Sadly for me, the NBA season is over. My obsession with basketball must take a backseat for a couple of months while I try to navigate the incessant sports chatter about football season starting up (you know it’s bad when ESPN jumps on CFL and Arena League highlights a month before the NFL starts). The NFL has always bothered me, I’ve never really been able to get into it. Most recently, I was reminded again that Colin Kaepernick remains a free-agent after being frozen out by essentially every team in the NFL. We’ve all heard the lines about how he stood (or kneeled) for what he believed in, and the predictions came true that owners around the league would shun him because of his political stance. At the end of the day, Kaepernick was one of the most graceful and aware activists of modern times. He brought his political stance to the forefront, that Black lives matter, using the platform he had access to, donated his time and his money to the causes he believed in, listened to others about how to improve his own message, AND he listened to those who opposed the way he went about his protest. What more could you ask from an activist in today’s political climate?? In an age where dialogue and communication (not to mention compromise) have been characterized as “loosing” or “giving in,” the fact that he was able to discuss and evolve while standing up for his beliefs is incredible. 

 

So, about a month out from the NFL starting up again, it is a terrible look for the league to have such a player on sidelines, and it is even worse for American society as a whole that we support a league when someone has been ostracized for speaking their mind. In Donald Trump’s America, there has been a growing attack on First Amendment rights, especially for minorities. And when it comes to race, Agent Orange has only emboldened conservative white Americans to speak out against those fighting for racial equality, such as a Colin Kaepernick. William C. Rhoden, a scholar and sports writer, recently wrote on one of my favorite websites, The Undefeated, an article about Kaepernick still being a free-agent. He perfectly summarized why his position reflects so poorly on America by saying, “The apparent blackballing of Kaepernick is not about football. This is about the erosion of the American Soul filtered through the prism of football.” (Hot damn, that’s a well written sentence!)

with no repercussion from either commissioner.

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Thinking about the “American Soul,” as Roden puts it, I’ve come across a new movie and a TV show that have stuck with me, thinking about the issue of race in both pieces, and what they mean on a larger American scale. 

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I’ve been hearing about this new film by Sofia Coppola that’s about the lives of a house full of white women in the Civil War era south. Coppola has come under fire for removing Black characters and Black storylines, so that she can solely focus on issues of gender during the time. My reaction is somewhere between the Jackie Chan “What?” meme, and the Conceited Rapper face. I read an amazing article on The Root by Clarkisha Kent, titled Sofia Coppola’s Blatant Erasure of Black Women in The Beguiled Highlights How White Women Are Complicit in White Supremacy,which discussed the problematic nature of this film so well that I will simply bulk quote her article. 

 

On the decision to remove Black characters, Kent writes, “Coppola stated that she wanted to ‘focus on the gender dynamics’ rather than ‘the racial ones.’ I call bullshit on this, mostly because black women find themselves at the intersection of both and because white women are not devoid of race, no matter how badly they want to be.” 

 

Kent continues, moving onto Coppola’s claim that she also removed the Black characters because she didn’t want to portray them incorrectly. Kent said, “Coppola could have included black women to acknowledge [the] problematic aspects of the source material she drew inspiration from and offered a more nuanced take that ditches what is likable for what is actually historically correct. But instead, because she didn’t want to portray the protagonists of her ‘white [girl] power’ film as slave owners or people who were A-OK with owning slaves, she opted to leave them out entirely. The whole idea here is that if you leave them out and they are not seen, you don’t have to talk about them. Or think about them. Or work hard at potentially misrepresenting them (never mind that you could find black women who actually know what they’re doing to help, but that would be smart, so … )…Because while it would be equally problematic to erase the inclusion of black women in a fictional story, erasing said women from a fictional story set during the Civil War goes beyond problematic. It is just plain inaccurate, period.” (Author’s emphasis). Kent’s analysis is great, perfectly explaining how Coppola’s decision makes her film more problematic than less.