A Letter to Gabby Douglas

 

Dear Gabby,

Congratulations on your monumental achievement.  That gold medal hanging around your tiny neck is your reward for your hard work and your great sacrifices.  Most of us here back home are bursting with pride, as if we did something other than cheer you on.

You probably haven’t had much time to notice, but the vultures in America have wasted no time trying to knock you off that vaunted pedestal.  It’s the American way or so it seems.

You are aware of the “sistahs” in Tweetland who decided your hair looks “a hot mess” while you do things with your 4’11” body that most of them couldn’t even dream of doing.  They who sit at their smartphones tweeting nasty remarks about the appropriateness of your hairstyle instead of celebrating your unprecedented achievement are ill, Gabby; they just don’t know it yet.

You have stepped up like the champion you are and told those haters they might as well stop tweeting, because you aren’t going to change a thing.  You were kind enough not to point out how utterly ridiculous they are for not noticing that your hair is styled exactly the same way all your teammates have theirs done, and how indicative their behavior is of a deep-seated racial self-hatred we African American women still sometimes model and propagate.

Maybe you are too young and too sheltered to realize that last point – after all, your training regimen doesn’t give you much time to get down in the dirt with the mean girls, who are so jealous of your accomplishments they deflect the recognition you so rightly deserve by being critical of the nappy edges of your sweat-soaked hair.  You should know though, Gabby, there is a high likelihood that those tweeters are tweeting while wearing hair that originally grew on the heads of some women in India, so consider the source.

It is bad enough when your own peeps try to play Whack-a-Mole with you.

Now the lockstep talking heads over at Fox TV News have decided you are portraying a kind of “soft anti-America sentiment!”  And they went and found themselves a black member of the Tea Party to support that view.  Why?  Because you wore hot pink (which, by the way, was also worn by your teammates) on the day you made history and became the best all-around female gymnast on the face of the earth.  The geniuses at Fox News think you should have been wearing the flag colors. Let me take a wild guess – you had nothing to do with choosing the uniform that day, right?

I can’t help it, Gabby; I wonder if that medal had gone to, say, Jordyn Wieber, if the right-wing broadcasters would have remembered how they once accused another African American woman of being anti-American for something she said off the cuff.  That would be Olympic Games fan #1 –our First Lady.  You don’t suppose your skin tone had anything to do with it, do you Gabby?  It’s hard to know.

Welcome to the world, Gabby.  I pray you will have around you the support you are going to need to help you negotiate the sewage you are about to have slung your way.  I guess it is too much to ask that you be idolized and iconized in the same manner as Mary Lou Retton was, you being such a lightening rod for bovine defecation. 

You are probably already wealthy by now – the Corn Flakes box is just the beginning.  You certainly have earned it.  I just hope you won’t be required to earn your fame and fortune over and over and over again, just because you sweat and you understand the meaning of the word “uniform.”

With warm regards,

L in the Southeast

Photo by USAToday

Video from Fox News