Can White Men Jump?

Can White men jump? 

In the last 17  Olympics, Black men have won the high jump maybe three times. I can't tell for certain. The winners are not listed by race, of course, nor should they be. 

Charlie Dumas won the first of the 17 Olympics that I remember. He was the first person to high jump seven feet, which he did at Compton Junior College. In that college my father was once a pulling guard (and won a national championship and a small gold football on a chain).

The Olympic evidence suggests that White men usually win the high jump. So why do we commonly say that only Black people can jump?

Part of the answer has to do with class. In America the people who excel in professional sports like boxing and football often are poor, very smart, very disciplined and desperate. That is, they often come from the poorest classes, the class willing to risk concussions. That class once was the Irish and then became the Italians and Jews. Today it's Black Americans. Today Black athletes are the ones we see jumping. 

The other reason we say that White men can't jump is bedrock in the history of racism. Part of the earliest framing of American racism was the claim that God or nature made White men intelligent and compensated stupid Black men by making them muscular and lustful, useful beasts of burden, capable only of the simplest thoughts. So pervasive was that belief that today people still unselfconsciously joke about how Black people are, well, the better animals.

If you watch the NBA, you will see Black athletes who have made themselves extremely fit and learned difficult skills--but what lifted them that final step was intelligence, the ability to outthink and out-prepare opponents. 

Failures with Greed

My family has been in this country since it was founded, but none us has become rich or famous. I grew up working class. In general the white working class gives its loyalty to kith and kin rather than to ideological insights, which is one reason the white working class can disappoint labor leaders, middle class progressives and abolitionists. 

I have never seen a live crowd that supports the blubber I call Agent Orange (our President, who finished second in the election, good enough to win). I have seen the supporters of Agent Orange on television, whooping with mad delight as the blubbering mound encourages them to hate Muslims or Mexicans or Africans or molested girls and women or any legal immigrant not from Northern Europe. 

It’s not easy to describe these gents. Norman Mailer may have done it years ago when he described certain supporters of the war we lost in Vietnam. Basically they are people like me who have not become rich or famous. Some think of themselves (unfortunately) as losers, left only with “hate, dull hate, cloud banks of hate, the hatred of failures who had not lost their greed”  (from THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT).

Taylor Swift's Bottom

I’m not what you’d call a Taylor Swift fan, preferring, as I do, Patsy Kline, Chuck Berry and Beethoven. But not long ago, she was groped in public and made a complaint. The man involved got fired and then sued her for 3 million dollars. Swift’s testimony at the trial was recently published in HARPER’S. (I have skipped a lot of the testimony in the interest of not typing more than needed.)

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The man’s attorney: You contend that Mr. Brown put his hand underneath your skirt and grabbed your bare bottom.

Swift: Yes. He stayed latched on my bare ass cheek as I lurched away from him, visibly uncomfortable.

Attorney: Mr. Brown never grabbed your butt outside of your clothing?

Swift: He grabbed my ass underneath my skirt.

Attorney: So you acknowledge that Mr. Brown never grabbed your butt outside of your clothing.

Swift: Rather than grabbing my ass outside of my clothing, he grabbed my ass underneath the clothing.

Attorney: And Mr. Brown never otherwise touched your rear outside of your clothing.

Swift: He was busy grabbing my ass underneath my skirt, so he didn’t grab it outside of my skirt. 

Attorney: And other than the incident under the skirt, Mr. Brown didn’t otherwise touch you inappropriately?

Swift: Other than grabbing my ass underneath my skirt against my will and refusing to let go, he did not otherwise touch me inappropriately. 

Attorney: So you’re not critical of your bodyguard for allowing Mr. Brown to grope you and then walk out of the photo booth?

Swift:  No, I’m critical of your client for sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass.

Attorney: Can you explain to me how, given the stiffness of this skirt—If Mr. Brown’s hand is actually grabbing your bare cheek in the photography, why isn’t the front of your skirt someplace else?

Swift: Because my ass is located in the back of my body.

(Swift won.)

Mr. Nobody

There's an old saying in politics, that you can't beat someone with nobody. You need a viable opponent. That does not seem to apply to a President who is on the outside a malignant narcissist and on the inside is a moron. When polled about an imaginary race between Trump and Mr. Nobody, Trump gets only 36% of the vote.

Trumpian Idiots Command the Center for Disease Control

The basic notion is that if you ban a name, then what the word names will cease to exist. We banned the N-word, for instance. I won’t use it. But racism in America has, in some key ways, gotten worse in the last few years, not better. Feminists have been attempting for 50 years to end sexism in our pronouns, but the pronouns and sexism persist.

This history came to mind because recently the Center for Disease Control has banned the use (in its documents) of the terms “fetus,” “science-based” and “transgender.” This is Orwellian idiocy. Apparently the fish brain in charge at the CDC  believes that if we don’t have a word for a fetus, people will no longer seek abortions. Never mind that women have been getting abortions since humanity was invented (that might be nearly 6,143 years ago, according to the leadership at the non-science-based CDC).

Here’s the point.  Our species had children before we had a name for children. Things exist before we invent names for them, and they linger after the names have been banned. 

And how long have civilians who owned individual brain stems known this fact? At least 500 years.  “What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” 

Murder

My second cousin has been tracing our undistinguished family back to before the Revolution. Yesterday I found out, from her work, that my fourth great-grandfather, Steven Strickland, was murdered. He was traveling, probably in Connecticut, and he stopped at a tavern. An American and an Irishman got into a fight, and the tavern owner, who was lame, asked Strickland to separate them. Strickland intervened and the Irishman's brother picked up a stone (a stone?) and pounded Strickland, crushing his skull. Strickland eventually made it home and died. The brother was held in jail for a trial, and that's all I know.

My first great-grandfather was Sylvester Streeter Strickland, known as "Vet." He was an ironmonger and fiddler and sometime union organizer, which got him run out of Los Angeles. He roamed a lot. When young he hired out in some western county to kill off all the coyotes and wolves. He set out poisoned meat and killed every dog for thirty miles. Had to run for his life.  In some camp somewhere he claimed he had fiddled while Bojangles danced.  He married Mary Berry, a pipe-smoking Irish girl right off the boat. I'm no doubt the last person to remember them. 

The American Cornhole League

This week I discovered—to my surprise—the American Cornhole League on ESPN2. (I’m not making this up—you can google it for verification.) As far as I can tell, the league is a creature of the American Cornhole Organization, where you can buy sweatshirts and so on.  

Competitive cornholing, I now see, is a national phenomenon. (According to dictionaries of slang, a cornholer is a penetrator in anal sex.)  

I have to admit it gets difficult for old men like me to keep up with how sports keep changing.

In the game I saw, two teams tried to lob beanbags into a hole. The teams were usually two young men, but I did see one woman cornhole with her boyfriend. The game itself resembled a form of horseshoes that had been simplified for beer drinkers who found horseshoes too complex. I watched a playoff, preliminary to a final weekend In Las Vegas called “Cornhole Madness.” 

After the playoff game between Arkansas and Mississippi State, I went on line for an explanation. The announcers had said things like “There’s not much strategy” and  “The holes are really small,”  but I thought the main strategic point of the competition was obvious: to avoid elimination.  

When California Was Alabama

In 1850 California passed a law that prohibited Black people, Indians and Chinese from testifying in court. In 1860 the state legislature barred “Mongolians, Indians and Negroes” from public schools. The Alien Land Acts of 1913 and 1920 made it illegal for American-born Chinese citizens to own land, according to Joan Didion in WHERE I WAS FROM. 

Those are facts, as far as I know. In those days, California was Alabama. 

The Origin of Morals

I say that I got my morals sitting on the lap of my mother, but that's less than half true. Like most things about us, morality is the product of evolution--modified a bit by culture and personal experience. Morality is Mother Nature's way of making it possible for mammals to live near one another. It has to emerge from natural selection. Science offers no alternative.

One might argue that morality can't be genetic because it isn't identical from person to person. But that is like arguing that walking on two legs can't be genetic because a few people are born without legs and some well-trained people can run faster than others.  

You can see something like a moral nature in other mammals. Wolves live in family groups and do their best to take care of one another. A lone wolf is as lonely and desperate and ultimately as dead as Ayn Rand. 

Among humans each tribe is bonded together by morality, and infants, according to psychologists, exhibit aspects of moral behavior while very young.

Peek-A-Boo

I've noticed that some of the pretty women delivering cable news are wearing their hair so that it partly covers one eye. It's like the Veronica Lake hairdo of World War II. (She was a small actress who starred in films in the forties, particularly in THIS GUN FOR HIRE. Goddard copied the death scene from THIS GUN FOR HIRE in BREATHLESS, and Bruce Springsteen wrote a song. . . .)

The government asked Lake to change her hairdo, because women were riveting things in defense plants and needed two good eyes for depth perception.

Anyway, what is this hairstyle about? Is it about making the ladies look half blind and helpless and in need of princes to ride up and save them? Come on. To get where they are, the lovely newsreaders on TV must have the vision of eagles, who can spot a fish in the water from sixty storeys up.

KKK Explained

A few years after our grandparents died, my brother and I sat around one evening looking through a cardboard box of old photographs. We came across one of our paternal grandfather dressed in a white KKK robe and wearing a pointed hat. The photo was taken in the 1920s in California's Big Valley. 

We asked our father what the hell was going on. He told us that Grandpa had joined the KKK for one year because he'd been told they served free beer. That had proved untrue, so he had left the KKK to look for a more generous social club.

My question was: Who would have told our grandfather a dirty lie like that? Fifty years later I got an answer. In the 1920s the KKK suddenly grew huge numbers of members. There were, in 1920, many clubs boosting widespread racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, but it was the KKK that burgeoned because it was a pyramid scheme. My grandfather had paid ten dollars to join, a lot of money from a working man in the twenties (but worth it if you got a year's supply of beer). The liar who recruited him got to keep 40% of the membership fee. If you joined the KKK and then talked ten friends into joining, you came out $30 ahead. 

You could make a living selling caps with KKK printed on the bills. You could make a living by traveling around and giving KKK lectures. You could sell memorabilia and the special white robes (no serious member would wear a sheet). And a hundred years later you can sell caps with MAGA on them. Those caps are making money for someone.