Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself...

During the last UCABJ meeting (Thursday night in 423 TUC), Terron mentioned the first columns we did in Kathy Wilson's columns and reviews class. The idea was to choose a segment of our identity - like gender, class, sexuality, or race - and write a column about it. This helped us home in on our individual voice. Since my professor was the only one that ever saw that column, I thought I'd post it here. It might also provide a good backdrop for upcoming posts, since they will also concern my experiences at the Lakota school district.

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He Got Game

I hate basketball. A sense of relief flows through me every spring whenever I realize “March Madness” is over and the ubiquitous college basketball season has come to an end. My embarrassing lack of athletic ability has helped make me generally disinterested in sports. But more than any other game, basketball really gets under my skin. And the color of that skin probably has a lot to do with my hatred of the game.

As a black male of the Hip Hop generation, others often assume I love basketball. The athletic expectations that are placed on people like me at an early age can make certain roles, like the black basketball player, painful and humiliating.

I grew up in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester, Ohio. It was a place where the corn grew tall, the big houses were far apart, and they designed high schools to look like shopping malls. Most of the trees in my neighborhood were noticeably small because the real estate was so new. There were frequent parking problems at my high school, Lakota West, because so many students were driving their own cars to classes. And when they got to those classes, I was routinely the only black guy there.

I know what you might be thinking. No, I am not an Uncle Tom. I really do identify strongly with the black community. As a literate black male, dealing with racial tension and a preoccupation with forms of oppression became integral parts of my identity.

But my personal encounters with bigotry in suburbia, however real they may have been, weren’t severe enough to fully explain my fixation on race. In many ways, my identity has been shaped by things that happened before I was born.

We members of the Hip Hop generation share a vivid collective memory of past traumas and struggles linked to American racism. In fact, our parents’ stories overshadow our own. Segregation and racism are often on our minds.

I see myself in images of black bodies chained together on slave ships, and black people hanging from trees. The stories of those that came before me - from my Grandma Pauline’s mother being raped by a slave master to the hostility my parents experienced as they integrated elementary schools in Tennessee in the ‘60s – have helped to shape who I am.

The hope, faith, and strength that my forefathers and foremothers had through all of these struggles continue to empower me. At the same time, being a member of the Hip Hop generation also involves an underlying sense of being late to the show. It’s as if all of the exciting and important stories have already been told.

But only a liar would try to say the continuing significance of race in everyday life is just in our heads. People who grow up in the suburbs don’t catch as much hell as the ones who grow up in the ghettos or the rural south, but we all feel the heat.

Racism in the criminal justice system is very real. Gross disparities in education and employment are very real. And somehow unarmed white young men don’t seem to get killed by police as often as unarmed black young men do.

The personal interactions with peers and authority figures are even more important to racial identity than societal conditions are. Being black is like that history teacher that decided I’d be a discipline problem the moment I walked into the room.

Being black is like my frustration with white supremacist compliments like “I don’t even think of you as black.” They always smile when they say it, as if denigrating my heritage is supposed to make me feel flattered.

And yes, being black is like when the other guys picked me for their basketball team because they thought dark skin somehow made me a Harlem Globetrotter or something. Being black is like when you’re viewed as some kind of mutant when you don’t embody the stereotype. Charlie-Brown-cases like me that are short and clumsy deal with enough rejection without such racially charged expectations rubbing salt into the wound.

I don’t know if listening to Rap, Jazz and NPR makes me more or less “black.” I don’t know if being able to name which planet Chewbacca is from or spending Sunday mornings in a pew makes me more or less “white.” Who knows? Maybe believing in karma makes me more Asian. There’s a lot of ambiguity when it comes to my generation’s racial identity.

But there’s one thing I do know. I hate basketball.

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~Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ