The Pendulum
Asking The Question About How We Celebrate Diversity Without Compromising Equality
The story of NFL prospect and reigning SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam is well known to those who follow sports on a regular basis. In case you aren’t aware of what Mr. Sam is famous for, all you need to do is go here.
When he came out as openly gay earlier in 2014, many applauded his courage and fortitude. His teammates and coaches stood behind him (Sam had told them before the 2013 season started) and the talk now shifted to how this might affect his NFL draft status.
The NFL draft happened last week and Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the 7th round of the draft, and much was made of it in the media, especially ESPN showing an emotional Sam embracing his boyfriend and exchanging a few kisses in celebration.
Many took to various media outlets, including Twitter and Facebook, to both support and deride Sam and ESPN for showing this. To their credit, ESPN’s treatment of the situation wasn’t altogether different from how they analyzed the rest of the draft, but with the draft taking three days and Sam being drafted in the final round, the vast majority of the coverage on the final day went to this story.
When you’re spending as much time and money on covering one event as ESPN has with the NFL Draft, you shouldn’t be surprised when human interest stories trump the actual draft results and analysis at certain points. Much of the story on Thursday, the first day of the draft, surrounded the draft status of Johnny Manziel, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from Texas A&M who was a very polarizing figure during his time in college football.
I was speaking to some friends on Monday about the Michael Sam situation and I remarked how it was nice that a lot of the coverage of the event didn’t try too hard to glamorize the “first openly gay player to be drafted into the NFL” aspect of the story. Rather, it seemed like many media outlets were trying their best to give this story the same, bland treatment the rest of the draftees received during ESPN’s coverage, and that, in and of itself, was a victory for equality.
If you think of racial and social equality as a pendulum, it makes sense. For years and year, the pendulum had swung the way of inequality, where races and genders were discriminated against merely because they were different. Things began to change with the women’s sufferage movement, and then the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.
The pendulum, as it were, began to swing towards equality. But if you think of that pendulum as a “rainbow”, the middle section is probably kind of beige. And that was the point my friend made on Monday. He feels like the “beige-ness” and “blandness” of our current state of equality isn’t true equality. It’s making everyone and everything completely the same in order to make sure no one is treated differently.
His point is that robs us of the opportunity to celebrate differences in each other while still pushing for equal treatment. I agree with him, but I don’t think being beige is technically a bad thing.
When you think about it, for the longest time, and still today, many parts of our culture suffer from racial and gender inequality and intolerance. All you need to do is watch the news for any length of time to see stories on Donald Sterling, or how women across the board still aren’t being paid what men are being paid for the same job.
Then you have situations like the one in Nigeria where terrorists are responsible for the kidnapping of 200 children, and the government of Nigeria trying their best to sweep it under the rug.
Racial intolerance isn’t dead in this country or in the world. Ethnic tensions are better here in the US but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The pendulum is still in the process of swinging towards true equality.
Maybe being more beige is a good thing for the time being. Maybe if we work to be beige for a while, those good habits of trying to focus on what makes us equal will help us to truly see what it is we’re missing, and help us to see our fellow men and women in a different and better light. Then as those habits truly take root, we can begin to celebrate the differences in each other while loving them and treating them with equality.
Maybe spending some time in the middle of the pendulum, celebrating that and pushing that, is a good thing. It’s better than spending even one more second putting down or beating up another race or gender because they aren’t like white males.
Sure…beige isn’t the best color in the world. But it’s better than black and blue.
