How We Climb

A Letter of Encouragement to my Unborn Child

Reaching the summit of Mt. St. Helens was an incredible feeling. It took all of 4 hours to hike through the forest, over piles of jagged volcanic rock, and finally up the slippery scree to the lip of the giant crater at the top. Your mother and I were with her family and even though you were just a tiny thing, the size of a jelly bean, she felt the effects of carrying you up the mountain. At one point during the hike, your mom’s father and I found ourselves waiting for the rest of the group by a trail marker next to a giant boulder. As we waited there, a couple of young men were making their way up and, upon seeing us, they paused and started complaining about the climb. One of the men whined about his legs hurting, about the weather (it was a sunny day), and about the length of the hike. Your grandpa and I didn’t really know what to say so we just mumbled some generic words of encouragement and watched as they slowly trudged their way towards the next marker. It wasn’t long before we would pass them again on our trek towards the summit and I wondered if they had the drive to keep going or if they would talk themselves into turning back.

Upon further reflection of the encounter with the complaining stranger, it dawned on me how much we can learn about life from the experience of climbing a mountain and I wanted to share some thoughts with you because I know there will be times when it feels like you are climbing with no end in sight. As an educator, I am called to help young student-athletes develop as human beings and acquire life-long skills through the game of soccer. Believe me, it is such a long road from when you first begin to walk to when you are running up and down a field chasing your dreams in front of thousands. What could be a better metaphor for this process than climbing a mountain? When you begin to climb, you can’t see the top and you aren’t quite sure of everything you might find along the way. Similarly, I can’t see the finished article of what young players will become and I’m certainly not in control of what they might face in their lives on or off the field. However, what I can directly influence on the mountain of my life is how I make the climb. That is to say that I am in control of my mentality, my attitude, and the spirit with which I put my foot past the other, over and over, up and up, over and over again. With my players, I can influence not just the way they climb at the moment, but also how they approach the mountain as a whole. This is what I want to pass on to you, my child, and I want you to hear it from me because I want you to always know that I love you enough to tell you the truth in order to prepare you for your own climb.

If the mountain trail represents a human lifespan (or a daunting task), which we all experience as a birth, an ascent filled with varying degrees of struggle, and eventually a death, then the fact of our mortality is akin to the necessity of descending from the summit of the mountain once we reach it. One way or another we must come down, we will come down. Nobody can stay on top of the mountain forever. So then, the question that we all must face is how we choose to make the climb. What values are important to us? What is worth fighting for? Asking how we will choose to climb is asking how we will choose to live. I’m not suggesting for one minute that personal responsibility accounts for the lived condition of people everywhere. Sweetheart, don’t walk around believing that people who are struggling in the world are suffering because of something innately wrong with them. The truth is that we are all, to varying degrees, the products of the environments created by the most powerful people in whatever corner of the world we find ourselves. We’ve got to be honest about the fact that the mountain to climb is a little more daunting and arduous for certain folks. For the poor and disenfranchised, the steep path contains more peril, more unforgiving elements, and offers virtually no guarantees that the marginalized among us will ever see the mountain top. And yet we all must make the climb. We all must struggle to grow up, which means that we all must come to grips with the inescapable elements of the human condition that we all share. 

Before you were born, I tried to combine my passion for soccer, studying history, and teaching into some way that I could impact lives and make a small difference in society. I wanted to wrestle with questions that have plagued me throughout my life and, in order to truly make substantive change in the communities I work in, I knew that there had to be a reckoning of the values and beliefs that underpin the lives we lead and the choices we make. This applies to everything we engage in, from the classroom to the athletic field, and even to our duties as citizens of the world. So I asked myself some questions. I asked myself, what if? What if, rather than a too-big-to-change, win-at-all costs, and elitist youth soccer structure where players often develop in spite of their training, we instead built affordable and accessible organizations for all kids to experience the game? What if these programs not only provided engagement but also gave more youth the platform to reach higher levels of play regardless of their socio-economic background? On the training field itself, what might happen if, rather than jumping to negative conclusions about kids because they don’t properly execute step-overs during isolated drills, we instead helped players learn how to scan the field, find and occupy space, and determine for themselves what action they should take and when? I asked myself what progress might look like beyond the athletic field. Socially, what could happen to our most marginalized communities if we stopped treating their challenges as the inevitable consequences of a twisted sense of freedom and prosperity that is only attainable by a select few? What kind of change could we bring forth if we honestly questioned the notion that social justice requires tiny incremental changes rather than urgent action aimed at reforming systems and institutions? How much better would we be as a country if, instead of stubbornly retreating into a cyclone of false narratives about the humanity and worth of our most vulnerable citizens, we instead leapt forwards with specific proposals, initiatives, and laws aimed at establishing concrete actions to address inequality and plunder? What if? You must always be prepared to ask questions, especially of yourself.

You were born into a world that is used to treating those who look like you as if you were something other than fully human. It’s not your fault and it never will be because to some people, your very presence represents the fruition of their greatest fear. As you grow, you will steadily learn that what truly ails this nation is the fear of facing who we truly are. Understand that you can’t grow, either as an individual or a collective, until you face this head on. That is the hardest aspect of the climb that we all must make. Indeed, I tremble with fury and sadness for this country when I consider all that we destroy because of a deeply rooted and debilitating fear of our truth. We have destroyed entire civilizations, we continue to destroy families here and abroad, and we don’t even blink an eye at the destruction of human bodies as long as the killing fits the time-honored narratives of power, freedom, and supremacy for some. Honestly, coaching youth soccer has taught me more about our culture of fear than I ever imagined I could learn from sitting on the sidelines watching young children chase a ball around a field. I’ve learned from experience how insecurity that is not overcome can grow into an obsessive fear that ultimately presents itself in the form of attitudes and behaviors that hold us back from reaching our full potential on the athletic field. Our cowardice certainly holds us back from working towards a more just and humane society. Unfortunately, my child, you will sometimes bear the brunt of this social immaturity. You are not the only one, and you may not even suffer nearly as much as some of your own countrymen. Always remember that being a victim is not your identity any more than it is theirs. However, the way that you ensure that you are not merely a victim of life’s mountain is to arm yourself with an understanding of how others have conditioned themselves to view you. Or rather, how they have learned to view themselves in relation to you in order to stop from really seeing you as you are.

You are a child of Africa and you are native to North America. Yours is truly a global identity. Do not fall victim to the obsession of labeling yourself as this or that. Above all, know that you are loved and that your presence is cherished. I pray that you take as much joy in studying history as I do, if only because there really is no other way to travel through time and get a glimpse of the psychology that people used to justify the social systems they created that persist to this day. I learned to love reading and history from my father, your grandfather, who always prayed for the day he could pass the same powerful messages on to you. You should study history not just to learn what happened before your time but also because the more you know about what has taken place backstage, the less likely you will be inclined to believe the lies being sold to you in the fancy show in front of you. The most obvious, and perhaps the most salient, lie that you will face throughout your life is that your ethnicity and the color of your skin means that you are inferior. At the heart of this white-supremacist logic is a fear of losing or conceding anything to the mythical nigger. What should be instructive about this fear for everyone is the incredible amount of insecurity and paranoia that festers at the core of this grotesque mechanism of American life. We have managed to indulge in such white-washing of history in this country that even the well documented and undeniable legacy of government-sanctioned rape, torture, murder, and mutilation of black and brown bodies has done very little to squelch the notion that it is dark skinned people who ought to be feared and distrusted. This is a result of a national insecurity with what has happened here. 

Time and time again, our history shows us that when faced with the opportunity to stand together with people who share similar economic challenges, to remake and reshape the American dream, the country has, more often than not, chosen to ensure that the doctrine of white (mostly male) supremacy remains intact. This is one of the major lessons of the American Civil War and the period known as Reconstruction. In my opinion—and I encourage you to form your own on the matter, which can be the same or different than mine—the most striking thing to have happened after the Confederate States officially surrendered was the alteration of the war’s narrative from one about keeping slavery as the “cornerstone” of Southern society to the post-war idea of a battle for “state’s rights” and the noble cause of the prideful south. In sports, well-intentioned people call out this kind of revisionism and hypocrisy for what it actually is, insecurity and a fatal weakness of character. Don’t let other people confuse you about what happened during this war. The side that was fighting to maintain slavery lost the physical battle. War is certainly not a game, but just to paint the picture for you, before the actual fighting began the Confederate States were very clear that this was about keeping niggers in their place as servants and mules for their white masters. Many southern gentlemen swore never to see the day when they would have to treat black people as actual human beings. Then, after the brutal contest (which they lost), they cried foul, saying that the other side was unfairly aggressive, and then they proceeded to hang up banners and monuments hailing their remarkable fighters as if they were successful in their quest. What is truly awful, and perhaps even more cowardly, is that the nation allowed the losers’ narrative of events to hold sway over the political decisions in the aftermath of the bloodshed. This meant, amongst other things, that black people were returned to a state of slavery, and in truth much worse, in large part because the winning side of the war had no interest in actively engaging with and enforcing the fact that black men and women are flesh and blood equals to any people on the face of the earth. Rather than working to ensure the dignity of the former slaves, the people whose labor, resiliency, and suffering literally produced the nation, this country chose instead to acquiesce to the whims of white supremacy. This is an example of the insecurity and mendacity that explains how some people can live with the plunder of folks that they deem to be perpetually beneath them, just so they can comfort themselves that they are not at the bottom of the social pile. 

That is a snapshot of our history, and it is not the past because until this very hour we continue to face the psychological and structural ramifications of a society that is seemingly incapable of being honest to itself about its true nature. In the years directly before you were born we spent a lot of time arguing over the superficial nonsense about whether or not kneeling for the national anthem is disrespectful. I’m convinced we did this because it was easier, especially for the truly lost among us, than dealing with the truth about our condition. Remember that I implored you to always be willing to ask questions? Well, here is another one for you: What might it look like if we truly faced the fact that certain groups of people in this country have been disproportionately and repeatedly terrorized and killed at the hands of law enforcement? Perhaps, and this is certainly a fear for some, that kind of introspection should give all of us reason to pause and rethink our national values and culture. If we can’t do that then we have no right to expect anyone with a free-thinking brain to salute a flag and a song that doesn’t really apply to them, and never really has. My baby, what you must know is that the reason people try to squash the truth is because of what it might reveal about who they are. What we collectively have failed to face, and it says a lot about how we got to this point in our story, is that there are certain people in our society from whom the powers that be only demand their total obedience and submission, not their opinion and certainly not their principled resistance. You are a part of that group from whom nothing but blind obedience is tolerated, and only marginal success is warmly accepted as long as you don’t rock the boat and challenge the overarching system too much. For those who dare to overstep these boundaries written into the stars and stripes, we effectively silence them by stripping them of their complexity as human beings within the context of a chaotic world. The result is that we peddle the myth that the oppressed cannot have heroes who are flawed in any way. 

We insist on believing that those who resist the evils of the status-quo must constantly remain blemish free otherwise their critiques of our world are deemed worthless. Nothing exemplifies injustice and inequality more than this state of affairs, for we are all flawed, we all struggle to make the climb. However, we must understand that an unjust society is one in which your climb up the mountain comes at the expense of another’s innate human dignity. Some people have the audacity to wonder why others can’t pull themselves up from the crevasse they were dropped in as their bodies were used as levers to propel the privileged citizens up the mountain trail. My love, if you ever find yourself struggling in your climb, understand that what the privileged fear is that, if they went back to help you climb out of the crevasse, then you might pull them down with you. They fear that we would do to them what they have done to us. That is what they fear, and that is what imprisons them in a cycle of hatred. Or perhaps they might even fear that if you ever did get the chance to climb with the same privileges as them, that your drive, your hard work, and your brilliance would carry you to the top ahead of them and ahead of their children. Again, that is their fear and insecurity to deal with. As for you, my sweet child, overcoming life’s challenges begins with the knowledge of self and with a sense of purpose that guides you like a lighthouse through the storms. I know that we all must climb our own mountain, and the ones your mother and I have climbed may or may not be ones that you struggle mightily with. I know it is hard and sometimes grueling but ultimately the greatest gift, and the most powerful resistance, is being able to choose for yourself how to make the climb while helping others do the same. I love you and I’m so proud to be your father. For you, and for a better world, we reach higher.