Thank you, Maya. So glad to see this coverage. I didn’t know they were going to be honored at that upcoming game and I’m sorry I don’t live in the Bay Area to see it. I played in the WBL myself in those early years, and Anita, Cardtie, & Musiette were terrific players. Anita was also a star at UCLA, and I played against her there, too. It was an honor to know them & in two cases, to still be in touch 45 years later. Yes to lifting up Black women Pioneers.
What always need to be made widely public are such instances of immense mass inhumanity. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved the narrator notes that, like the South, the Civil War era northern states also hated Black people but happened to hate slavery more.
[Of course, this succinct summation of the ugliness of the politics of difference and scale is applicable elsewhere: e.g. they hate libertarians but hate liberals even more; they loath Semites but despise the Palestinians far more, or hate Hispanics but abhor the Chinese more so, etcetera, etcetera.]
Black people have been brutalized for centuries, and in the U.S. told they were not welcome — even though they, as a people, had been violently forced to the U.S. from their African home as slaves. And, as a people, there has been little or no reparations or real refuge for them here, since.
So many people on this atrocity-prone planet can be and often are [consciously or subconsciously] perceived as not being of equal value or worth to everyone else, when morally they all definitely should be.
Internationally or intercontinentally, human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic, relatively civilized and supposedly Christian nations. And it’s even easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions. In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.
With each news report of the daily civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.
Great job covering this valuable history!!
thank you molly! that means so much. i can't wait to write more about the team.
Thank you, Maya. So glad to see this coverage. I didn’t know they were going to be honored at that upcoming game and I’m sorry I don’t live in the Bay Area to see it. I played in the WBL myself in those early years, and Anita, Cardtie, & Musiette were terrific players. Anita was also a star at UCLA, and I played against her there, too. It was an honor to know them & in two cases, to still be in touch 45 years later. Yes to lifting up Black women Pioneers.
What always need to be made widely public are such instances of immense mass inhumanity. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved the narrator notes that, like the South, the Civil War era northern states also hated Black people but happened to hate slavery more.
[Of course, this succinct summation of the ugliness of the politics of difference and scale is applicable elsewhere: e.g. they hate libertarians but hate liberals even more; they loath Semites but despise the Palestinians far more, or hate Hispanics but abhor the Chinese more so, etcetera, etcetera.]
Black people have been brutalized for centuries, and in the U.S. told they were not welcome — even though they, as a people, had been violently forced to the U.S. from their African home as slaves. And, as a people, there has been little or no reparations or real refuge for them here, since.
So many people on this atrocity-prone planet can be and often are [consciously or subconsciously] perceived as not being of equal value or worth to everyone else, when morally they all definitely should be.
Internationally or intercontinentally, human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic, relatively civilized and supposedly Christian nations. And it’s even easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions. In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.
With each news report of the daily civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.