankful for all this, regardless of what comes after. As though now wasn’t actually all we have, which is another way of saying: everything.
March 2, 2021
Something to Be Said for an Island
During the past year, I lost all my patience with the hive mind. I don’t think I’d ever blocked an acquaintance on Facebook before, but this year it’s been something of a reflex, and not even without sometimes telling that acquaintance to fuck off first , as in *typing it right out there in the comments thread,* instead of just yelling at my screen as per usual.
I mostly have quit Twitter altogether, because constant access to everybody’s thought processes like a ticker-tape was turning me into a misanthrope.
I still marvel at all those curious enough to put the big questions onto social media, beyond maybe, “What are your plans for tonight’s supper?” I am here for the minutia and your photos of your cats. But oh my god, I have never cared less what you think about vaccinations, or lockdowns, when you’re local nail salons should open, and my aversion to the airing of these concerns is so apolitical—the over-anxious bother me as much as the laissez-faire types. (Though it’s worth noting that I don’t have many of the latter in my circles, really. And if I did, I probably told them all to fuck off last April…)
I think it’s because I’ve found this very tenuous balance of keeping it together, and anything that causes me to waver makes me irate. And I don’t mean “anything” in terms of data, facts or news stories—I am always happy to consider these, because it’s not like I don’t inhabit reality, but it’s just other people’s feelings, other people’s fears and worries about the same things I fear and worry about—I just absolutely lack the capacity to take them on board.
Which is why my blog has more than ever seemed like a beloved retreat. Where I go to write pieces for myself, and I don’t even share some of the posts on social media because I really don’t care what anybody thinks of them, and I write these pieces for myself more than anything. If someone shows up and finds my thoughts worthwhile, then that’s terrific, but it’s not like I’m broadcasting them, you know? It’s “I don’t care what you think,” but not even from a place that’s defensive. Like really, all the work I can do right now is the work in my own head.
(It’s worth remarking that I have infinite capacity for other people’s blog posts, for their thoughtfulness and process, for work that makes me think. It’s the more surfacey, less exploratory kind of content that I just can’t contend with.)
And the strange thing about all of this is that while I’ve also been having no truck with the virtuals, I’ve been trying very hard to be zen about the actuals. Accepting that the behaviour of others is beyond my control, trying to trust that most people will make good-enough choices for our community, and trying not to lose my mind about people who don’t, because that anger serves no one. Possibly this is easier because the actual people are more theoretical these days of isolation, and virtual people are all getting up there in my online grill, having ideas and opinions, and everything.
(It is possible that the latter group of people drives me up the wall because they are proof that Project of Live-and-let-live is a lost cause? Or does Live–and-Let-Live only work if you keep people at a remove [ie not while receiving a tickertape of their every waking thought]?)
On the weekend, there was an article in the newspaper about “conspirituality,” which is the kind of nonsense I’m all over—if you ever want me to read an article, make sure it’s about a cult, is what I am saying. And I checked out the Instagram account for the woman mentioned in the first half of the article, and couldn’t stop scrolling because her audacity and entitlement was just so fascinating to me, like all I want to do is figure it out… But I won’t. And eventually I had to stop because if I didn’t, my brain would have exploded, and I just have to let it go, let that whackadoodle woman do her whackadoodle thing, and let all her whackadoodle fans respond to her posts with the worshipping hands emoji.
Like I’m reconsidering the idea of society as a web, is what my point here, or maybe I’m talking about (just?) the web as a web instead. This blog as the place I’ve got out in the country, off the grid, where we’re collecting the water in a rain-barrel, and while you’re welcome to stop by and I’ll pour you a cold glass of lemonade, there is really something to be said for an island.
February 24, 2021
‘90s Films About Hideous Women Finding Love
The 1991 River Phoenix/Lili Taylor vehicle, Dogfight, could only be construed as a romance by a certain sort of person, namely an awkward teenage girl with low self-esteem and no sense of her own narrative beyond being a character in someone else’s story. Who is content to sit around waiting for a boy with a pretty face to saunter over and ask her on a date—even if the only reason he’s asking is to win a bet with his friends as to which of them can pick up the ugliest girl.
The movie takes place in San Francisco, 1963, the night before the Kennedy assassination, which is also the night before Phoenix’s character, Eddie Birdlace, a Marine, ships out to Vietnam. He brings Taylor’s Rose to the “dogfight,” and not only fails to win the bet, but Rose ends up slugging him when she gets wise to the ruse. Which, of course, provokes his interest—turns out Rose is more than an ugly face. And the two proceed to spend a Before Sunrise-ish night in each other’s company, Rose managing to project a sense of humanity onto Birdlace’s bland exterior, so that it seems kind of sweet that they end up sleeping together. Birdlace promising to write to her, but then he tears up Rose’s address the next morning as his bus pulls away, and now the 1960s proper can finally begin.
If Dogfight wasn’t hope enough for weird girls with problems applying eye-makeup or fitting unruly bodies into pretty dresses that one day they too could be used and abused by a fellow with A-List good looks, along comes 1995’s Circle of Friends, based on the novel by Maeve Binchy. This time, the absolute dog is Minnie Driver who inexplicably draws the eye of Chris O’Donnell, a Hollywood Chris before Hollywood Chris’s were even a thing. Set in 1950s’ Dublin, their unlikely pairing invites disbelief—Driver’s Benny was supposed to end up with a very greasy character played by Alan Cumming—and then it all goes wrong when Benny’s conventionally attractive friend tricks O’Donnell’s Jack into having sex with her and pins her accidental pregnancy on him. In the movie, unlike the book, Benny eventually takes Jack back, however, because—obviously—such a girl can’t afford to be picky.
If Dogfight wasn’t hope enough for weird girls with problems applying eye-makeup or fitting unruly bodies into pretty dresses that one day they too could be used and abused by a fellow with A-List good looks, along comes 1995’s Circle of Friends…
The 1994 cult fave Muriel’s Wedding also falls into this peculiar genre, but at least with a high degree of self-awareness. Dumpy Muriel (played gorgeously by Toni Collette in her breakout role) wants nothing more than a dream wedding and a love story as rousing as an ABBA song—apparently she never listened very carefully to the lyrics of songs like “Waterloo” and “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” She finally schemes her way to a happily-ever-after with marriage to a hunky South African swimmer with a face so plastic he makes Chris O’Donnell look like a character actor. Eventually a series of tragedies makes Muriel realize that her priorities are shallow, and she discovers that female friendship can give us the real loves of our lives. But in the meantime, she has managed to consummate her marriage with the swimmer—score one for the ugly chick!
It’s another bet that kicks off She’s All That (1999), perhaps the most defining film of this kind. Big man on high school campus Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr.) suffers a comedown when his girlfriend dumps him for a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, and then he accepts his best friend’s challenge to turn the most unlikely girl at school into a prom queen. The girl? Lainey Boggs, played by Rachael Leigh Cook, an artsy dork who finds Zack and his friends insufferable and falls down a lot. But it also turns out—and get this—that when she takes her glasses off, she’s actually hot, and this helps Zack realize (as River Phoenix and Chris O’Donnell did before him) that this weird looking chick might be the only real thing he’s ever had.
Which is the point, of course, for any woman, whether she wears glasses or not: she is there to bring meaning into the life of a painfully boring, oblivious man. To awaken his feelings, his passion, and remain loyal to him even after he treats her poorly, because after all, how could he know any better before she’s shown him the way? It is the job of this woman to be his helpmeet on the journey toward enlightenment, the discovery of his truest self, never mind her own desires.
(1990s’ films remind us to be wary of women with desires: remember how The Hand That Rocked the Cradle turned out? And Rebecca DeMornay wasn’t even ugly.)
What higher purpose is there anyway than making a man who resembles a Ken doll consider that he might be human?
February 22, 2021
On Rereading Wuthering Heights
I received the Gladstone Press edition of Wuthering Heights for Christmas this year, a beautiful book that replaced perhaps the most hideous copy of Wuthering Heights in existence, a cheap paperback full of typos—I’d got rid of it or else I’d post a photo, but you can check it out here. (Oh, and while I’ve got you, doesn’t this look like the version of Wuthering Heights that LM Montgomery wrote?) Anyway, the Gladstone Press Wuthering Heights is beautiful, and an occasion to reread this classic novel. I don’t remember when I’d read it previously—at least once, perhaps for a university English class? But it was a curious thing to encounter it again.
Mostly because…everybody in the book is terrible. Except the housekeeper, Nelly Dean. Somebody needs to write a Wide Sargasso Sea-style retelling from Nelly Dean’s point of view. But everybody else: awful. And not just Linton, who had every right to be awful, because somebody had named him Linton, but all of them, including various Catherines. If only somebody had thought to take the children from these families into town and encouraged them to mingle with wider-society. If only any of them had ever been attired for the weather, which would meant there would have been less catching one’s death. This book, I wrote a few weeks ago in an Instagram post, would make an excellent advertisement for Goretex.
Not that I didn’t enjoy the book—I did. But I sure did hate everybody within it, until the end when the pieces began to come together. The book underlined for me too how little patience I have for men these days, the excuses we make for their deplorable behaviour. However did anyone get the idea that Heathcliff was a romantic hero? Heathcliff was a monster. Really, this is kind of a book that’s up there with Frankenstein, instead. He makes Mr. Rochester look like Prince Charming. And, well, maybe I was wrong to assume he was meant to be a hero at all, maybe I just put him that category because I was young and stupid when I first read this book. But I found absolutely nothing redeemable in his character this time.
Sometimes I feel like we don’t know how to talk about men except in exemplary terms. I write about this in my own novel. We’re finishing a read-aloud of The Odyssey right now, and maybe it’s Emily Wilson’s translation, but there is something ironic about the constant refrain of “the godlike Odysseus” in the text, when he really seems to be so fallible, painfully human. And so too with Heathcliff, in whom we attribute depth in order to better understand his terrible behaviour, so that he becomes larger than life, when really he’s so pitifully small, and we really need to stop making excuses for terrible men just like him.
February 9, 2021
The Solution is Patience
The solution is patience.
Though not always.
Sometimes the solution is to rise up and make noise and stomp your feet and demand to be heard, and rally in support of others, and organize a potluck, and shake your fists, use your power.
But sometimes the solution is just to wait.
When the teacher hasn’t logged on to virtual school. When the vaccines are delayed. When technical glitches impede your progress. When you can’t find your hairbrush. When people are insufferable. When conspiracy theorists run rampant. When you’re feeling sad and like there’s no way out of that place. When it’s only February and you want it to be spring.
The solution is to breathe. To know the knot will untangle, and pulling on it now will only make the thing tighter. Instead, to be patient. Hunker down. Buy a cheap bouquet of tulips.
The solution is to put the kettle on, and brew a cup of tea.
February 5, 2021
Dizzy Righteousness
For a long time, quitting Twitter—for me— seemed about as possible or likely as quitting oxygen, even if the whole experience was so much less rewarding. I didn’t like Twitter (anymore—once upon a time it had been a source of friendship, inspiration and fun, but that all changed around 2014 or thereabouts) but it was necessary, it seemed. It was true there were things I knew from Twitter that were tremendously worthwhile. If not for Twitter, I might have travelled to the UK at year ago this March, but I was put off by disturbing tweet threads by Italian ICU doctors with perspectives that weren’t yet being reported in the newspaper. Twitter was how I found out about everything, from breaking news to pop culture scandals to political developments. It was the platform from which I interfaced with so much of the world…and then it began to occur to me that this was the problem. That while the world was difficult, Twitter only made it worse.
There was a reason that I quit Twitter, finally, but now I can’t even remember what it was, and perhaps this is the point. When I finally logged back onto Twitter a few weeks after my first break—I still have an account but check it every 60 days instead of 60 times a day, which is a big shift for me—Scott Baio was trending for arranging mugs in a department store, and that really just clinched it, because what if I’d never found out that had happened? What else could I have done with those brain cells?
I had spent the last three years on Twitter being furious, mainly about our provincial government and various terrible things they’d done, and while I found solidarity and community with other people who felt the same on the platform, the platform for practical purposes wasn’t useful to me. All my online fury actually gave me a peculiar sympathy for the kind of person who gets radicalized through online groups and decides to drive his truck from Manitoba to Ottawa to smash into the gates at the entrance of the Prime Minister’s residence. Because online rage is a self-perpetuating spiral, and spitting one’s feelings into the online void only underlines how impotent most of us really are, and that only makes you angrier (and the cycle begins again). My furious responses to the Minister of Education’s tweets were not useful to me, nor him or anybody, and it wasn’t like he was even reading them. This performance could not be more similar (or futile) than screaming into the wind. The only entity that profited was the social media platform because it seemed I couldn’t quit it.
Sometime last summer I began to insist that I could no longer view our government as an adversary. Which is not to say that our government was not an adversary, but this arrangement was making me irate and unhappy, and it didn’t make anything better. Further, my children were to be heading back to school in September, and I really decided that having some trust in the system was necessary for me to be a functioning citizen. Like, I’d rather trust and be wrong than end being that guy in a tinfoil hat. And I realized too that my online interactions were so much of the reason why I was angry all the time. That normal people didn’t necessary function this way, and maybe there was something more targeted and effective I could do with my energy than be constantly furious or full of anxiety, waiting for the next calamity to come across the timeline. And that if I just decided not to be furious all the time about the government, flicked it off with a switch, would that make an iota of difference to how the government functioned? It wouldn’t make anything better, but it also wouldn’t be worse.
“I feel like everybody on social media is always yelling at me,” I said the other night to one adult person I spend all of my time with these days. Trying to articulate just what it was that was making me uncomfortable—not just with Twitter, but the Facebook and even Instagram with its weird powerpoint social justice stories. I can’t stand them. “And it’s not that I don’t care about social justice,” I continued, but I am beginning to think of “social justice” as an abstract principle as an ambition that’s also vague and vast. I am still really tired of social justice memes and wish that people would write their own stories, feel their own feelings, share their own ideas instead of parroting somebody else’s.
This is not an “everybody on the left is brainwashed, it’s a cult, cancel culture, blah blah” kind of post. I still stand by guiding principle that one should never do anything for which Jonathan Kay or his mother might leap to their defence. A lot of people who’ve spent less time online than I have imagine themselves bravely rallying for free speech, due process, and against slippery slops, and they don’t know that they’re being manipulated by so many bad-faith actors. I’m not “just asking questions” or wondering if political correctness has gone too far. And I am definitely not saying “Goodbye to All That” to “the church of social justice” (as one viral essay once put it), or talking about “both sides.” I know what side I am on, and it’s the side of anti-racism, alleviating poverty, supporting marginalized people, lifting up the oppressed, supporting workers’ rights and helping make the world a safer, more gentler place for weirdos to be who they are. But I just have recently become dissuaded of the notion that social media is the place to make all this happen. (Blogs, on the other hand…) Considering that there are other ways to be engaged. That perhaps what social media is isn’t even actually engagement.
David Roth’s “The March of the American Kooks” is one of the most interesting, succinct and illuminating pieces I’ve read about the lunacy of American politics at this moment, articulating so much of what I was trying to get at as I rambled on about everybody yelling at me on the internet. And there is no doubt that the far-right fringes have become a clear and present, violent danger. When there are people marching in the streets with literal Nazi flags, and you’re still going on about “antifa,” I think you’ve missed the point, or you’ve been watching the wrong television channels. I am still confused about how after Nazis went marching in Charlottesville in 2017, perfectly reasonable people wanted to remind us that the left has its extremism too. January 6, 2021, my dudes. This is what comes of both-sidesing. The threat and danger is clearly situated along one specific branch of the political spectrum, full stop.
But part of the reason it’s especially threatening and dangerous is that “dizzy righteousness of derangement” which stretches right across the board, that is not just specific to conspiracy theorist kooks. Which makes it difficult to turn vast and vague ambitions into anything tangible beyond clicks. Fed by social media platforms designed to stoke our rage (Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes about this here), we’ve all bought into this idea that righteous online fury is the way to the change the world—but I think we’re being played. This notion has given us nothing substantial or useful to meet the moment—and its clear and present danger—with. It’s also profoundly uninteresting.
From Roth’s essay: “The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage.”
The outcomes are different, and perhaps so too are the extremes, but the symptoms are the same, and I’m done with it. When you can see yourself in an article about a bunch of conspiracy Q-uacks, it’s time to close the browser, turn the page.
February 4, 2021
Things to Read During the Big Game
One of my favourite things about how my life turned out is that I married somebody who cares about sports even less than I do, which means that I got to give him the big news that there was some kind of sports event this weekend, which I only know about because I keep receiving e-newsletters from food bloggers with subject heading GAME DAY EATS. (I was actually only able to parse out what the game in question was because I’d heard about the poet who was scheduled for the halftime show.)
And I honestly felt like perhaps I was the only blogger on earth whose content wasn’t Superbowl-adjacent (it IS the Superbowl, right? And Superbowl is a compound word? Or is it Super Bowl? I don’t know. I am going to choose to remain in ignorance. At least I know it’s about football, by which I mean the oblong, brown American kind, and so I’m feeling a little bit savvy.) Just because I don’t actually care about sports doesn’t mean I don’t want to be part of the action.
And so that end, I have put together a list of some of my favourite game-day literary experiences, books that are perfect to get lost in and you don’t even have to worry about the score.
January 23, 2021
What Norman Rockwell Left Out of the Picture
How old were YOU when you learned that when Hank Aaron eclipsed Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, he was subject to hate mail and death threats by fans furious that a Black man could outrank a white baseball legend? That his successes were snubbed by baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who would have been expected to congratulate him and didn’t?
I only found out this morning, myself, reading Hank Aaron’s obituary in the Toronto Star over my cup of tea, and I’m not really going to beat myself up that, because that I was reading an article in the sports pages at all was kind of remarkable. But it’s also typical of the limitations of my understanding and experience, as someone who grew up in the 1980s and came of age in the ’90s, believing that the fight for civil rights had long ago been won.
We thought a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., but never about the fact that someone had murdered him. I knew about Ruby Bridges from Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of the school girl, but never once in my life had I seen a photo of the ferocious mobs of white people (mostly women) who were screaming at her as she entered her school. I knew that baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron had overcome adversity and racism to succeed as they did in baseball, but all that strife was kind of abstract. Until this morning, I’d never really considered the kind of violent rage that would cause someone to write a death threat to a baseball player, to put a stamp on it. That this is literally white supremacy—a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, but possibly because it’s everywhere: the unfettered rage of a white person at seeing a Black athlete shine.
A lot of people like to spend their time maligning “wokeness,” and in some ways I understand the cynicism, and I actually see the fallacy of viewing everything that happens in the world through a social justice lens, but I also can’t think of a better metaphor. That I must have been sleeping, for what other excuse could there be for having failed to notice that those furious white women screaming at Ruby Bridges didn’t just disappear with the Civil Rights act, and neither did racism? That even if “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” there are so many people intent on throwing obstacles in its way?
That the story of a hero like Hank Aaron isn’t actually one of triumph in the end, but instead that of an incredible talent who lost his love of the game, because racism and white supremacy beat it out of him—and this story is so exhausting. It often seems never-ending. And people who haven’t woken up yet, who continue to insist that race doesn’t matter, that none of us are or should be judged or valued by the colour of our skin, that “making everything about race” is a thing that people go out of their way to do in a world where men get death threats for hitting home run records, in a world where race seems to be about everything—they’re only making that story even longer.
