I’ll return to the Lost Months shortly, but today I want to focus on the here and now.
We lost someone this week. The Greatest. A man who knocked down people and racial barriers with equal alacrity and used sarcastic humor as the ranch dressing that allowed whites to stomach the freshly tossed salad of bitter truth that was existing in America within a brown body.
As a child of the eighties, I confess my level of engaging with Muhammad Ali was more as a Father than a fighter. As a muscular brown girl who would never be considered ‘dainty’, Laila Ali was an icon-- an attractive woman, sexy even, who could and would knock a bitch out. She existed on her own terms, KO-ing gender stereotypes in the way her father took on racism.
She was the woman I thought I could have been with the support of a loving father.
Not a boxer, mind you, I have rubbish hand-eye coordination, but a fighter, a woman who lived life on her own terms and was secure in her skin, flaws and all. Hollywood glamorized the relationship between ‘The Greatest’ and his baby girl to an almost Disneyesque degree, and I bought in hook, line, and sinker.
I have since had the opportunity to get to know my father. As the rose colored glasses came off, I learned the reality of Father-daughter relationships: no one is perfect, your parents are not superheroes, and a Father is still a man. And men tend to be dumb.
Well, you are. #sorrynotsorry.
I love my Dad. But I don’t idolize him. Although my father is not a three time heavyweight champion, he is a bit of a Hometown Hero. He plays piano at church, coaches pee wee football (in the south), and, along with my Grandmother, feeds the homeless every Saturday. He is a good person.
Yet he is far from my fairy tale vision of a perfect father. So far in fact, that at times it is difficult for me to reconcile the man others tell me about with the man I know. It’s not that he’s secretly a monster, it’s just that I’ve never seen him as a saint.
He’s just my Dad-- the guy who doesn’t call enough, Facebook bullies my boyfriends, drinks juice from the carton. He’s the guy who after one too many Margaritas will hit on the waitress-- in front of my stepmother (see? DUMB).
So which version of himself should a father be judged by? His truth or his legacy?
Last week my pastor’s father passed away. He preached a sermon on how all barriers to unity amongst the living disappear in the face of death (which you can listen to here). The gist of it is that death has a way of clarifying things for us; there are no Muslims or Christians, blacks or whites, lesbians or straight girls. There are only dying and dead.
Death reminds us of our own mortality. It inspires us to do something worth being remembered by when we are gone. It hurts, no matter if you lose a parent or child, spouse or sibling-- the separation is permanent. And it is agony. Yet it is in these times of common suffering that we come closest to King’s beloved community. By remembering our own pain we are able to better empathize with people who have values and backgrounds that are vastly different from our own.
I called my pastor to see how he was doing. In private we spoke about his father, the man, and how from an early age it had been impressed upon him to live up to his family name. Educational attainment, social activism, and human dignity were at the core of his familial expectations. Although we were decades apart, races apart, and raised completely differently, his daddy expected the same things of him that mine does of me.
I thought again of my own father, whose last name I don’t share. I thought of Muhammad Ali, who threw away his family name in favor of one that honored his ancestral roots. I thought of my niece, whose father is incarcerated, and my other niece whose father is embroiled in a multi-state custody battle that allows him to see her during summers only.
Perhaps that is why Ali’s fathering inspired more admiration than his fighting in my young soul. In the Black community, fathers are just one more privilege many of us are forced to go without.
Yet whether by their presence or absence, our fathers shape the people we grow up to be. Their legacies become the building blocks for our children’s expectations. And when we lose them, a little piece of us dies too.
My heart goes out to Laila Ali in this moment, knowing that even as I grieve with her, as the world grieves with her, that we are not grieving the same person she is. We lost the legend, while she lost the man.
Regardless of what Muhammad Ali’s truth was, his legacy is one that his daughter can be proud of. He called on us to boldly confront the issues of our day-- to stand and fight injustice in its strongholds- the institutions that so enslave our minds that we stumble about ‘mentally dead’, spiritually defunct, and morally bankrupt.
Instead of giving up on understanding each other, Muhammad Ali called us to dig deeper, push harder, think bigger, and be greater.
If God in Her infinite wisdom is kind enough to give me forty-three more years on this earth, I hope I use mine half as well.
#RIP
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