What I Don’t Know About Brittney Griner, NCAA Women’s Basketball Champion

By Joan M. Martin

I admit it. Although I have been a pretty good amateur athlete all my life, I am a lifetime wanna-be collegiate and WNBA basketball player! I am also a die-hard UConn Women Huskies fan. Yet, hats off to the Baylor University Bears who won the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Championship last night, under the leadership of Baylor post player, Brittney Griner. You can read all the game stats and those for Griner in your favorite sports media as I did on espnW.com. 

For the entire NCAA basketball season, we have been learning tons about Griner. Yet I realize I really don’t know much about the woman. For example, I don't know 

• which cereal she eats for breakfast (maybe it ought to be Wheaties, The Breakfast of Champions);
• which sports movie she watches over and over again, (since Hollywood hasn’t made a women’s basketball version of A League of Their Own);
• what her all time favorite song is, (it ought to be, “We Are The Champions”);
• which athlete is her role model, (but she may have just looked in the mirror last night and marveled at the woman returning her gaze, after all, this year she won the Wade Trophy, the Naismith Player of the Year and the WBCA’s defensive player of the year awards); 
• what her religion is, (but I am absolutely positive that God was watching the game and yelling Her head off saying, “Go on, with your bad self,” (all due props to Skyler Diggings)); and
• which WNBA team she dreams of playing for one day in the not-so-distant future!

The WNBA? Women's basketball? Oh, it seems I haven’t been reading all the nasty taunts about Brittney Griner’s height and shoe size, all the openly misogynist hatred, all the lesbian baiting, and the vitriolic jealousy of her ability to dunk a b-ball as well as the best.

What I do know is that once again, a woman of outstanding athletic talent has come under attack for excellence. Needless to say, Brittney Griner is an outstanding African American woman athlete of excellence.  All too often, the Brittney Griners, Venus and Serena Williams, or Sheryl Swoopes of the sports world cannot be gifted and at the top echelon of their sport without being besmirched in regard to their race and gender, and often their sexuality in the case of homophobia.  

We need only recall the comment by sportscaster Sid Rosenberg, reported in the November 20, 2001, Newsday article, “Rosenberg [allegedly] said on the air: One time, a friend, he says to me, ‘Listen, one of these days you’re gonna see Venus and Serena Williams in Playboy.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a better shot at National Geographic.’  Rosenberg also referred to Venus Williams as an ‘animal.’” If you cannot remember that long ago, just think back to April 2007 when, after the Rutgers Lady Knights met the Lady Tennessee Vols in the NCAA Women’s Championship Game, MSNBC talk-radio host Imus in the Morning called the Rutgers team, “nappy-headed hos.”[1]

Those who maintain that racism is passé do not understand, in the face of the murder of Trayvon Martin, the all-too familiar and common belief that African American life is “cheap” in America. And many believe that discrimination against women is no longer an issue in nearly all walks of life in the United States until one looks closely at the statistical reports of the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau. Recently, one of the students I advise wrote that marriage equality is rapidly increasing in the United States. With marriage equality striking at the heart of patriarchal heteronormativity, I am waiting for the next round of redoubled backlash that inevitably comes whenever civil rights in the United States are expanded to include those considered “second-class” citizens.

We could become cynical in light of such analysis.  That, however, is not my point. 

Just as we resist complacency and instead demand justice for Trayvon Martin, we must not let the verbal abuse and violence against the Brittney Griners of any day continue, especially at the end of the collegiate basketball season when “out-of-sight” means “out-of-mind,” that is social amnesia in America.  What happened to Brittney Griner and to Trayvon Martin are two ends of a dehumanizing, pernicious continuum that has been repeated much too often and too long in our nation. Just as we must fight for growth in meaningful employment opportunity for all in this presidential election season and not just ‘jobs,’ we must speak the truth and vote our consciences about the continuing redistribution of US wealth and resources from the working and middle classes and from women and children to the obscenely rich in our country. The wealth continuum is grossly imbalanced and out of whack, jeopardizing our economic future as well as our moral compass.  Just as we must continue to press for the full human rights for persons of every sexual and gender orientation, we, too, along with Coach Kim Mulkey, can proudly carry Brittney Griner on our shoulders as the best of the best in women’s collegiate basketball this year. In this respect, it does not take masterminds to see the continuum of bullying to hate speech and crimes.

What does all this mean? I didn’t even root for Baylor last night, but I will root for the Brittney Griners of the world every day of every season, and then some!

[1] Source for the information on African American women athletes as quoted: http://mediamatters.org/research/200704040011; accessed 4/04/2012.

The Rev. Dr. Joan M. Martin is William W. Rankin Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School. 

Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday the Day After

By Joan M. Martin

Yesterday was The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national holiday.  Children were interviewed on national TV reading the words of the civil rights leader etched into the new MLK, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  Churches, synagogues, and mosques held interfaith worship services across the country. 

Original manuscripts of Dr. King’s speeches with his own handwritten editing comments crossed out or added were released for the first time by the King Center in Atlanta, GA. Most governmental offices and public schools and services observed the day by being closed. Yes, there were even several of those corporate commercials entreating us to “Keep the Dream Alive!”

Staff and administrative offices were closed at Episcopal Divinity School, but I worked yesterday, as did most faculty members and students and several librarians. Classes met so that students could receive the required teaching-learning hours necessary for full course credit for the two-week January Intensive Session. Rarely does the Dr. King’s birthday fall during the winter intensive session, so it really felt odd to be in class! 

So I began my class on the “Ethics of Vocation and Work in Church and Society” reminding my seminar participants that throughout his life Dr. King championed the civil rights of laborers, poor whites, people of color, and the right to organize by the U.S. labor movement.  We recalled that Dr. King spent his last days alive in Spring 1968 in solidarity with striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. 

There, he marched, spoke, and prepared the way for the proposed Poor Peoples’ March on Washington to occur later that summer.  How fitting and proper that our seminar understood at a new and deeper level Dr. King’s vocation to participate in creating God’s “beloved community,” and his work of human rights and solidarity given in the ultimate measure, with his very life.

This Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday 2012 falls in the midst of the greatest economic insecurity in the U.S. since the Great Depression, and in the uncertain shockwaves of the instability of global capitalism in the European Union and the recession in the U.S. economy. In July, The Christian Science Monitor reported that, “All racial groups lost ground in the recession, but blacks and Hispanics lost a bigger share of their net worth, a new study finds. As a result, the wealth gap is at its widest in at least 25 years.” 

Further, Paul Krugman suggested in The New York Times yesterday, “If King could actually see American now … he would see that … what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck. … Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.”

Wealth, poverty, unemployment, job creation, access to healthcare, racism, and the role of government are the issues that Dr. King believed were “inextricably bound” to the human flourishing from the perspective of economic and class injustice.  The call for “jobs” must entail job creation commensurate with the skills of the unemployed, particularly in the declining middle class, with income that preserves and creates new formations of stable civic and economic communities. 

Just as important and perhaps even more so, is the educational and skills development for entrepreneurship in service, technology, and information/communications industries for those in racially and economically marginalized communities – urban, ex-urban, and rural – that provides for serious competitive opportunity in economic sectors where there is economic mobility.  For such changes to be envisioned, the old “private/public sector” arrangements will have to give way to new forms of partnerships of all the stakeholders, beginning with those who need work and those who need the physical and community infrastructures of economics to be repaired and to grow as an integrated program with “green” integrity.

In the electoral season now upon us, as well as in the continual grassroots organizing coalescing under the canopy of the 99%, we have yet another opportunity to concretely struggle with nature of “The Dream” for the second decade of the 21st century and beyond, and to participate in the creation of the “beloved community” ever before us. Let our cry, “Remember the Dream,” be more than a once a year sentiment.  Rather, let it be an active engagement in it as our vocation and work in church and society.

* The Reverend Dr. Joan M. Martin is the William W. Rankin Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.