I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THE "GOOD GERMANS" in Nazi Germany. The people who knew Hitler was deliberately committing genocide against Jews but who voted for him, anyway. On purpose.
People say that they were doing what they thought--believed!--was right, but how could they believe that murdering an entire subcategory of humans was the right thing? My thought process in response to this, as a Jewish person, goes like this:
There are obvious flaws within the system of thinking here, but I want to be transparent and honest, because that's the only way forward, here, so bear with me. When Trump got elected in 2016 and started generalizing Mexicans in similar ways that Hitler generalized Jews, I of course panicked--because guess what? I'm Mexican, too. My friends told me that I was overreacting when I compared modern early Trumpism to early Nazi Germany, but I was genuinely terrified. Sure, I'm White-passing, and I grew up Christian. But would those things save me if push came to shove? When people start using rhetoric that blames an entire category of people, it's us-versus-them. It's fight-versus flight. It's survival thinking--and there's no reasoning with survival thinking.
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I NEVER FELT MEXICAN. NOT REALLY.
I've written several times about growing up as a privileged half-Latina, white-passing American, and I cannot stress how embarrassing it was to never really meet anyone else going through this. And isolating. Every time I met another Latinx person, I felt like a fraud. I even considered joining my school's Amigas Unidas organization, or the Sigma Lambda Gamma chapter, but I felt "too white" to join. I kept feeling like I had to prove that I knew Spanish, kept apologizing for my grammar. I pretended like I understood the slang jokes that everyone else made. I was lying. I am a proud Latina; I'm proud of the legacy that my Mexican grandparents have set, the stories of perseverance that they told about growing up prior to Cesar Chavez's labour movement. I grew up as a young Mexican girl in Fresno, but my story was far from that of Gary Soto's--I lived in the suburbs, not the barrio; I went to private, magnet, and charter schools and had an attentive mother who nagged me about my grades; there was never any question about whether I was going to college or not, and I even thought of Fresno State as a fallback school rather than something to aspire to*. And to make matters worse: I was never racially profiled. This sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? And it is, to an extent. But it's distressing in that my brother and I have drastically different experiences with this, despite having the same racial blood makeup.
"Foundation," everyone trying to quietly get their four-of-a-kind on the concrete floor of the dressing room, our faces made up with full eye makeup and red lipstick on our braces-lined teeth, looking more like twelve-year-old hookers to an outsider than anything else. We were all preoccupied with being professional ballerinas one day, determined to live out this dream until we were all dancing for ABT (did we know any other ballet company when we were twelve?). But we were young; we had time; and anyway we were so busy between rehearsal and homework that there wasn't time for anything else. We moved through the motions, did the performances, got our ten-year roses.
Automatically, the title of this post makes me sound young to about half of you, and the other half of you haven't the foggiest idea what I'm talking about. My twelve-year-old cousin has a smartphone and knows--very thoroughly--how to use it, and just this year she took a coding class at school. This is my concept of coding at school at 12 years old: (notice it's not even coding)
(also notice the floppies) (vintage, baby.) Dear Ann Carr(-Tunney) of Penn State,
I just watched you in the 1980 AIAW National Women's Collegiate Gymnastics Event Finals. I'm about 35 years too late in writing this letter, but in my defence I wasn't alive in 1980. Regardless, sorry for the delay in this letter. I know that's no excuse. But those 35 years make a huge difference. I see you in your blue leotard, dressed up with white curved streaks in a flippy pattern throughout the body, and think how dressed-up you must have felt. You were twenty-two, at the top of the world. First woman to be awarded a full athletic scholarship at Penn State. US National Team member. Gold medals galore in the 1975 Pan-American Games, winner of three Broderick Awards, but today at 57 years old, none of that is bragged on your LinkedIn profile. Instead, you've quietly made 10 connections and modestly mention your 27 years of service with the School District of Philadelphia. I think of Sydney Johnson-Scharpf, daughter of another gymnastics legend 15 years younger than you. You paved the way for Brandy Johnson and Brandy paved the way for Sydney--down the generations you've passed on levels of difficulty and expectations for one, two, three somersaults in the air before landing back down to the women who came after you. And they're so young now. Sydney Johnson-Scharpf is nearing 16. She's tired in the 2014 Secret US Classic, after coming back from three injuries, so young, so old, the weight of fame siding with gravity to keep her down. Gymnastics is so different now. Your floor exercise in 1980 featured large amounts of ballet incorporated in your exercise. Growing up as a dancer, I'd always thought gymnasts were just doing it wrong, with their hands splayed out into what we call "competition hands" in the studio dance world, their ribs sticking out, their backs arched too much. The older I got, the more I separated gymnastics "dance" exercises from my own. They were a different species. Gymnastics did not equal ballet, and that was okay. But then I saw you, and realized I was wrong. Or, at least I would have been in 1980. |
PART OF THIS COMPLETE BREAKFASTBlog not recommended for sober consumption. |