Mother Jones - May 01, 2018

64 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY  JUNE 2018

MIXED MEDIA

to stop. Not seeing the value of black and

brown bodies has to stop,” Wade said. Then,

he added a negotiated, balancing qualifier,

necessary to appease the corporate entities

involved. “But also the retaliation has to

stop. The endless gun violence in places like

Chicago, Dallas—not to mention Orlando—

it has to stop. Enough. Enough is enough.

Now, as athletes, it’s on us to challenge each

other to do even more than what we already

do in our own communities. And the con-

versation cannot stop as our schedules get

busy again.” Wade’s words underscored the

corporate minefield today’s players tread.

Wade’s inclusion of the “endless gun vio-

lence in places like Chicago” was personal—

it is his hometown—but was also seen as a

negotiated appeasement to the “What about

black-on-black crime?” sect. It was always

a bizarre and illogical leap, a derivative of

“shut up and play”: Black people kill one

another, so why should anyone complain

when the good guys kill them too?

Still, what James and the others said the

night of the espys should have been a call to

action for all athletes. But just as in the 1960s,

few white players have accepted the challenge.

The police unions reacted to player protests

by threatening to withhold services to events

where criticism was expected to be on display.

Black players found themselves where they

had always been whenever they sought white

support: pleading to be seen as full Ameri-

cans to a public that only saw flag over griev-

ance, authority over justice. It was about the

most important black employees in America

reclaiming a voice and responsibility from an

American public that didn’t think they had

ever earned the right to speak at all. And it was

why many whites hated Kaepernick so. He

did not negotiate. He was not a peacemaker.

So when James confronted Trumpism two

years later with public defiance, Ingraham

responded with an old weapon: an attempt

to deny his voice—“Must they run their

mouths like that?”—and, indeed, his citi-

zenship. James and others shot back with I

will not shut up and dribble, and Ingraham

ultimately outed herself as a fraud, invit-

ing James to appear on her show in a weak

attempt to spin her condescending, racist

attack into chummy celebrity banter. She

failed, naturally, but her attitudes succeeded

in reminding players, despite their millions

and after all these years, why the Heritage

endures: Even when African Americans

think they’ve made it, they haven’t. Q

in 1935 , when gertrude stein returned to Oakland, California,

for the first time in decades, she stopped by her childhood home

to find the big house and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge

she remembered all gone. “There is no there there,” she later wrote

in Everybody’s Autobiography, a phrase for which she (and, unfairly,

Oakland itself) would long be remembered.

Author Tommy Orange uses Stein’s words to evoke a different

sort of erasure in There There, his debut novel, out in June. The

book’s 12 main characters, like its 36-year-old author, are Native

American—their ancestral land, one reminisces, buried in “glass and

concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory.” Their

stories, which become ever more tightly braided as the book moves

toward its explosive finale (at a powwow in a football stadium), are

those of contemporary Oaklanders—postal workers and custodians

and high schoolers who are fighting “to be a present-tense people.”

Some 70 percent of the country’s roughly 5 million

Native Americans are now city dwellers. Yet the urban

Native experience had never been portrayed in lit-

erature, “as far as I could tell,” Orange says as

we walk around Oakland’s Lake Merritt.

That, coupled with his “raw virtuosic talent”

(as novelist Claire Vaye Watkins puts it in

her cover blurb), sparked a bidding war among

publishers who hoped to end the drought of

major books from Native American writers.

Sherman Alexie, who first made

waves with his 1993 story col-

lection, The Lone Ranger

and Tonto Fistfight in

Heaven, lamented

NATIVE SON

Novelist Tommy Orange highlights a group

of urbanites we seldom hear about.

BOTTOM: ELENA SEIBERT; TOP: MOLLY CRABAPPLE