Reading this morning's Athletic, I felt so sorry for Draymond Green speaking about the terrorists storming and pillaging our national capital, how in his words, if those people had been of color they would have been met by the National Guard with guns and attack dogs, beaten into submission and hauled of in unmarked vans to jail. Draymond sounded so depressed. I thought of Doc Rivers' sorrowful question, I paraphrase: Why do we love a country so much that doesn't love us back? If this isn't what was in the back of Draymond mind, it surely must have been there like a shadow of thought.
As athletes we grow up believing in a level playing field. No person of color (or any right-thinking white) is so foolish as to believe this works as a metaphor for equal rights and opportunity in America. As a goal, however, it is surely something to hope for and play for. Sadly, what I heard from Draymond was a hopelessness that such a future level playing field will never be attained.
That Draymond and every African American watching the Capital debacle feels this way with its related depression and anger can not be left unrecognized. As a consequence of not dealing with the promise of a level playing field, I offer this poem by Langston Hughes:
Does it dry up
Like a raison in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and and sugar ovr
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load
Or does it explode?
***
So, is there anything this blog can offer that might help Draymond's depression? About the present, nothing helpful, I'm afraid. Our so-called president has managed to raise to the surface of our country all of its racial prejudices in a bunch so it sits on our body politic like scum.
There is, however, a possible scumless FUTURE. And this might help. To identify it, one must look to television commercials for proof. Over the last decade, I'd been noticing more and more TV ads featuring inter-racial couples selling products. At first I thought these ads were designed by advertising companies for a targeted liberal east/ west coast audience, leaving the less liberal parts of America watching same-o-same-o un-mixed racial images. I telephoned my sister, a retired advertising exec to find out what the story was. The inter-racial commercials were viewed all over the country she told me. Her words, "The advertising industry has always been ahead of the demographic curve. Inter-racialism is where this country is trending."
Draymond, I don't know if this information helps you to visualize a better America. It does comfort me somewhat. I recognize it in the way my grandchildren and their friends and school mates think and inter-act positively with all races. I see the younger generations as multi cultural and multi-racial. And the generation of Trump voters see it too and are terrified by it. Thus their violence to hold on to their white power. But there is nothing they can do about the trend. An inter-racial society is coming. It is inevitable. And, Draymond, with this new and better generation of young people growing up and voting for change will finally come the level playing field you so desperately yearn for. Look around you. Check out the young people. Don't despair.
