What Kobe Bryant meant

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Today is a day of complex grief for many, many people.

Five-time NBA champion and four-time All-Star MVP Kobe Bryant, 41, and his 13-year-old-daughter Gianna, were among nine people who died when the helicopter they were traveling in crashed in the hills near Calabasas, Calif., on Sunday morning.

He leaves behind his wife Vanessa, and their three daughters.

At press time, six victims had been identified. Orange Coast College confirmed that their baseball coach, John Altobelli, his wife Keri, and their daughter Alyssa, were on board. Also on board was Christina Mauser, a girls assistant basketball coach who leaves behind a husband and three young children.

Gianna, known as Gigi, was a rising basketball star, poised to follow her father’s example and determined to play for the UConn Huskies one day. (Here’s a wonderful tribute to her from Slate, if you can handle it.) Bryant may have been a thrilling athlete and a mogul well in the making, but he died a devoted father, taking his kid and her friends to a basketball event.

And because it was Kobe, it feels like a personal loss.

The outpouring of grief spilled into the Grammy coverage and Sunday’s NBA games. The Spurs and Raptors used the language of basketball for their tribute; each team took a voluntary 24-second shot clock violation—a slow dribbled count-down to highlight the number 24, which Bryant wore on his Laker jersey until he retired in 2016.

Twitter became an instant and ongoing funeral, an outpouring of love and support.

Grief for a public figure is particularly complicated. It’s losing a stranger we feel like we know, our friend not only in our heads, but in our hearts, too.

When they die, we miss them because they’ve become part of our lives and identities. It’s normal to grieve. “Fans mourn not only the loss of the celebrity, but other aspects of their personal life which have become bound-up with the celebrity,” says Michael Brennan, a sociologist at Liverpool Hope University, and quoted by Quartz, in this helpful piece. Athletes, in particular, give us a reason to feel proud of our cities, exhilarating memories of victory, friendship, and fun, and a metaphor for hard work and excellence.

They vanquish. They dominate. They dig deep. They WIN. And through them, so do we.

And Kobe had super fans, even among people who didn’t follow basketball. He was poised for an astonishing second act as a designer-collaborator, venture capitalist, storyteller and producer, philanthropist, and advocate. He had become a role model of a different type, a symbol of outsized Black achievement at a time when it still feels necessary to claim credentials like his for the community.

But for some, his legacy is more painful. Like many male celebrities who have been credibly accused of sexual assault, he’d become emblematic of a culture that values male success above all else. It’s difficult to find ways to talk about this part of Bryant’s history without considering the overlapping universes of wealth, fame, entertainment, sports, media, capitalism, sex, and all the things that inspire us to ride or die for strangers we feel like we know.

It’s reasonable to expect that in real life and online, lots of different kinds (and perhaps conflicting) grief will be present, held by people filled with shock, sadness, anger, and a bunch of other emotions that may be hard to name.

So, my best advice, which I lean on often, comes from my dear friend David Kyuman Kim, an author and professor of religion, race, and American studies. He has become a raceAhead treasure.

Being able to survive an encounter with someone else’s grief—or anything else about their lived experiences—requires being willing to make room for them, even if you don’t fully understand. It’s a basic building block of an inclusive culture, whether inside a corporation or simply in your life. “What does it mean to be in solidarity?” Asks Kim. “It means I’m standing with you because I care about you in abstraction. I care about your well-being, including the threats to your humanity.”

The specific conversations that come next are the really scary part, of course.

“Start with the language of love and mercy,” he says. “That’s where you’ll find courage.”

Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
[email protected]

On Point

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day It’s a poignant and necessary reminder, made more so by the alarming uptick in anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks. “Now is the first time that I have truly felt, in my (admittedly few) 23 years of life, such an overwhelming fear of impending doom,” writes Jordan Salama in an opinion piece. “If war won’t destroy the world, climate change will. And now to add to it, the wave of anti-Semitic attacks over the past year are instilling the seeds of fear into many millennial American Jews for perhaps the first time.” More ways to remember and connect below.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Despite grief and controversy, the Grammys went on Our colleague Eric R. Danton does a beautiful job assessing an awards show, which nobly performed under pressure but made the point of its longtime critics. “Genre lines grow ever blurrier as artists decline to stay put within categories that have come to look too narrow and confining, and the Grammys haven’t figured out how to keep pace,” he says. Case in point, Tyler the Creator, who won for best rap album for Igor. Except, it’s not a rap album. “It sucks that whenever we, and I mean guys that look like me, do anything that’s genre-bending, they always put it in a ‘rap’ or ‘urban’ category,” Tyler said backstage. “I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. It’s just a politically correct way to say the N-word. When I hear that, I’m just like why can’t we just be in pop?” Click through for the rest of the news.
Coins2Day

China’s biggest film weekend curtailed by threat of coronavirus infection The annual week-long new year holiday is typically big business for China’s film industry, but this year, new releases and special events were cancelled out of caution. While it was the right thing to do, it is a setback for a country that had been aiming to carve out a bigger piece of international box office figures. “The swathe of cancellations has meant that plans to release overseas also have to be scrapped, as regulations state that Chinese-produced films must be released in the home market first,” reports The Guardian.
The Guardian

A Ugandan youth climate activist was cropped out of a photo, igniting outrage Vanessa Nakate was part of a group of young activists, including Greta Thunberg, who gave a press conference in Davos last Friday. But for some reason, Nakate was cropped out of the picture published by the Associated Press (AP). She expertly raised the issue on Twitter in comments and a video which went viral. “Why did you remove me from the photo? I was part of the group,” she tweeted. Then, in a video, she said, “We don’t deserve this. Africa is the least emitter of carbons, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis,” she said. “You erasing our voices won’t change anything. You erasing our stories won’t change anything.” The AP said the photo was cropped for compositional purposes; other agencies, including Reuters, misidentified Nakate as Zambian activist Natasha Mwansa.
The Guardian

On Background

A newly discovered Auschwitz survivor’s diary Sheindi Ehrenwald was 14 when she arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1944. Now 90, and called Sheindi Miller, she is sharing the diary she kept in secret, documenting the horrors she and others endured. Miller survived the war and emigrated to Israel, where the documents were stored in a kitchen cupboard for 70 years. She was unable to talk about her experiences with her family, but is now publishing the diary out of fear of rising anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe. “When I was writing the diary, my greatest fear was that a German would read it,” Miller said this week. “Today, 76 years later, my greatest joy is that Germans are reading it.” The diary is being exhibited this week at the German History Museum in Berlin.
Wall Street Journal

An estimated one-third of Holocaust survivors in the U.S. Are living in poverty The stories pop-up on Remembrance Day—like this one from San Diego—but there seems to be little progress. There are about 100,000 Holocaust survivors currently living in the U.S., and according to The Blue Card, a non-profit that offers financial assistance to the survivor population, one third are living at or below the federal guidelines for poverty. Survivors who relocated after the former Soviet Union fell are in particularly dire financial condition and have little access pensions or other safety nets. The number is in stark contrast to the 10% of Americans over age 65 who are living in poverty.
The Blue Card

More Americans went to the library in 2019 than to the movies Of course, we’re all still watching movies, but a recent Gallup poll, visiting the local library is the most common “cultural activity” American adults enjoy—and by far, with 10.5 trips on average last year. “Americans attend live music or theatrical events and visit national or historic parks roughly four times a year on average and visit museums and gambling casinos 2.5 times annually. Trips to amusement or theme parks (1.5) and zoos (.9) are the least common activities among this list.”
Lithub