There are a lot of different ways that people talk about what is happening the US right now. Fascism, authoritarianism, nazism, white supremacy. What I’ve seen generally falls into two categories: people that throw around nazi references and 1930s Germany like candy–“THIS IS JUST LIKE THE NAZIS!” with no context or development of exactly how a particular situation is just like the nazis. What it usually boils down to is the nazis and the right wing in the US are doing very similar things like banning books or targeting trans people. Their analysis rarely, if ever, develops a power analysis that explains how the nazis used their power to ban books or target trans people. By refusing to engage with a power analysis, the problem becomes ‘the right wing is mean like nazis’ rather than a more useful ‘this is how the right wing is manipulating power to achieve similar means as the nazis.’

The other way people talk about what is happening in the US right now is to use very Big Words I’m the Smartest. For example, the other day I saw a big fight on twitter between two ‘experts’ over if we’re in a moment of fascism: yes or no. The fight involved detailed analysis and lots of snark–but I admit, even I didn’t read through the end of the thread. I realized about halfway through the thread, you know, I don’t really even know after all the time what fascism even is. I have no functioning definition of fascism and most people that are in debates like this operate from the space that people do or should or could at least look it up.

When I went and looked up ‘fascism,’ I disagreed that our current moment meets the definition of fascism, although there are obviously key elements of fascism playing out. But that’s when I realized–the moment we’re in doesn’t need us deciding/fighting over which expert is right. What it needs is a way for all of us to understand how power is playing out, both in our individual lives and collectively, so that we can better understand what is happening and more effectively fight power with power.

In that light, I decided that it’s time for me to sit and detail, in a more permanent space than twitter, the language I am using to make sense of this moment. My hope is that it’s useful, and that it stays useful.

White Supremacy

First: My Context
Years ago, when I was organizing in Detroit, the buzzword floating around the social justice world was ‘white privilege.’ Everybody had some form of ‘privilege’ and ‘white privilege’ was everywhere. Being able to go to college. Not ever worrying about being the only white person in the room. Not worrying about your hair or name stopping you from getting jobs. There are benefits to being white, and those were some of them. 

Many white people resisted the ‘privilege’ framework. While a lot of that resistance was just good old white defensiveness, there was also the inherent classism of the ‘privilege’ framework. And, indeed, the ‘privilege’ framework came from a college classroom. The woman that synthesized ‘privilege’ as a framework was a university researcher and the privilege framework was used in university classrooms where the typical student of that time would’ve been white, upper/middle class, just out of high school. 

But there was also a more insidious problem, and it’s where I resisted the ‘privilege’ framework. People went from pointing out how ‘white people won’t get overlooked for a job because of their name.’ to ‘That white cop killed a black person because of white privilege.’ There was something inherently awful to me imagining that killing a human being was a simple ‘privilege’ of being white. The paradigm of ‘privilege’ was not able to answer my questions: Who gave white people the privilege of killing black people? Who enforces this privilege? That is, who (or what?) makes sure every single new generation of white people get the privilege of killing black people? How do white people make the decision–they are going to kill a black person today? What makes other white people NOT claim this privilege to kill black people?

I began talking to black elders in Detroit about how frustrating the constant battles over ‘white privilege’ were and they pointed out something to me that has stayed with me ever since. Why are we talking about ‘white privilege’ when we already have the framework of white supremacy (which we haven’t even come close to dealing with)? I couldn’t answer that question. The only thing I knew about white supremacy was white hats and burning crosses. I didn’t understand that there was a difference between white privilege and white supremacy.

Social Sorting

At the same time I was struggling to understand ‘white supremacy’ as a framework, I attended the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. One of the workshops that I’ve long since forgotten who was leading introduced me to the concept of ‘social sorting.’ What this means, according to the workshop, is that in the US, people are assigned different identities and ‘sorted’ according to those identities. Women to the left, men to the right. White men to the left, other men to the right. White gay men away from ‘real’ white men. White Christian straight men, ‘real.’ Everybody else sorted according to how close or far they are from ‘white Christian straight man.’

I was especially interested in this concept of ‘social sorting’ because as a light skinned queer daughter of a Mexican man and a white woman, I often felt like I was a ping pong bouncing around the social sorting queues, not belonging in any line, getting yelled at because I didn’t know what line to get into.

The analysis of social sorting helped me to see for the first time that ‘social sorting’ came with rules on how people are sorted/sort themselves. And that the rules that easily sorted some people into the ‘white christian straight man’ group were not so clear for me. White but not quite. A person that ‘couldn’t make up her mind’ about her sexuality (bisexual). Buddhist (oh lord). Ambiguously a girl/woman. I finally understood that the sorting rules were crap. That there was something wrong with them. Not me.

So why do we need these ‘social sorting’ rules then? Why do they even exist?

Resource Hoarding

As I continued to study ‘white supremacy’ I was beginning to understand that white supremacy was a system. I know in this day and age after years of the right rolling their eyes over ‘woke’ and ‘systemic racism’ and actively working to ban Critical Race Theory from k-PhD, ‘systemic’ and ‘system’ is not sexy to talk about. But just as many of us don’t really understand what ‘fascism’ is (even though we are against it!), many of us don’t necessarily know in real world language what ‘systemic’ means. Or why it’s important to understand ‘white supremacy’ as a ‘system.’

So what is a ‘system’? To draw on the dreaded ‘post-modernist’ Foucault: our entire world is made up of an intricate web of ‘power’ that allows the world to function. Those webs of power start on the individual level and expand all the way to worldwide scale. The webs become so normal, you don’t even notice or see them, most times. But there they are.

Some of the webs: governments, federal, state, local. And ALSO: the food system that grows food, delivers it to stores, sells it to people. The water system that pulls water out of nature, cleans it, delivers it to people, charges people for it. The education system that develops education criteria, trains educators, builds/funds schools, makes the laws the require children to attend school. The medical system that decides how to treat illness. The insurance system that decides if those treatments are allowed.

Each of those systems exist as a spiderweb of power. When you destroy one strand of the web, it grows a different strand in a different place. There is no spider that controls this web, the people that build up each of the systems control the web. Revolutionary movements have made this mistake repeatedly through the decades. If we kill the person in charge, we win. If we blow up the place in charge, we win. It rarely happens that way. Because power doesn’t exist in just one space, even under authoritarian fascist regimes. And that’s why the right wing in the US in this moment have been so spectacularly successful.

For whatever reason, they understood from the beginning that power existed throughout multiple spaces and in multiple ways. So their goal, unlike Democrats, has never been ‘get the presidency’ exclusively. Their goal has been to get the presidency, the court system, the police, the churches, the water/food systems, etc.

And they’ve done this, with remarkable success. While Ds had people out frantically trying to get HRC elected because at least some people understood what was at stake if Republicans got to name people to the Supreme Court, Republicans had already, for decades, been in control most of the apparatus that decided who would be interns at the Supreme Court, what law firms those interns would be fed into once they graduated, all major narratives about what made a judge ‘qualified’ (originalist! constitutionalist! NOT ‘understands a flexible constitution is necessary part of becoming a better nation!). Republicans were also in control of the actual judges–understanding ‘networking’ as a site of power. Networking became recruiting and friendship became obligation.

Republicans controlled everything except deciding who would be named as the next judge. Because they understood power exists throughout the entire web and that a web was made up of multiple other webs and that if you get block on one strand, you can just jump over and use resources to get what you want anyway.

Resources are what make the webs of power run. Resources are why we have webs of power. There are certain resources that everybody wants or just plain old needs to survive–and there needs to be systems set up to decide where and how those resources will be used or distributed.

For example: There is water. If everybody can just go to the stream and get water, the people that can’t get to the water get no water. The people that are too weak to get the water get no water. The people that aren’t strong enough to fight bigger people for access to the water either get no water or don’t get enough water.

Some societies decided that system of distributing water was good enough. But that system of getting water is not efficient and means that people need to spend most of their time working to get water instead of working. So we decided to create water treatment plants and a system of pipes that brings clean water to each home. At one point, we felt like it was best that ‘the public’ controlled that water treatment plant and the system of piping, but over the course of time, we were convinced that corporations or private equity firms could control the water better.

The water system is a system of resource distribution. And while Foucault argues that that system becomes so normalized, you don’t even think about it anymore–the water just magically appears–in this day and age, in 2023, in a world that is living through a pandemic and experienced Donald Trump in power and now sees extremist and radical right fundamentalists taking control of a frightening amount of our systems in the US–those systems are no longer as invisible or just ‘there’ as they used to be.

And that’s meant that we’re starting to see all the dangerous ways that republicans are using their power. Book banning, criminalizing genders, banning abortion, allowing vigilantes to report on people that have abortions, restricting the ability of people to travel across state borders, etc. Those are all restrictions on resources that used to be mostly available, if only in name.

They are hoarding resources (Donald Trump gets a new ball room, people with cancer get research and treatment defunded), and in doing so, they are recalibrating how resources will get distributed.

Bringing it all Together

Which brings us back to white supremacy and social sorting.

Why are Republicans hoarding resources? What is the benefit to them? Why are they seizing control of the way resources are distributed? What is the benefit to them?

While it may seem an obvious answer (people still need those resources no matter who is in control of how they get distributed, and whoever is in control of the resources is in control of the money to be made off those resources), this is slightly more complicated when you recognize that resource distribution is systemic.

Enslavers realized very early on that we (very literally) needed a systemic way to sort people. Specifically, how do we decide who should be enslaved versus who should be owners of the enslaved? An entire system was set up with rules through the courts and Congress that followed each human being in the US through entire lifetimes and generations that decide who would be enslaved and and as such, who would be owners of the enslaved. The same people that set up the ‘slave’ sorting system also figured out that they needed to decide who got to own all the resources (land, water, trees, etc) not, just enslaved humans. Deciding who had the actual rightful claim to the resource of land/water became entrenched in the project of deciding who had the rightful claim to enslaved laborer’s bodies.

Rich white men that became the slave owning aristocracy in the US recognized that England and Europe had their own social sorting systems, and that social sorting system was actually why so many of those white men wound up in the ‘New World.’ Kings, queens and popes were the official sorters of social orders in Europe. They, even as white men, could never become official sorters, not when kings and queens or popes were being chosen by God.

So these white men moved to the New World and created their own social sorting system where they could be the ones in charge. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are projects of social sorting, each in their own ways. Each document positions white land owning men as the new king/pope. Each document declares how ‘natural’ it is (When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,) that white men hold and should always and forever be entitled to the positions of power they were assigning themselves (and not the ‘merciless savages’ the British were inciting against ‘us’).

The ‘us’ and ‘we’ of ‘the people’ in the Declaration and Constitution were never women or black people or indigenous peoples, and they were never intended to be.

We the people was exclusively the white men that wrote the documents and the people they wrote those documents for. Those documents were not a privilege bestowed upon them because they were white. They were systemic power they gave to themselves.

And that systemic power meant that not only did they own the resources (thanks merciless savages), they owned the means of production as well (enslaved people). Resources were free (to them) and the means of developing those resources into objects to be sold were also the lowest cost its ever been before or since. That is, the cost of an enslaved person paid once for the entire lifetime of that person with the added benefit that all that enslaved person’s offspring became free laborers as well.

Do you see how much power a person that gets to be in charge of sorting gets? Do you see why Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act is what has truly upset the slaver aristocracy? Each of these things challenged or outright eliminated the systemic power that kept the slave owning and then plantation owning aristocracy in place. It empowered non-white people to challenge the way they had been sorted (black people–cooks and field workers, white women–wives and baby machines) and encouraged them to challenge the idea only white men could be sorters. It even to a certain extent, allowed people to decide on their own what standards the social system should even follow. Maybe this person with a penis is a woman, in other words. Maybe this person with a Mexican father and a white mother is multiracial. Maybe we all get to decide our own destinies.

Some could tolerate this dreaming and the systemic changes these dreams built. Many could not. And those people are the ones that have, over the centuries, shifted into what we now see as MAGA. Yes, they were mad about Obama. No, they don’t like immigrants. Yes, big cities scare them. But it’s always been desegrgation. And the end of slavery. Always.

And that’s why we’re living through what we’re living through today. They don’t give a shit about some kid getting his ass beat in DC. They want power. They don’t give a shit about abortions. They want power. They couldn’t care less about cancer research or vaccines. They want power.

And the power they want is the power to control as many resources as possible for as cheaply as possible, the power to control the means of production for as cheaply as possible, and the power to decide how those resources will be distributed. They get that power through the system of white supremacy that positions them as natural inheritors of and controllers of that power.

They want power. They want a particular type of power. If we don’t work to understand that power and how they’re seizing control of and rebuilding that power (it’s just like the Nazis! it’s fascism that I’m never going to explain to you!), then we will never build an effective resistance, much less a powerful justice filled alternative that grows and builds the dream of people supporting each other as we build our own destinies.

May we become the experts in power analysis we were always meant to be.

En Lucha

My daughter, the Warrior Princess, played her first game of volleyball when she was ten years old. Several of her friends also played, and so the long Saturday mornings in cold gymnasiums across the city playing friendly games of pick up volleyball were like parties for her. Every weekend she’d get to see her friends and have fun doing a little light exercising. They were never bothered by their parents-most of us knew next to nothing about volleyball and found more pleasure catching up on recent gossip and complaining about our children than in watching the games.

But as the kids grew older, my daughter, already the tallest in her class since kindergarten, shot up two feet in about a year. And it was about then when the first club volleyball coach approached her at one of the community games. I never knew there were volleyball coaches at those community games. I couldn’t imagine why anybody who wasn’t forced to be at those games would be there–far too often plays stopped because one girl was picking at her fingernails or because a ball, the only ball anybody had remembered to bring, was kicked under the stands or up into the netting for basketball hoops and nobody could figure out how to get it out.

But the coaches were there and and they saw the thick powerful legs of this Warrior Princess and the towering height and they salivated. They talked to us about how she’d never be able to keep up with other girls if she didn’t get into club volleyball right now, and even worse, they threw out their very first hint of a promise–with hard work and dedication, she could be good enough…their voices trailed off, leaving us to imagine the ending of their sentences.

We hardly dared to dream it. Both my partner and I were high school athletes and we’d both carried on playing our respective sports as adults. But neither of us were good enough to play in college. Not even at smaller colleges.

And we had always ridden the line between working class and poverty.  I couldn’t remember the last time we weren’t worried about when the car would break down or if we could make rent that month. Sending our kids to college was a dream. A distant dream that we didn’t dare even speak out loud.

***

The Larry Nassar sentencing consumes me.

Each new athlete that walked up to the microphone in the teeny grey courtroom twisted my stomach and tore at my throat. How could this have happened? How could any man have gotten away with hurting so many women and girls for so long? By the end of the sentencing, over 150 women and girls testified, and there were even more than didn’t get to testify because of time constraints. The sentencing couldn’t go on forever, after all.

But that’s the way things go with sexual abuse. There’s always more people.

The stories that the young women shared all felt familiar, like an old pair of pants–stiff and scratchy until they settle into your body and you forget you’re wearing them. One young person spoke of breaking her neck in four spots and a coach bullying her into continuing to practice. Another young person told of continuing to practice on a painful leg because of bullying by coaches, only to find out later her leg was broken. Several people shared stories of bulging discs and torn ligaments and pain so excruciating they could barely walk. One girl wound up in a wheelchair. Another with a hip injury that left her unable to lift her leg from the floor. She competed anyway. That same girl testified about deliberately hurting herself so she could escape the Karolyi camp (a nationally renowned Olympic level gymnastics training center run by Bela and Marta Karolyi). Marta Karolyi responded to the girl’s injuries by telling her that a different girl had fallen off a bunk bed and didn’t miss a day of practice.

Coach after coach sent these hurting bodies to Larry Nassar. The miracle doctor that could fix anything. Multiple survivors testified that he was the ‘good guy’ to the bullying bad guy coaches. Nasser snuck the girls forbidden candy and promised to get coaches to back off. He scheduled appointments after hours and very quickly–a blessing for hurting athletes that often had to wait months to get into even poorly rated therapists. He charged nothing when girls couldn’t afford it. He commented on their Facebook posts and liked their instagram pictures. He was nice. Parents trusted him, even ones trained not to trust. Multiple parents of survivors are police officers, and they trusted him. And so their girls did too.

Individual stories. Hurt bodies. A familiar ending.

***

Volleyball is not a high impact sport like football or basketball. Occasionally, one girl will crash into chairs or even another girl while trying to get a wayward ball, but that’s rare. Other times, girls get concussions from being hit by a spiked ball. As girls get older and more competent, the good ones can spike balls up to 100 miles an hour, and if you’re not paying attention, very often even if you are, you’re going to get hurt. But even concussions are rare in volleyball. As girls get better at spiking, girls also get better at bumping and ‘receiving’ the ball.

What makes girls better able to spike and receive balls is repetition. They repeat their drills so often, spiking the ball, bumping the ball, setting the ball, the skill weaves in the muscles, becoming a part of their DNA–the musculature learning to move before the brain can think.

For every game the Warrior Princess played, she spent hours and hours on the court, doing thousands of repetitions of various drills. Arm swings. Blocking. Passing. As a middle blocker, she spent most of the game at the net, either spiking balls for a point or blocking balls that other players spiked at her. One of the drills she did would start her at one end of the net, and then she’d jump up as high as she could, legs and arms fully extended, as if blocking a ball, all the way to the other side of the net. She’d do this back and forth across the net 5-10 times. And this was just a warm up drill.

Drills they did during practice would be more intense, sometimes spiking a ball (and almost all the girls spike with one arm), hundreds of times in one practice alone. And then there was the blocking drills. For that a coach stands on a big block and hit balls over the net, like an opponent might during a game. The Warrior Princess would block until she couldn’t breath, her face red and dripping sweat, her stomach heaving from the tension and stress of repetition. I’ve seen more than one girl throw up–the jokes about puke buckets were dark and borderline angry. The same girls getting lectured about not throwing up to be skinny were being encouraged and told working out so hard they threw up was ‘good for them.’

The Warrior Princess was usually hurt by mid season. There was almost never a single moment that caused her injury–no, for her the pattern was that one day after good and bad days, her body would decide to torque up just a little too tight for her to rotate or stretch out of and she’d be in physical therapy for a month. Repetition injuries. Sometimes she’d be able to recover quickly enough to make it back to the team before the end of the season, sometimes the pain was season ending.

But the pain never went away.

***

I picked my first bucket of blueberries at age ten. I don’t remember what made my parents pack all the kids in the car and drive us over to a local field. But it made sense to me then. We were a poor Mexican family, and working in the fields is what most of my Mexican friends did.

I learned quickly how physically demanding picking berries can be. After a few hours of work, I could hardly move my arms because of the intense pain radiating from the center of my neck out to my shoulders and down to my elbows. The bucket that I dropped my berries into yanked on my hips, twisting my back muscles into painful knots.  I drank enough soda or Koolaid to keep ‘sunstroke’ away–but often felt ready to vomit. I understand now that was due to dehydration. Back then, I made myself get used to the feeling, assuming that I was being ‘childish’ or ‘not tough enough.’ But I never got used to not eating for 12 or 13 hours a day. I would try to sneak a few berries when I thought nobody was looking, but after being reprimanded for ‘eating your paycheck’ I stopped doing even that.

Repetition injuries. The first time I went to a physical therapist, it was for a pinch in my neck that finally became too much to ignore or grit my teeth through until the advil kicked in. When they asked me what I thought caused it, I couldn’t answer them. This pain had torn at the back of my neck for so long it seemed normal, like it was a part of me. I was laying in bed that night, drifting in and out of sleep, my mind working underneath the waves of sleep, when the answer finally seeped into my consciousness. The hot days, the rope with a towel around it, the bucket of blueberries hanging off it, the sharp stab in my neck. The searing heat across my neck and shoulders as I reached out for blueberries. And the firm ‘suck it up’ from whatever adult I told. The deep breath, the focus, the singing under the breath. So that eventually I learned how to ignore it.

Even now, I always know when I’m stressed out–my neck muscles seize up and the muscles and their memories squeeze a few involuntary  wheezes of pain out of me.

I know hard physical work. And I know pain.

And I knew I would do whatever it took to protect my daughter from what I knew.

***

As athletes move up in the volleyball ranks, they get closer and closer to The Dream.

Back in the olden days, when I played pickup baseball games with neighbor kids, we had The Dream too, but it wasn’t like it is now. Back in those days, we’d pretend that we were a player from our favorite team. We’d listen to games while wearing our gloves and cheer whenever the announcer mentioned our player. Maybe if we were lucky, our parents would put us in local rec leagues to learn how to be just like Alan Trammel or Jack Morris. But that only happened if it didn’t interfere with vacation, and only if you agreed to ride your bike or take the bus to practice. More often, if we were good enough, during our gym class, our gym teacher might mention to us that tryouts were starting soon. And then sometime in late high school, we might get the actual visit–the college recruiter. But until then, it was all a fuzzy blurry Dream, one that only the best players ever were able to tune into a sharp focus. For the rest of us, being able to say ‘played in high school’ was an honor.

The Dream these days is a recruitment tool, and they start shaping it for you before you’ve even handed over the first check. Club/travel teams post their recruited athletes on websites and gym walls. They tout their ongoing one-on-one relationships with colleges teams and recruiters. They hold clinics for the general public explaining what it would take to get your kid recruited. They talk about how their sport is the most likely to get athletes full ride scholarships. Eventually they even offer ‘rate your daughter’ experiences where your daughter can go do drills and play a game in front of college coaches, who then ‘rate’ where your daughter would stand in comparison to other girls and what she can do to improve her chances at getting recruited.

Clubs never promise scholarships or that your daughter will be recruited. But they do swear that this is the only path they can travel if they do want to get recruited some day. And they’re right. Back in the olden days, the best athletes played throughout the year, but they did it by shifting between sports. Bo Jackson was a three sport athlete in high school. Lou Gehrig played football and baseball (and was actually recruited for football). Jackie Robinson was a four sport athlete in college. They were superior athletes, but didn’t become masters of their particular sport until they were adults–in Bo Jackson’s case until he was already playing in the MLB. And it wasn’t uncommon for the Old Dream folks to take some time to develop. Star athletes like Tom Brady, who is considered the greatest quarterback of all time, often talks about how he took two years as a professional to learn plays and get his feet under him.

These days, kids play one sport year round, thanks to club and travel teams and that Dream they sell. Kids specialize and become masters of their particular sports at high school and even middle school level.  And clubs are careful to point out that unless you’re playing year round, you’ll be so far behind by the time college recruiters come knocking, even good athletes will be passed by mediocre kids that have had the time to perfect their skills.

But even with all the passive threats and aggressive carrot dangling, clubs don’t promise you anything except that the Dream is one you can buy access to. The rest is up to your athlete.

***

Club/travel sports are an investment. Like a good money fund or a house. And so just as adults go to work to pay for the house, girls go to work to get the big payoff, The Dream.

And they start protecting their investment. Girls play thru all but the most immobilizing pain. Many times, they even play through that. One time at a club game, I asked a small group of parents if any of them had some aspirin for my throbbing headache, and after digging, no less than ten bottles of painkillers were offered to me, some over the counter, others prescription, all meant for the aches and pains their daughters dealt with from playing. After I expressed shock, purses were overturned and backpacks were emptied and a big pile of herbal salves, ice packs, knee wraps and braces, and KT tape mixed together on the floor. Nobody on the team played pain free. Most of them were using multiple methods to manage their pain. I wondered how these painkillers interacted with normal teen activity like sneaking alcohol from parents or smoking pot.

Girls played through back pain, knee pain, ankle twists and muscle tears. Parents pushed their girls when they knew their daughter’s tears were from exhaustion rather than manageable pain. We all sat judgement on parents that couldn’t tell the difference. We also sat judgement on parents that seemed to only care about being ‘the best.’ We didn’t care if our daughters were the best, we cared if they worked hard and were persistent. We believed that a ‘good balance’ of being tough and working hard would lead to The Dream. That felt right to us, like a good compromise.

When my Warrior Princess refused to play through pain, she and I fought. She wasn’t sweating under the 100 degree sun for 12 hours a day, she was doing something she loved. Something that could get her college scholarship! What kind of pampered child was I raising? If she warmed up properly, the pain should go away. Right?
She and I fought hard. I wondered how bad the pain could really be. She wondered how I could call her a liar. I am not calling you a liar, I’d retort, I’m just wondering how bad that pain really is, I saw you running just now and you didn’t even wince. She’d respond with one of those teenage eye rolls and maybe a door slam. We’d fight like this on and on for days. The more I’d push, the more she’d dig in. When I changed tactics and tried to sweet talk (I know you can do it, my sweet Warrior Princess!) or guilt trip (you’re letting your team down!), she’d respond with a sarcastic, ‘Like I can’t figure out what you’re doing, mother.”

I could never bring myself to force her to play anyway, like I’d seen other parents do, or even tell her to toughen up. But boy did we fight. Driving to games, my partner, her father, would burrow into a seat, headphones firmly stuffed into his ears, so he didn’t have to listen or take part of our battles. Her brother stopped coming to games unless I forced him to.

If my kid was a different kid, one who wanted to be a good girl maybe, she would’ve caved under the intensity of my blazing pressure. If I didn’t have the teeny veneer of conscience hold me back, I would’ve blazed until she broke.

But I call her Warrior Princess for a reason, it is a title she has truly earned. And she never lost a battle against her dragon mother, even if there were plenty of draws.

***

One of the stories that came out during the Nassar hearings was of the young woman who tried to tell her father that Nassar was hurting her. Her father not only didn’t believe her, but demanded she apologize to Nassar for accusing him of something so awful. She refused to.

And then the blazing whirlwind of fire began. Every time father and daughter got into fights, father would pressure the daughter. You need to apologize to Larry. You need to admit you’re lying. I’ll make your life a living hell if you don’t. Kyle Stephens stopped talking about it to her parents. But she replayed the molestation she survived in her head, over and over again on repeat. So that she could remind herself that she was telling the truth. She wasn’t a liar.

Eventually there was the show down–the daughter tried one more time to tell the father, the father became so enraged he put his hands on his daughter’s throat. And then something clicked, and he knew the truth. He knew. The daughter told the court about how his guilt eventually led to his suicide.

Father and daughter. Blazing pain. The Dream deferred.

***

The question never goes away. How could this happen? Pulled out every single time yet another ‘shocking’ case of sexual violence happens. How could this happen? It’s like the comfort blankie from our childhood, we cling to it, smelling it’s warm familiarity, sucking on it’s frayed corners. The answer to ‘how could this happen’ offers it’s own Dream. If we can figure out the right answer, the pain, the violence–it might not happen to our Warrior Princesses. Our babies.

As more testimony came out during the Nassar sentencing, the question became like a drumbeat for the heads of parents. How could they have let this happen? What kind of parent doesn’t know?

Abuse is rampant in all sports, but it was never called abuse, not when I was growing up. We called it, ‘being tough.’ Suck it up, stop being a pussy, toughen up. You see examples of this olden days abusive behavior in the classic movie, Bad News Bears. A drunken coach regularly yells at and belittles his players, who are all just barely on the cusp of puberty. A different win-at-all-costs coach slaps his son after the son makes a mistake. The movie sits judgement on both of these coaches, but doesn’t really reflect on what is going on around the coaches and players to make coaches so abusive. And the movie never called what the adults did, abuse. The kids eventually seem to even sorta be glad that their coach was a little ‘hard on them.’ It showed he cared.

These days, even the slim condemnation Bad News Bears sat parents that were ‘too hard’ on their kids seems quaint. Today, parents, coaches, even sports radio, bemoan a world where kids get ‘participation’ medals or ‘everybody is a winner’ certificates. They can’t stand how kids today are treated with kid gloves, never exposed to the hard facts of life that sometimes there are winners and sometimes there are losers. They all agree: kids need to toughen up and stop being pussies.

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes was released back in 1995. It spoke of the many ways that coaches were ‘toughening up’ their athletes, but this book called ‘toughening up’ abuse. And it questioned where the line was between ‘toughening up’ and ‘abuse.’ It wondered how good it could be for girls to be ‘toughened up.’ It wondered if the price for winning was just too high and too extreme, especially for children that hadn’t even reached puberty yet.

But athletes, even many gymnasts, who the book focused on, weren’t interested in answering the questions the book raised back then. I saw an interview with several gymnasts defending the brutal training practices–they knew what they signed up for. It’s what they wanted. They wanted to train hard and be the best. That’s how they got to do it.

But even if they defended their sport, they didn’t deny that they were treated like shit. It was just a question of whether or not The Dream was worth it. Most argued yes.

Next to nobody asked if it was appropriate for little girls to be achieving their dreams–most seemed to have forgotten that achieving dreams is for adults.

***

The US Gymnastics team dominated the 2016 Olympics. The US won the team competition by an unprecedented 10 points over their nearest team. Simone Biles destroyed the competition in all that she did except the balance beam. The entire team exuded power, effervescence, brilliance. Their interviews about their training regimen inspired admiring coos from broadcasters, the internet ran listicles telling us how to ‘work out’ just like Simone Biles or Aly Raismen.

And at the time, the list seemed admirable. 32 hours or more of workouts a week. Hours and hours of ab drills. No parents allowed in the gym or at the camp. No phone access at camps. No candy allowed. No water until the skill is perfect. All distractions gone, eliminated, so girls could train to be the best, so they could focus. Everybody admired the work ethic–that is how you win! adults said as they introduced their daughters to the sport.

I asked during the 2016 Olympics if any -body- should be as well trained as Simone Biles or Aly Raismen. Especially when so many of those bodies were so young. I worried about what that sort of training would do to girls who would never and could never be Simone Biles. I worried about what it would mean for gymnastics. It’s a sport where 20-year-old Gabby Douglas was considered down right grandmotherly. Many questioned if Douglas had any right being on the team in 2016 when she was so clearly ‘distracted’ by adult problems like university and (Possibly? Could it be?) dating. Is there anybody left, I wondered, who remembered what grown women’s bodies doing gymnastics looked like?

The very few people that responded to my questions, responded negatively. Why would you shit on the excellence of these girls? asked on commenter. I think they’re gorgeous, said a more gracious commenter. They know what they signed up for, said another.

They know what they signed up for.

***

I worked in the fields as a ten year old because workers regulations prevented McDonalds or General Motors from hiring me. And even when I finally was old enough to work at McDonalds, I was only allowed to work until a certain time of the day and a certain number of hours a week, especially when school was still in session. Farm workers are exempted from these worker protections so that kids working on their family farms don’t get penalized. It just so happens that the lack of worker protections mean that a significant number of kids as young as five and six are out in the fields picking before most people are out of bed in the morning.

My family knew what they were doing when they dragged us all out to the fields to work. Us kids even wound up feeling a sense of pride and self-respect when we were able to contribute to the family through our paychecks.

I knew what I was doing. I knew what I signed up for.

I was a woman before I questioned if it was ok for 10-year-olds to work 12 hour days for any reason.

***

The Warrior Princess never backed down in her refusal to play when she was hurt. And I just kept getting angrier and angrier with her. It was ok to push her. It was ok to bully her. It was ok to ‘expect more’ of her. Because I was giving my daughter a gift. A gift that I never got. The economic support to dream big. The support and love of her family. We knew she could do it.  We all believed in her. I believed in her.

I loved my daughter. My most precious thing.

Why couldn’t she see that?

Our battles increased in intensity and swamped our time away from the volleyball court. Now we weren’t just fighting on the way to the court, we fought over dinner and in between homework and on instant message during school. She spent more and more time in her bedroom with the door closed and the time we used to spend cooking together or talking about books we read together was non-existent.

One day after dropping her off at a practice, I pulled into a local park and broke down completely. Sobs ripped open my mouth, tears flooded my nose and mouth, making me choke. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. We couldn’t stop fighting. And I missed my girl. My daughter.

Luckily, my partner was with me then, holding me through the ugly sobs, helping me to breath through the choking tears. As I calmed down, he finally said–you can’t fill her up when it’s you that needs the filling.

I let his words come into me. They were gentle, spoken from love. He trusted me to hear him, and I trusted him enough to listen.

What was the hole I was trying to fill?

***

When I heard Kyle Stephens testify about her father, I didn’t feel angry or disgusted or even sick to my stomach as I had over so many other stories. I felt compassion for her father, and fear.

What hole was her father trying to fill? What was so empty in him, so hurt, he was willing to take down his daughter, hurt his best thing, to stop anybody from seeing? What was the Dream he was trying to buy?

What was the Dream I thought I was buying?

***

I apologized to my daughter. Not because I was a good person that finally figured it all out. But because there was just enough of the rational logical part of me that hadn’t been consumed by the emotional Dream beast that I was able to find first one then another then another brick down the road to doing something different.

I explained to my daughter that I wanted more for her than to be a former migrant worker with a bad neck. And so I had pushed her too hard and cared too much about the wrong things. She nodded and said she understood, but that this was her life. I nodded back at here and vowed to myself to respect her declaration.

I backed off, but our fights didn’t immediately stop. Instead of yelling or screaming, I many times contented myself with gritted teeth and adult version of eye rolls. If I couldn’t verbally say to her what I wanted to say, maybe my grinding teeth would. This, of course, set her off. I thought you were going to back off and leave me alone, she’d scream. And I would have to fight to choke back my own angry words so that I could at least angrily scream back at her at some point from a moral high ground.

But even as things weren’t always perfect, I didn’t stop trying. And neither did she. And so we started to find our way back to each other.

At dinner one night, we did appreciations. This is where we go around the table and share with the family what we appreciate about other family members. We’ve done it since the kids were teeny, and often the appreciations are silly or repeats of what they said for the last appreciations. But that night, I told the family I appreciated what the Warrior Princess of mine taught me about boundaries. That her refusal to back down against the massive dragon of her mother was inspiring. And taught me a life lesson I didn’t get from my parents or any adult growing up.

This kid of mine looked at me and smiled and said thank you. Not a grateful thank you–a  confident strong thank you. She knew she did good. And she would’ve known it whether I told her or not.

I see that same confidence blazing out of Kyle Stephens when she confronts Larry Nassar in court. And I am so glad to read that she and her father found their way back to each other before he died.

***

The Warrior Princess played one more season of volleyball and then got a catastrophic knee injury. She had to go through surgery and then months and months of physical therapy. If she played her cards the right way, she could’ve gone back for her senior year of volleyball. But where our lives used to be swamped by practices and games, there was now only endless physical therapy appointments. So we had a lot of time to talk. And she told me that as much as she didn’t want to be hurt, she was thankful her volleyball career was over. She actually hated volleyball. But she didn’t know it until doctors told her she might not play again in high school. And felt the relief flooding through her.

Her words reminded me of the Russian gymnast back in the 80s that was bullied into performing skills she wasn’t ready for and wound up paralyzed. She gave an interview saying that when she was laying on the floor, hurt, unable to move, the only thing she could feel was relief. Now she wouldn’t have to go to the Olympics.

Thankful for pain. Thank god. Now it’s over.

Individual stories. Hurt bodies. A familiar ending.

***

I can’t stop thinking about what the Nassar sex abuse case means for sports. I know what I hope it means. I hope it means that we give up on little girls working like grown adults in unsupervised spaces where they’re taught obedience and submission. I hope it means that we let kids be kids. And club sports are banned forever. I hope we go back to kids exploring sports they like in gym class and recruiting only happening during senior year of high school. I hope we willingly embrace grown women doing less fantastic but more sophisticated skills. I hope to see what grown women’s bodies look like doing gymnastics and figure skating and baseball and hockey. I want money in sports to be regulated so that training schedules are looked at as the labor they are rather than the ‘dedication’ they are forced to be.

And it has to be ok to ask: when is too young to ‘achieve your dream’? It has to be ok, because this is what club sports are selling. A dream possibly realized, by the kid, and maybe even by the parent too. Because what parent doesn’t have lost dreams? What parent doesn’t have a hole that needs some filling? And how many of us would do anything under the sun short of murder (and sometimes even that) to make sure our kids don’t feel the twisting empty hole we’ve had to learn to ignore?

It’s a natural part of the parent/child relationship for the child break away from the parent. It’s a normal part of a child’s growth for them to push back and say that’s not my dream. And there is nothing, nothing, in the world of (club, collegiate, professional or Olympic) sports that encourages young people to push back and declare their own space and their own boundaries. Regulating sports as labor would be one way to push back. If a kid can’t push back against coaches and parents and corporate sponsorship and college recruiters, maybe labor regulations can.

But in the end, what is point of sports if kids are hurting themselves to escape them? If kids are grateful to be hurt so they can be free?

***

As the Warrior Princess recovered from her knee injury, she joined the cross country team. She’s not any good, most of the kids on her team aren’t either. There’s no college recruiters showing up to meets, and most practices involve them running unobserved by their coach out at local parks or down long stretches of quiet road. She tells me about how sometimes her team will meet up at a nearby play structure and play on the swings together before they go back to the school. It reminds me of this Mexican kid I used to know with a sore neck and lost dreams that used to skip class to go hang out with her friends in back of the school and smoke cigarettes and ride skateboards. A rare treat before she had to go to work.

I don’t know if the world of cross country is reflected in my kid’s team. I don’t know if there are any club cross country teams or workshops or classes kids can take to get better or if all cross country teams are as laid back as the Warrior Princess’s team is. But maybe that’s the point. Because this is what it’s supposed to be like for kids. They’re supposed to have the time and space to fuck around while they figure things out. They’re supposed to have the space to push back and say no. So that when they’re on their own at college or at their first jobs or in their first relationships–they know how to do it.

Sports are an industrial complex now, and the foundation of this industrial complex is built on the silence and obedience of athlete/workers. On their lack of power. And this industrial complex manipulates the parents/child relationship so that parents are the enforcers of worker silence and obedience.

So we start there. We must be brave enough to start there.

Are we brave enough to help destroy the complex our kids are trying to escape? Are we adults brave enough to slay our own dragons, and not make our kids do it for us?

The interesting thing as the MSU sex abuse scandals are developing, is how often so many different corners of the media world have tried to impose a ‘savior’ on the situation. Feminist minded people want Judge Aquilina’s sympathy for and fierce protection of victims to be the new standard we judge all judges by. The Atlantic went so far as to call her court room ‘transformative justice‘ and the meme of her tossing aside Larry Nassar’s letter has gone viral.

Michiganders are (not unironically) calling for Governor Rick Snyder to force MSU president and board to step down, fans are calling for the NCAA to ‘do something,’ and most (myself included) are wondering why the FBI hasn’t stepped in to do real investigating.

Nobody knows what to do with a scandal that is so all encompassing, that has so many different institutions in positions of culpability, that has gone on unchecked for so many decades. We want more judges like Judge Aquilinia, we want people to ‘listen’ to girls and women that speak up, we want victims to speak up–a few of us want boys and men to learn different ways of having sex. Almost everybody is calling for as many people as possible to be punished.

The one thing I keep getting stuck on, though, is how few calls we’re seeing for the empowerment of girls and women specifically as producers of labor. That is, next to nobody is treating the MSU case generally and the Larry Nassar case specifically, as a reason that justifies, in fact, demands, that non-professional athletes be unionized.

During the Nassar sentencing, over and over again, girls and women testified about the conditions of the gyms they spent upwards of 35 hours a week in. The physical and emotional abuse that coaches subjected them to. The contracts forcing them to submit to physical treatments or lose their place on the team. The trips without parents. The camps with no access to parents or guardians. The endless practices with no advocate in the gym, training or locker rooms. The endless practices girls with broken bones, torn muscles, unhealed bodies were pressured to participate in. The endless practices that girls as young as nine and ten years old were pressured to participate in.

What would we say about a child being forced to work at a fast food restaurant for 30+ hours a week with her back broken in four spots that was directly caused by the job? Would we be ok with that? Our child labor laws tell us no, we’re not.

So why is it ok if it’s being done in the name of a sport?

Sports are not just ‘sports’ anymore. Sports are an industry that from the time an athlete enters their first club, through until the time they end their ‘careers’ requires a massive investment in. Gone are the days that athletes experimented in gym class or joined a school team on a whim. Club sports have cornered the market on what used to be kids playing in the street or at the local YMCA. Many young people get so invested in the rigors of club sports, they even skip their high school season under the guise of how much of a ‘challenge’ club sports are.

Kids dream of Olympics and being recruited. Parents dream of free rides through colleges and maybe a house when Bobby makes the NFL team. They plunk out the thousands of dollars to enter their kids into the upper echelons of club sports, where they are given access to the chance to reach their dreams. You can’t achieve your dreams mucking around on a high school team coached by an unpaid math teacher.

The ‘chance to achieve your dream’ is a powerful narrative, one that is built into the fabric of US society. If you just work hard enough, you’ll get there. The sports industry especially embraces this narrative-Do you believe in miracles?? yells Al Michaels during the hockey game where a few scrappy American college kids took on the red force of communist hockey, and won. The ‘miracle’ is that hard work and dedication can really over come anything, lack of training resources, money, even the communists.

But lost in this narrative of ‘hard work’ and ‘achieving your dream’ is the reality that we glimpsed at the Nassar sentencing. Kids are paying thousands of dollars to labor in violent and abusive conditions to create a product that makes their clubs millions. Club sports are a $15 billion–yes *billion* dollar industry. On Olympic years, when kids get to see the Fierce Five undo the competition or Michael Phelps singing the national anthem for the 14th time, enrollment in club sports spikes.

When an individual does well, her club/home team is recognized, her club/team coach often gets as many interview requests as she does. And as we saw with Larry Nassar and MSU–that Olympic connection then becomes a powerful recruiting tool. As MSU gymnastic coach, Kathie Klages said in her recruitment letters–We have Larry Nassar!

But every single child, whether they make it to Olympic gold or not, are not just working for free–they’re paying to work. By the time those that go to the Olympics or they get recruited for top teams or they finally finally finally make it to the bigs, they’ve been paying to work for decades. The vast majority, who won’t even be recruited at a class D school, have been paying to work with no reward at all.

And yet, whether or not they make it big, the names of their clubs becomes permanently attached to their resumes. Any success they create, whether Olympic gold or just getting accepted to a good college, is another opportunity for the club to advertise and recruit. I’ve seen just as many clubs talking about ‘their girls’ being top notch students that wind up in elite colleges, as I’ve seen clubs advertising Olympic connections. Implicit in their recruiting efforts is the promise that a documented long term dedication to a single sport ‘looks good’ on an application and plays as much of a factor in getting girls into Harvard as their coaching plays in getting girls recruited by a Big Ten team. Whether or not that’s true, club/home teams using the success of the girls to recruit in more business means that it’s not just that these kids are paying to work, they’re paying to ultimately become a powerful marketing tool for their club/home teams.

Non-professional athletes have limited power–the ones with the most power are the ones on high revenue sports (like basketball or football) that know the worst thing a program desperate for the revenue his name could earn the college could hear is a ‘no.’ But even those athletes can only hope that they wind up making enough money in the pros that when their bodies begin breaking down from the years of overwork and abuse, they’re set.

All the other athletes, the athletes that are recruited by the Olympic dream that only five people every four years will be given a chance to compete for, continue to plunk out thousands and thousands of dollars for the chance to work too many hours in abusive conditions that depend on them being powerless, voiceless and obedient. The already limited power of a high revenue athlete is non-existent for those whose sport only becomes big every four years like gymnastics–or never for sports like rowing, softball, or field hockey. It means something that most low-revenue or ‘every four years’ sports are sports played by women/girls.

Which all makes me wonder; what would happen if all these athletes were allowed to organize and unionize?

If we’re to go by how quickly the state of Michigan created and signed into law Public Act 414, the law that makes it illegal for student athletes to unionize after athletes in a different state and non-Michigan school were allowed to unionize, we’d have to suspect that empowering non-professional athletes would cause a massive shift in power that universities, club sports, the NCAA, the Olympic organization and even sports media don’t want and would be unprepared to handle.

Of course there would be a tremendous loss of money for these major institutions if student athletes had the right to organize to be paid for their labor instead of to pay for it. But more importantly, what would happen if any of the student athletes at MSU had the chance to go to their union rep when coach Kathie Klages ignored their complaints? Or if either of the women’s gold medal winning Olympic teams had the power of their union behind them when they said, unless you get rid of Larry Nassar and allow each athlete to go to their own doctors, we’re not competing at the Olympics? Or if every little girl at Twistars gym had the power to mobilize all the gymnasts at the gym to get rid Larry Nassar? Or Kathie Klages? Or Jim Geddert?

How quickly might things have changed? Do these huge sports entities really want that level of change? Or do they depend on athletes being powerless?

I know that unions come with their own problems. And we have to assume that if all these other institutions could so fantastically and horrifically fail hundreds of athletes in this way, a union could too.

But right now, with so many people looking for all these individual entities to ‘save’ girl and women athletes, it’s shocking and appalling to me that next to nobody is acknowledging that girl and women athletes saved themselves. And that their power comes from their ability to mass mobilize. And that right now, the one entity we have in the US that can provide any sort of protection at all for mobilized populations, are unions.

What if the best thing we can do to ‘save’ our athletes, and especially athletes that are women and girls, isn’t get more sympathetic judges or get the FBI or the NCAA involved in investigations, but is rather instead to fight that fucked up bullshit piece of shit legislation in Michigan that makes it illegal for college athletes to unionize?

Would we be willing to support their efforts by refusing to buy tickets, products advertised during major sporting events, and refusing to allow our children to go to colleges that refuse to let their teams unionize?

Sports are a money making industry now. Acknowledging that we’re expecting children to pay to work in abusive conditions is not cynical or an attempt to eliminate the ‘purity’ of sports culture. It’s acknowledging that industries rarely, if ever treat their workers with respect or dignity unless they’re forced to.

Rachael Denhollander asked us all to answer the questions–how much is a little girl worth? How much is a woman worth?

Their lives are worth fighting for unionization. They’re lives are worth shutting everything down until all athletes have the right to mobilize, organize and unionize. And their lives are worth me doing without sports until the power shifts and one athlete’s voice saying the first time it happens that they want it to stop, holds as much power as 156 voices in a court room does.