Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 420

February 11-12, 2012: Remembering Whitney Houston

A brief tribute to one of late 20th century America's most talented and troubled stars.

Whitney Houston, who died Saturday, wasn't nearly as significant a historical and cultural voice and presence as the folks on whom my Black History Month series focused. Moreover, since I know very little about her career and life, I'm not particularly qualified to write a tribute to her at this tragic final moment. But there's no question that she was one of the most talented singers in American pop music history, that for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s she was one of the most potent cultural icons on the planet, and that with those qualities she inspired many listeners and fans. And there's similarly no question that her descent since that time into a spiral of, apparently, drugs and poverty and self-destruction is one of the sadder American cultural stories in recent memory.

So here's to remembering Whitney Houston, not in this tragic moment, nor during that long spiral, but as she was, when she was as good as they get. More next week,

Ben

2/11 Memory Day nominee: Lydia Maria Child, about the many facets of whose justified status as "The First Woman in the Republic" I wrote at length in that linked post—and for further details of which I cannot recommend highly enough Carolyn Karcher's comprehensive cultural biography with that title.

2/12 Memory Day nominee: Cotton Mather, partly because he helps us understand the complex and telling national tragedy that was the Salem Witch Trials, but mostly because the rest of his life and work, especially in advocating for smallpox inoculation, were so important and inspiring.

February 10, 2012: Remembering David Walker

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Remembering one of the most aggressive, impassioned, and eloquent—if tragically short-lived—voices for social equality in our nation's history.

When it comes to social progress and change, as I wrote most explicitly in this post on the Civil Rights movement, I think our national narratives tend to emphasize peaceful mechanisms like passive resistance (which is not, as I also argued in this Occupy Davis post, necessarily peaceful nor passive) more than they do aggressive protests or challenges to the established order or society. That's a perfectly understandable perspective, since it allows us to recognize the need for change while likewise celebrating peace, love, and other importantly unifying ideas. But just as Martin Luther King pushed back on such perspectives by arguing for Why We Can't Wait, and just as Frederick Douglass illustrated by challenging his audience directly in his seminal "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech, significant social change depends as well, if not indeed centrally, on aggressive voices and protests.

When it comes to abolitionism, there are certainly no shortage of aggressive voices to include in our national narratives: Douglass himself, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, even (if exemplifying the conflicts that such aggression can produce) John Brown. But perhaps the most aggressive and angry, yet also eloquent and powerful, such abolitionist voice belongs to an almost entirely forgotten early 19th century American: David Walker. Walker's life, and even more so his public prominence, were tragically short-lived—he burst onto the scene as one of Boston's and the nation's most vocal abolitionists in 1827/1828, published his seminal Walker's Appeal in 1829 , and died (probably of tuberculosis) at the age of 33 in 1830—which might explain in part his disappearance from our collective memories. But I would argue that Walker's profoundly radical text and ideas likewise contributed to that elision—and are precisely why we should instead remember and engage with him today.

The most overtly, and not at all unimportantly, radical aspect of Walker's Appeal is its typography: as scholar Marcy Dinius has recently analyzed at length, Walker utilized capitalization, exclamation points, enlarged typefaces, bold and italics, and many other typographical elements to create a text that quite literally yells (screams, even) at its audiences. Yet those typographical extremes parallel the book's many equally aggressive and challenging ideas and elements: Walker's use of the Constitution as a frame, in order to force the nation's hypocrisies to the fore throughout; his arguments for immediate and absolute emancipation by any and every means, including violent slave revolts; and, perhaps most strikingly for the era, his titular and continued address not to fellow abolitionists, nor to slaveholders, or even to white Americans at all, but "to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America." That address, like Walker's book and voice overall, refuses to accept any of the conditions of slavery, including its forced illiteracy and powerlessness, making a case instead for the shared anger, challenge, passion, and eloquence of all African Americans.

Please share Walker's book and voice, and his lasting significance, this February! One more in the series this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any African American texts, voices, or figures that you think we should better remember? Highlight 'em here!

2/10 Memory Day nominee: John Franklin Enders, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist whose pioneering work with viruses greatly influenced Jonas Salk's development of a polio vaccine, led Enders to be known as "The Father of Modern Vaccines," and reflected, as does his co-authored Nobel lecture, a communal understanding of scientific work and progress.

February 9, 2012: Remembering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Remembering an author and reformer whose efforts and works spanned virtually every significant 19th century period, issue, and literary genre.

Many of my nominees for the Hall of American Inspiration have been folks I have called Renaissance Americans, historical and cultural figures whose work, writing, interests, and influences spanned many different subjects and disciplines, communities and events. Such figures, to echo what I wrote about historical and literary inspirations in yesterday's post, exemplify the deepest meaning of an interdisciplinary American Studies approach, making clear that inspirational American identities do not adhere to specific categories or boundaries for where and how their influences are felt. And I don't know that any American has crossed into more spheres of influence, nor done so by overcoming more significant obstacles, than Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper).

Watkins (her maiden name) was born to free African American parents in Baltimore, but in 1825, a period when (as Frederick Douglass's slave experiences of that city around the same time illustrate) the lives and prospects of free blacks were not often far removed from those of slaves. Yet before she had turned 30—while slavery was still the law of much of the land, including of course in Maryland—she had published multiple collections of poetry, including the very successful Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); had moved to Pennsylvania and was helping William Still run his portion of the Underground Railroad; and was traveling throughout the north delivering lectures on behalf of both abolitionism and women's rights. Her 1860 marriage to Fenton Harper briefly removed her from such public efforts, and had she concluded her public careers at that time her life and works would already constitute an impressive and inspirational part of our histories and community.

Fentor Harper tragically died only four years later, however, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (as she would remain known for the remainder of her life) returned to the public sphere, or really many spheres, with renewed passion and power. She not only continued to work for African American rights, during and after Reconstruction and the many other post-war challenges, but became as eloquent and important a voice for women's rights and suffrage as any American. She contributed so many journalistic pieces on those and other issues that she came to be known as the mother of African American journalism. She released many more collections of poetry, creating in Sketches of Southern Life (1872)'s Aunt Chloe one of the era's most compelling characters and voices. She also published multiple novels, including one of the most important Reconstruction novels in Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) . And throughout she dealt with her period and its far too often dark histories with the combination of realism and optimism reflected in Iola's subtitle and best captured in her most famous lines of poetry: "Yet the shadows bear the promise/Of a brighter coming day."

Please share that poem, and Harper's inspirational life and works, this February! Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any inspirational Renaissance Americans (from any community) you'd highlight?

2/9 Memory Day nominee: Tom Paine, the Anglo-American immigrant whose political pamphlets Common Sense and the multi-volume The Crisis complemented, strengthened, and extended the efforts of the Declaration of Independence and early Revolutionary battles, and whose broader political and spiritual philosophizing in The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason provided bracingly radical and democratic visions for a rebellious age.

February 8, 2012: Remembering Anna Julia Cooper

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see

February 7, 2012: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Adding three distinct and equally interesting voices into our collective memories of the Harlem Renaissance.

It seems to me that Americans generally have a sense of the Harlem Renaissance, at least as far as our collective memories of any historical moment or literary and artistic community go. The name itself resonates in our collective consciousness, I'd say, and might even be connected by many American to particularly well-known writers and works from the era: the poems of Langston Hughes for many decades now, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) more recently. Compared to African American writers from (for example) Charles Chesnutt's era, about a couple of whom more in the next couple of posts, the writers and artists who comprised the Renaissance are positively prominent in our national narratives.

But as I have argued many times before in this space, having a general or even specific sense of a history or narrative doesn't mean that there aren't ways we can and should seek to expand, deepen, and strengthen our individual and collective memories, and in this case I would argue that many Harlem Renaissance voices and works deserve a fuller place in those memories. For starters, there's the man known in his own as the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance," Alain Locke; Locke gained that title not only because he expanded his 1925 essay "The New Negro" into a book-length collection of writings and art (with the same title) that really launched the Renaissance, but because his philosophical and practical support for the movement and community, for its ideas and goals, and most especially for its artists were crucial to its growth and success (and remain vital in American life). We can't remember the Harlem Renaissance, it seems to me, and not remember Alain Locke much more fully than we do.

The Renaissance was first and foremost about artists and writers, though, and there's similarly work for us to do in expanding our collective memories of those voices and works. Alongside Hughes's poems, for example, I would say that we can and must include the works of Countee Cullen; Cullen's poem "Incident," from his debut collection Color (1925), represents in particular as clear and potent a statement of the meanings and power of racism and bigotry as can be found in American literature. And alongside Hurston's novel, I would likewise put Jean Toomer's much more modernist and stylistically radical book Cane (1923), a book which includes multiple literary and artistic genres and pushes the envelopes of form and response just as fully as it does our perspectives of race and place. Neither Cullen nor Toomer should supplant Hughes or Hurston, and there are other potential writers and artists who could be added as well; the key, as always for me, is to add voices to our collective memories and stories as much as possible.

So I'll ask again—share Cullen's poem, or a bit of Toomer's book, with somebody this February! Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any writers or artists you'd highlight?

2/7 Memory Day nominee: Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose "Little House on the Prairie" books (and the subsequent TV series) defined the frontier and childhood and family for many generations of young Americans, and whose own complicated and multi-stage life and identity can help us understand not only those themes, but also America itself in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

February 6, 2012: Remembering Lucille Clifton

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. This is the first in the series.]

Remembering a poet whose best works do the two very different, and equally important, things that poetry can do best.

It seems to me that when we think about poetry, here in the early 21st century, we tend to think about it as a profoundly individual and intimate genre, an expression of personal experiences and perspectives that, if they are not explicitly the poet's, at least feel as if they could be. That kind of confessional tone is indeed one of the styles and effects poetry is best suited to capture, and can create understanding of and empathy for identities and perspectives in very powerful ways. Yet if we date the origins of poetry back to texts such as the works of Homer or The Aeneid, then it's fair to say that poetry has also been particularly strong as capturing communal historical experiences, at representing how groups of people are affected by and affect historical events and changes.

I don't know too many poets who are equally adept at both of those elements, especially not in this era of more specialized genres and subjects. But then there's Lucille Clifton. In her best confessional poems, such as the raw and heart-breaking "The Lost Baby Poem," Clifton got as close to lived experiences and genuine identities as any American poet ever has; I don't have any idea whether Clifton herself had to abort or otherwise lost a child in the complex and painful circumstances and moment which her poem describes, but the poem is equally honest, and its effects equally shattering and yet productive of connection and empathy, in any case. And the speaker's final perspective, her promises to that lost child about the future she must and will make beyond, and through, that loss, is similarly as compelling and real as any poetic voice I know.

No less compelling and real, nor indeed any less intimate and personal, are Clifton's historical poems. In a poem like "At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989," Clifton within the first fourteen lines engages both with histories of slavery and race and with questions of collective and public memory as well as any history textbook could, capturing in a few lines both the identities of those distant historical ancestors (of us all) and their complex absence and presence at a historic site. And in the subsequent twenty lines, she makes a profound and powerful case for her own voice and role, in remembering these histories and identities, in telling and writing of them, and in bringing them to an audience that might otherwise have lost them. When she told Bill Moyers, in a conversation about this poem, that "the past isn't back there, the past is here too," she defined not only the poem's historical vision, but the perspectives on experience and identity that both her confessional and her historical poems so perfectly capture.

This February (and beyond), share some Clifton with those around you, if you could. Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any inspiring folks—writers or otherwise—you'd like to nominate for inclusion in the series?

2/6 Memory Day nominee: Aaron Burr, certainly a controversial choice—I don't anticipate any other nominees having been tried for treason or having killed another prominent American in a duel—but a voice and perspective that can, as Gore Vidal so brilliantly recognized, shed a very different and crucially important light on the Revolutionary and Early Republic era, on the Founders and their legacies, and on America's origins and meanings.

February 4-5, 2012: A Key Question about Muhammad Ali

[For this Super Bowl week, I'll be blogging about interesting American Studies moments, texts, and issues related to the history of sports in America. This is the fifth and final entry in the series.]

In which I ask a critical question (of you, dear readers!) about one of America's most talented, compelling, and above all socially significant sports figures.

I wrote a couple weeks ago, in this Martin Luther King Day post, about the ways in which popular narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., have elided his more angry and aggressive positions in favor of his peaceful and optimistic ones; those ideas of mine are certainly complemented by the work of historian Rick Perlstein, who has developed at length a theory about the "Santa Claus-ification" of King and has pushed back by emphasizing the many Americans who expressed bigotry and hatred toward King in his own era (and beyond). The same case could be made, to connect to my last week of posts on sports in American Studies, for figures like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron—not that they were as divisive (nor as influential or inspiring) as King, but certainly that the death threats and abuse they received in their respective careers have given away to almost universal public adoration in our own moment.

There's no question that Muhammad Ali is similarly adored; in fact, I would argue that he is on the short list for our most celebrated American athlete (both today and of all time), as evidenced by the 1996 Olympic torch/cauldron lighting, the recent and extensive 70th birthday celebrations, and much else besides. Yet there's also no question that during his boxing career, at least the first couple decades of it, Ali was known as much for controversial political and social choices as for his phenomenal talents: principally the 1965 choice to convert to Islam and change his name from Cassius Clay (which he called "the name of the white slave master") and then the subsequent and related 1967 draft resistance and refusal to serve in Vietnam (which Ali framed not as a choice between the military and jail, but through the third option of "justice").  These choices were, in their era, significantly more striking and potentially divisive than (say) Aaron's pursuit of Ruth's home run record, during the course of which Aaron got those death threats.

So my question is this: was Ali as hated and attacked as Robinson and Aaron? Did he receive the kinds of threats and attacks to which King was subjected? Has he, in short, been Santa Claus-ified in similar ways? Or was there something about Ali—his singular talent, his charm and charisma, his sense of humor and style, his particular sport—that allowed him to navigate the troubled waters of his own decisions and the 1960s without the same responses; not without controversy or critique, but without that level of vitriol, maintaining his status as a generally beloved and idolized athlete and figure? I'm sure I could learn the answers—or at least how certain historians and writers have answered those questions—through extended research, but this blog and site are nothing if not, in their purposes at least, crowd-sourced. So I ask you, those of you with experiences, a perspective, or a sense of these questions—which was the case with Ali?

More this coming week, a series celebrating Black History Month to which this post can definitely be connected as well,

Ben

PS. I'll just ask again for your input!

2/4 Memory Day nominee (national): Betty Friedan, the scholar, author, and activist whose book The Feminine Mystique (1963) is one of the 20th century's most significant works, and whose efforts in founding the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (Naral), and the National Women's Political Caucus transformed every aspect of American society and life in the 1970s and beyond.

2/4 Memory Day nominee (special): I'll let the nominator, Ilene Railton, do the honors: "Herman Fine, born in Boston in 1913, died in Florida in 1989. He was the youngest of 10, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother's family was wiped out in a pogrom, and she hid in a soap barrel, was adopted by a family and eventually came to America where she met her husband. He was a junk dealer, who drove a horse and cart. Herman, or Bob as he was called most of his adult life, was spoiled by his sisters, and loved to tell a joke. He went to night school at Boston University and became a pharmacist, and for a while owned the drug store in the Ritz Carlton Hotel by the Public Gardens. The war ended that episode in his life, but he always remembered it fondly. Bob was an avid reader and a lover of opera. He often spent Saturday afternoons listening to opera on the old Motorola record player, sitting with the libretto, humming along. He passed his love of reading on to me, his only child, and I was undoubtedly the rare girl in the 1950′s whose favorite books were Stevenson's adventures."

2/5 Memory Day nominee: James Otis, the lawyer and firebrand whose eloquent and impassioned opposition to both the Sugar Act and writs of assistance in the early 1760s helped set the stage for the American Revolution; even though a 1769 fight with an angered royal customs commissioner left Otis disabled and unable to take full part in the Revolution itself, his words and arguments were instrumental to every stage of colonial resistance and independence.

February 3, 2012: The Growth of an American Sports Studier

[For this Super Bowl week, I'll be blogging about interesting American Studies moments, texts, and issues related to the history of sports in America. This is the fourth in the series.]

How three very different but equally talented American authors can reveal the stages of an American Studier's perspectives on sports, America, and life.

When I was a kid, my growing interest in the stories and dramas of sports, and especially baseball, found literary expression in the novels of Matt Christopher. Christopher's novels focus on very believable and universal conflicts as faced, and eventually overcome, by their youthful protagonists; as illustrated by my favorite baseball book of his, Catcher with a Glass Arm (1985), such conflicts include the psychological effects of being beaned and peer teasing over an athletic weakness. While there may have been occasional details that revealed the particular setting or time period of the books, I don't remember any, and my instinct is not: Christopher's explicit goal was to create books that spanned places and times, to which any reader could connect with equal interest and meaning.

As I started to develop into a teenage American Studier (kind of like a teenage werewolf, but more consistent and less scary), I started to want sports and baseball novels that engaged with those historical and social questions, that felt as if they were a part of our national narratives and stories. A book like Philip Roth's The Great American Novel (1973) was funny and over-the-top and compelling, but the baseball was a bit too metaphorical for it to qualify as a sports novel; Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al (1916) was extremely realistic and biting but a bit too cynical for my young taste. For me, as apparently for many teenage American Studiers, the pinnacle of these contextualized, real world baseball novels were the works of John Tunis, and specifically his classic The Kid From Tomkinsville (1940). Tunis's novel exists in, and more exactly captures, its Depression-era America quite fully without losing a bit of its narrative excitement; indeed, by the end the Kid's baseball story and the story of a damaged but resilient America seem very much to have merged.

I haven't outgrown my love for Tunis—this post makes me want to reread Kid right now, actually—but I have to admit that I have in the years since discovered an author and novel that even more impressively exemplify what an American baseball story can be and do. David James Duncan's The Brothers K (1992) might seem to be about much more than baseball—it's a rewriting of The Brothers Karamazov that's also a multigenerational family saga of the 1950s and 60s, Vietnam, the counter-culture, religion, writing, Eastern spirituality, sibling rivalries and bonds, humor, love, and more—yet at the same time it's entirely about baseball, not as metaphor so much as metonym, as a representation of the worst and best of American dreams and identities and histories and possibilities. It might be both the great American novel (it's definitely one of the greatest under-read ones) and the greatest baseball novel, and for this American Studier that combination is most definitely, yes, a grand slam.

One more sports post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any great baseball or sports books you'd highlight?

2/3 Memory Day nominee: A tie between Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to receive an MD, founder of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and an author who translated her own pioneering and inspiring life into multiple volumes of advice and support for future female doctors; and Norman Rockwell, perhaps the most iconic American artist and one whose works could capture both our highest ideals and our most troubling realities.

February 2, 2012: The Three Acts of John Rocker

[For this Super Bowl week, I'll be blogging about interesting American Studies moments, texts, and issues related to the history of sports in America. This is the third in the series.]

What the three distinct and even contradictory stages of John Rocker's public disintegration reveal about contemporary American sports and society.

As a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, I was, in the fall of 1999, a John Rocker fan as well—Rocker was the young relief pitcher with the near-100mph fastball who had blazed onto the scene during that season, helping the Braves reach the World Series in the process, and it was hard not to like the kid (despite, or perhaps even partly because of, his over-exuberant mound presence and antics). And then came the December Sports Illustrated profile piece, an article on Rocker's extreme personality and perspective that included some of the most bigoted and disgusting quotes (about New York City, about one of Rocker's own teammates, and more) I've seen outside of an anonymous internet comments thread. The article tore away any pretense that sports or America were free of old-school bigotry and hatred (such as that faced by Aaron during the home run chase) at the turn of the new millennium.

Rocker was suspended by the Braves for a good bit of the next (2000) season, but during that same period a second, very different and even contradictory set of stories and narratives about Rocker began to emerge.
Rocker went on to a brief and undistinguished career with the Braves and a couple subsequent teams, but the real third stage of his American sports narrative has only begun unfolding. With a book on his social and political views (seriously) in the works, Rocker has begun speaking out again, and in so doing has admitted not only to using steroids in the 1999 and 2000 seasons, but to Major League Baseball having tested him and known about (and thus covered up) his steroid use. The story indicates in part that Rocker has not learned from his prior experiences the value of holding back, although I suppose this honesty is at least as self-critical as it is generally belligerent (not expecting to say the same about the forthcoming book ,but I'll try to keep an open mind). But it also reminds baseball and sports fans that the true outrages of baseball at the turn of the 21st century were not the bigoted beliefs of individual athletes, but the widespread and dangerous deceptions in which even far more well-spoken and admirable players played an equal role.

One more sports post tomorrow,
Ben

PS. What do you think?

2/2 Memory Day nominee: Solomon Guggenheim, the son of Swiss immigrants and very successful businessman whose love for and relationships to the world of modern art led him both to contribute to the creation of some of the 20th century's most innovative museums and to start a hugely influential and ongoing foundation for art and education.

February 1, 2012: Tebow and Abdul-Rauf

[For this Super Bowl week, I'll be blogging about interesting American Studies moments, texts, and issues related to the history of sports in America. This is the second in the series.]

How two of the more controversial recent American athletes can help us analyze fault lines of religion, patriotism, and communal identifications.

As I wrote in this post from last summer, one inspired by the success of the American women's soccer team at the World Cup, one of the most inspiring aspects of sports—it's ability to connect people across a community through their shared embrace of a team or athlete—is also a double-edged sword, helping to amplify "us vs. them" communal identifications that are as exclusionary as they are inclusive, as divisive as they are unifying. Perhaps exhibit A in the case for those downsides would be the hate mail and death threats that Hank Aaron received as he closed in on Babe Ruth's home run record, and thus the ways in which (presumably) white Americans identified with Ruth's race in direct opposition to Aaron's. Yet in their own ways the recent and ongoing responses to Tim Tebow's NFL successes and unique identity and perspective are even more illustrative of the complex communal identifications prompted by American sports.

Ever since his national championship and Heisman Trophy-winning days at the University of Florida, Tebow's fame has been due to a complex combination of athletic prowess and personal identity/perspective; similarly, his rapid return to prominence during this past NFL season (as evidenced by his ascension to the top of an ESPN poll focused on the most popular athletes) depended both on the late-game heroics through which his Denver Broncos continued to win and the religious celebrations with which he greeted those victories. Yet while it's impossible to quantify which of those aspects was more inspiring to each fan or even to communities as a whole, there's no question that Tebow's overtly and centrally Christian identity and perspective were at the heart of many Americans' identifications with him. It was to amplify and benefit from such connections, after all, that the Christian conservative organization Focus on the Family (with which Tebow has been connected for many years) aired a television ad in which kids recite the words of John 3:16, the scriptural verse that has frequently adorned Tebow's eye black.

While an American Studier might connect such identifications to a number of complex national histories and narratives, I think it's particularly interesting to do so by considering a very different case of a prominently religious athlete and the responses to him: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the Denver Nuggets basketball player who famously refused to stand during performances of the national anthem. As Abdul-Rauf argued, his stance (for which he was suspended by the NBA) was due first and foremost to his Muslim faith and his perspective on how that faith forbids "nationalist worship"; but he also made an explicitly political secondary argument, one focused on the Iraq War and other American engagements with the Middle East and Muslim world. That explicitly political stand might seem to differentiate Abdul-Rauf from Tebow, and similarly one could argue that the much more consistently critical communal responses to Abdul-Rauf were due to that political perspective and the kinds of patriotic responses it prompted; but I would push back a bit on both of those claims: arguing first that the responses to Tebow's religious displays would be very different if he were producing a Muslim prayer mat and praying toward Mecca after each victory; and second that there is indeed a political component to the responses to Tebow, one connected to communal identifications of America as a "Christian nation."

Plenty more to analyze with these complex athletes and cases, of course—so what do you think? Next sports post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Again, I'd love to hear your takes and thoughts. How would you analyze these cases? Other divisive athletes you'd highlight?

2/1 Memory Day nominee: Langston Hughes, one of America's most talented poets and writers, and the only one equally adept writing about himself, entire communities, racial and historical issues, the more humorous and human side of relationships, music, and America's most defining ideas and identities (among other things).