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Caitlin Clark: Open Season on the Golden Goose

Caitlin Clark gave the WNBA the audience it spent thirty years failing to find. On the night of June 24 it gave her a fist to the throat and a step over her body, and the officials paid to watch the floor saw nothing. Here is the case for her leaving. Begin with the tape, because the tape is where excuses go to die. Phoenix led Indiana late in the first half at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, a building that exists in its current sold-out form for one reason, and that reason was lying on the hardwood. Caitlin Clark had driven the lane, absorbed contact from Lexi Held, and gone down onto her side. The ball came loose. Held, DeWanna Bonner, and Alyssa Thomas dove after it and landed in a pile on top of her. Then Thomas, with Clark pinned beneath her, drove a closed fist into Clark’s throat, pushed herself upright, and stepped over the body of the best thing to happen to women’s basketball in forty years. One account of the scramble puts Thomas’s knee into Clark’s groin on the way down. Three referees stood within a few yards of all of it and called nothing.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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From Page to Stage: Newark in Black and Blue in 2004

In the Fall of 2004, I was teaching a course at Rutgers University in Newark called “From Page to Stage” where the idea — as I was teaching the course — was to take original scripts written in class and present them in live performance to learn how the process of active creation worked.

The final project was a series of group presentations where students shared their lives as they were living it — and the alarming result of one racially diverse group was: “Newark in Black and Blue.”  That group’s bruising presentation was tough and blunt and dramatic and I decided we had to record that performance in audio so we could preserve the truth of the moment.

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LinkedIn and the Promise of Minority Equality in the Age of Internet Access

Yesterday, I posted an image Janna took over the weekend to my social media circles, and I was surprised to read this morning how concerned some were over what I thought was a joyous image of young Black females in the urban core being involved in a connected electronic Age.  The action was happening on LinkedIn, and here is that discussion — I don’t know if you can read it by default, or if you have to be linked to me first or not — and here is the image that started it all:

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Microaggressions: Microassaults, Microinsults and Microinvalidations

Have you heard about “microaggressions” that come in the form of “microassaults” and “microinsults” and “microinvalidations?”  You may not know those totems of pain by their formal names, but I’m certain, at times in your life, you’ve felt their sting and, perhaps, even employed a few of them.

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Describing Skin Color in American Sign Language

Talking about Race in any situation — even in a university setting where teachers and students should feel safe to be blunt and congenial — can pack a certain, uncomfortable, stigma when bringing up the matter.

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Too Pretty to Work Here

Did you hear the one about the Iowa Supreme Court ruling that you can be fired for cause from your job because you’re just too pretty and tempting?

Standing by a December decision, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday that a male dentist who fired a female assistant because she was too attractive and threatened his marriage did not commit sex discrimination.

The all-male court ruled against Melissa Nelson, who sued her former employer James Knight, alleging Knight’s wife told Knight to fire Nelson because “she was a big threat to our marriage.” Knight fired Nelson in January 2010 after more than 10 years working for him, later testifying that she was not fired for performance reasons.

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