The times they are changin' ... changing but not without pain

A lengthy article in the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle has haunted me for the last couple of weeks. Three young male University of San Francisco baseball players, recruited athletes all, have filed a class action lawsuit accusing longtime head coach Nino Giarratano and former associate head coach Troy Nakamura of creating an “intolerable sexualized environment.”

The coaches' behavior seems to have been quite unapologetically piggish.

They [the students] described an atmosphere in which [associate head coach Troy] Nakamura routinely used sexually graphic language in front of the team; flipped one player into a handstand and pretended to eat spaghetti out of his crotch area during a pre-practice skit; and once crawled onto the field naked, swinging his penis in plain view. Head coach Nino] Giarratano witnessed these incidents, according to John Doe 1, and kissed his cross and looked skyward when Nakamura crawled onto the field naked. 

... Nakamura identified a dinner style — barbecue, luau, fast-food — and then went around the circle asking players what they would bring to this pretend meal. He always found a way to make the exercise sexual, according to the lawsuit, and encouraged players to do the same. For instance, the lawsuit said, Nakamura referred to women’s body parts he wanted to eat and bodily fluids he wanted to drink ... “Coach Naks would make those comments and he would see us roll our eyes,” John Doe 1 said. “He would see us isolate ourselves from the group or walk away. He could see we were visibly uncomfortable, and then things started to pick up.” 

 ... “It was kind of crazy,” he said. “Did I just see Coach Naks naked on the field? What prompted that? I didn’t know. Most of these situations, he came out of nowhere being sexual and I didn’t understand why.”

The players bringing the lawsuit described being shocked and confused by what they felt was completely improper behavior by persons with authority over them. They were afraid of losing their scholarships, though eventually found the situation so unbearable that they looked to transfer to other baseball schools.

The description of these events in the Chron doesn't go into the question of what the other members of the team may have felt. Did they like this toxic masculine atmosphere or were they just going along to get along? Were they convinced that this sort of thing was what it took to build a cohesive, tough team?

 The athletes bringing the suit clearly had been raised -- by parents? in high school? in organized sports? -- to expect respect in dealings with coaches and others. They seem to have had supportive parents with whom they could share their pain. Let's hope they land somewhere that will work better for them.

• • •

A recent Washington Post article explored at length the efforts of a Bellevue, Nebraska police official, Chief Ken Clary, to reduce use of force incidents by his officers.

[While attending] the National Institute of Justice LEADS Scholars Program in Washington, ... he was introduced to a wealth of academic research indicating female officers excel at de-escalation and use force less frequently than male officers." 

... Between classes, Clary struck up friendships with Ivonne Roman, a Newark police officer who would go on to be a finalist for New York City police chief earlier this year, and Maureen McGough, an attorney who is chief of staff for the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law. Roman shared with Clary many of the obstacles she faced rising through the ranks in Newark. In a later conversation over lunch, Clary shared with McGough a dawning realization. 

“He looked at me and, out of nowhere, he said, ‘Mo', we have got to figure out how to get the toxic masculinity out of policing,’ ” she recalled. ...

So far, Cleary's two-year experiment with hiring women officers, especially women officers of color, has reduced use-of-force incidents.

And he's run into exactly the sort of resistance that might be expected. "You are lowering standards," he is told. Time will tell whether the culture of toxic masculinity can be tamped down by fiat from authority in a police context ...

• • •

Feminist writer Jill Filipovic examined the underlying context in which these two seemingly so different events are playing out,

The whole Democratic Party message is “we’re all in this together, and we will make life better for everyone.” What happens, though, when a significant chunk of the electorate doesn’t want to be in it together, and doesn’t want life to become better for everyone? ... The complaint that America has grown “too soft,” coupled with what we know about conservative voters’ desires for inequality and hierarchy, is at heart a complaint that life in America is too easy for too many people. [Nuts!]

... If a subset of conservative voters want less equality and less equal opportunity, and more inequity and hardship, then what? If those voters who say that America is too soft want life in America to be harder and more hierarchical and less forgiving, there is no rhetoric or message discipline Democrats can employ to win their votes. And what’s scary is that it seems that as more Americans who have traditionally been cut out of power and privilege do ascend to higher levels — many white women, some men of color — many of them respond with greater hostility to their fellow citizens. Some of them also seem to believe that identity-based hierarchies are justified, that a fairer playing field is not actually the goal, that life in America should be tougher and more brutal for more people.

She concludes:

 ... I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re in a period of broad social cruelty following four years of an intentionally cruel presidency and the rising power of a party that seems to believe strength is defined by dominance and abuse. 

If the public can move in a more callous direction, though, it can also move in a more compassionate one. I believe that’s a harder task to accomplish — it’s always easier to appeal to one’s devils than one’s better angels. But progressives can try. We do it by not backing away from our core values — the belief that all human beings have basic rights; a desire for a more fair, compassionate, and equal society — both in the policies we put forward and in how we behave toward others. ... we should be playing the long game here.

The struggles within the University of San Francisco baseball team and in the Bellevue, Nebraska police department seem to me evidence of new cultural constructs of empathy and equality having a difficult birth. The sooner, the better ...