As is clear from my previous entry, I am not a big sports fan. In full disclosure, I played basketball and softball throughout my twisted youth. I also loved to downhill ski until a few years ago. My "ski knee" has notoriously come back to haunt me in my old age.
Not a fan. Not quite an avid sportswoman. But I am an American citizen and read/research/ write about American society and culture. I am especially a popular culture/media freak. Plus I was raised in a “typical” black American home—Sundays were made for Michelob, a big meal, and the family room television reserved for the big games. I, on the other hand, had no interest in sports. And this has continued to be the case except for a moment in high school when my adolescent lust turned me into a major college basketball fan. As a full grown woman, my knowledge is limited to the larger than life coverage of even larger than life sports stars, their teams, their kinfolk, and ultimately their various scandals and/or jail sentences. Yet I do realize that sports are at the heart of American culture, business, and identity. It is amazing to see how sports fans’ self-identities begin to revolve around “their team.”
Cheeseheads and die hard
Owners, managers, front office types. Keep the spotlight on them long enough and they are bound to say or do something (or not pay somebody enough) that underscores the tensions between management and “workers,” and that keep alive the racialized overtones of unbelievably wealthy and uneducated men/athletes of color.
Notorious athletes—do I even have to write that they are usually of African descent? Nothing needs to be said.
And so in some sense I guess I do follow sports, if only because sports stories, and the supporting scuttlebutt that surrounds sports stars and their business/sex partners, are a complicated, but very pregnant vein, from which to mine “American culture and society.”
Enter the Laura Lane/ Vanessa Bryant story of the last few days. In case you can’t follow the links in my opening teaser, Lane is a young perky blond reporter for ESPN magazine, who wrote on her personal blog that she had been cursed out by Vanessa Bryant during a Lakers playoff game. According to Lane, Vanessa cursed her out loudly because Lane had reported earlier about the young Bryant girls’ busy sports schedules (soccer in addition to gymnastics, ballet and hip-hop!). Many blogs and news stories over the past few days have been written about this (as well as the strangeness of Lane’s entire blog vanishing, just as the story began to spread—she claims that she took it down herself under no pressure from anybody). Some have insinuated that the Bryant “cuss out” may be linked to Mrs. Kobe being on edge because of a rumored Mr. Kobe affair with a now (equally mysteriously vanished and similarly named/looking Vanessa) Laker Cheerleader--one writer made sure to put in the dig that the cheerleader was a hotter and better-looking version of Mrs. Vanessa Bryant. Of course love on the rocks… may ultimately mean an even bigger and more obscene 4 million dollar apology rock for Mrs. Kobe. Every account that I have read has tended to side with Lane—innocent cub reporter. What is a girl to do when “Vanessa Bryant’s claws come out” (I didn’t make that up).
But the evil tongue dares to probe a little deeper. My slanted reading leads me to believe that what we are witnessing, not only in the event, but also its coverage, is yet another episode in the continuing saga of nasty tensions between white women and non-white women (even ones like Vanessa Bryant who signal their newly “earned” wealth with what appears to be a boatload of plastic surgery to make them look “whiter” and a similar boatload of “stuff” to make them closer in appearance to the Carringtons of Dynasty than the Ubrietas of Boyle Heights) in the U.S.
Beef Issue Number 1. Language is political.
Lane, taking the moral high ground of WASPicty, is astonished that Bryant used some pretty down and dirty language (gasp) in front of her young children (been to the hood/barrio/holler much Ms. Laura?). Those dark ones don’t know how to raise their children properly. Even with all the accoutrements of wealth, we learn subtly from Ms. Lane and more directly from other commentators that Vanessa Bryant should never have allowed her daughters to see her cursing and hacking up a storm in anger. Children need to be protected at all costs. I am not giving Bryant a pass, because I think children of her daughters’ ages (I too am the mother to a 5 and 3 year old) MAY be frightened by a sudden uncharacteristic “outburst” of mommy calling folks dripping cunts and such. But if it has happened a lot (and not always directed towards the hired help or the kids), it means that Bryant is teaching her girls to be “tough” in all the ways that our society says that women (read women of privilege , usually white or light bright and damned near white for most of our history) should not be. All the money and/or education in the world probably cannot totally wash away the lessons that many young girls of hue/class/southern heritage learn at their female relatives’ knees. “Showing out,” “acting ghetto, “ “keeping it real,” “throwing down”… these are the ways that have often historically been used to protect yourself (AND YOUR CHILDREN) both among and outside of your non-privileged community. For many women this continues to be, despite the well-intended ill-faith of social workers and researchers, the way to teach your children how to survive. There is a disconnect between Vanessa Bryant and her language because she is doing both the expected and unexpected.
(Think the ha, ha antics of Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” or the out of place storyline that goes along with any tale of a lower class woman who through her true ladylike charms moves upward in her station in life. How long do you think Cinderella lived happily ever after when she moved up to the big leagues? If she had the money and status to protect her… hmmm… maybe a week before somebody, perhaps her own husband, wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into and why couldn't Cindy just stop embarrassing him?)
White women made their first inroads as professionals in this country by making a science out of telling poor and non-white women how to clean up their acts for success.This almost always included excising that foul gutter language. No lady would speak in such a way nor raise her voice…. she wasn’t a lady or fit to be a mother, if she swore like a sailor or hood rat.
I badly want to get footage of the giddy Lane on E!. I bet her voice is light and frothy. No matter how smart she is (and she probably is indeed intelligent), she has probably learned to speak in a way that is to be respected. And we know that does not mean “cussin’ somebody out.” Hey. It doesn’t matter that you were a video dancer/vixen when you met your dream boat at age 17. It doesn’t matter that you never graduated from high school and have basically done everything that a modern woman is not supposed to do to become filthy rich and powerful—almost like a ummmmm Queen? This is what the evil tongue sees even in Lane’s gracious (gag) post-cussing out take on the whole thing:
The sad part is before all of this I kind of liked Vanessa and I thought we hit it off. She doesn't give a fuck about anything. She wears these insane outfits, struts around Staples Center like a queen, shows off her daughters and lets them run around the hall way playing tag while reporters are trying to get by.... As a journalist I am going to piss people off. That’s just the nature of the business. I never want to or intend to piss people off, but if you’re not pissing people off occasionally, then you are constantly kissing ass [See how she uses the words "fuck," "pissing," and "ass"to underscore that she is neither some tightly wound white girl nor a wimpy type who doesn't subscribe to the "well-behaved women rarely make history" bumper sticker/school of feminism...see...see...see!].
Ummm…. I want to cuss you out and I have never ever “kinda liked” Vanessa. And you can go by yourself to see The Sex and the City movie this Friday.
Beef Issue Number 2. You are what you wear.
A white tube dress, a purple tutu, black leggings, high-heeled short boots and a rhinestone-encrusted white leather jacket with the number 8 on the back, Kobe's old number.
This is what I think is really at the heart of the matter. This is what I think may have pushed Vanessa Bryant over the edge.
There truly is a divide in this country (and there always has been) between “urban” influenced fashion trends and “sophisticated,” or “trendy” fashion. Rockin and Rollin’ was black slang for sex and dancing before it became rock and roll. Bling, bling, baby. But still there is a divide in styles that is clearly based on race, class, and regionality. It is especially true for women's and children's "fashion" choices. Earnest white mothers of black children cut their daughters' hair to the quick for styling "ease" and cuteness. They never put any type of moisturizer on it. Black women cringe in horror, but never in front of the child because they know that our hair is our pride. Thinking that they are looking good and ready for the world, black women go to job interviews "downtown" with hair and nails "did" in ways that guarantee them the lowest job in the joint, that is if they are hired (no matter what the race of the person doing the hiring).
I do not follow Vanessa Bryant’s fashion statements. But I did see pictures/video of the number that Lane describes above. It looked like updated Madonna/Like a Virgin for the new millennium. (Where do you think Madonna got/gets her fashion inspiration, btw). The description seems benign, but I do think that by calling attention to it in the way that she did, Lane was either blissfully unaware of the shit that she was stepping into or was trying to nicely in that polite way ‘diss Bryant’s “costume,” as they say in France. I only have seen a headshot of Lane, but I would bet my girls’ next two years of Nordstrom shoe collection that she would NEVER be seen in anything like the outfit that Bryant wore for Kobe’s MVP ceremony. Hidden text alert: Low-class, too much money, fashion victim (I am thinking Britney Spears here too…).
I don’t have anywhere near the net worth of Mrs. Bryant, and I try not to really care too much about what “people” say about my style… which I would describe as aging urban bohemian/sex shooter. Color me non-white and call me overly sensitive, but I smell some nasty race/class-based writing there, Ms. Lane.
Part of the issue at the heart of all of this is connected to the problem of expectations of what money and wealth should look like and sound like. Vanessa Bryant, like many others (but not that many in real numbers… let’s be real) of her type would NEVER meet the standards of someone like Laura Lane and the people that are on “her side.”
Even if she coddled her children and kept them in line (Ummm don’t ask any of my relatives about what they think of “white folks” parenting skills… I grew up with folks all around me pointing out to misbehaving children that “they were not white and they didn’t play that …shit.”
Even if she started to appear “classy” and only wore Farah Angsana Couture, for instance.
Even if she learned to pass the phone test and only said “Oh gracious me” when she broke a manicured nail in front of her children.
In the end, I think that Lane has learned a valuable lesson for life on the street should she ever lose her place at the media supper table.
You can talk about my man, and even my children (although I will tell you it is really about me protecting them).
But don’t you dare go off on my clothes, biyatch.
