My mother was an excellent Chilean athlete. She was active in the late 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. My father was a tenacious basketball and tennis player. Both were left-leaning working-class professionals.
I was raised with the idea that we had to balance our intellectual and physical intakes.
Thus, my three sisters and I learned to read very early and we had the fortune (as I have mentioned in earlier columns) to have grown without television. Radio and books were our main providers of knowledge and entertainment.
We also spent plenty of time hanging out with friends outside, in the streets. There, we played with improvised balls made from discarded socks that we would push inside each other until a good size soccer ball was created. We also practiced organized sports in a more formal manner.
In those years, as it happens today, sport and art figures were idolized…but they were also scrutinized.
If you became good enough to represent your country (as it happened to me in both tennis and track), you might find yourself travelling to other countries or welcoming international teams and individuals. These international experiences obviously enhanced our lives, expanded our worlds and gave us a platform to stand on.
I discovered that—besides standing on it—you were expected to speak from those platforms…and give opinions. These opinions that were not only limited to sports issues, but to issues that would cover a large spectrum. Never mind if you were barely a teenager, you were representing your country! To speak up was a privilege and a duty.
In 1966, still a teenager, I received a track scholarship to come to the U.S. I landed smack in the middle of the 1960s, in U.C. Berkeley, where I studied sociology and theater.
I was a witness (and then a nervous participant) in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. I knew that—as a foreign student—I could be punished for my activism. The atmosphere around me (and the thoughts and experiences that I brought from Chile) helped me to conquer my fears and I took part in a few anti-war rallies.
From the track team coach, I had heard that I should stay away from politics. I was a student athlete, not a budding activist.
In the theater classes, I heard that we should refrain from “jamming our beliefs down people’s throats.”
The ‘60s were heady, exciting times. To not participate actively in them was impossible and neutrality was not an option—in sports, in the theater… in life!
I took part in many anti-war rallies. I discovered that some of the student athletes I knew, especially football players, would line up shoulder to shoulder with the police, against the students who were demonstrating.
I learned to cover my face with a bandana, to avoid being recognized by one of those huge and beefy White guys, who had become the antagonists to my anti-war feelings and thoughts.
On one occasion, I was recognized by an antagonist. That time, the young man across from me was not a football player… and he was not White, but an African American member of my track team.
He was a quiet guy, a long-distance runner. I had become friends with other Black athletes, but this particular guy remained aloof, even mysterious. We saluted each other politely, but that was it, no more interactions.
Until that day we faced each other at a rally. He stood next to other fellow students, all members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), a recruitment tool of the U.S. Army. They were uniformed and armed.
I was—for a change—without a bandana on my face. We looked at each other for a couple of seconds. Although he recognized me, he looked away. He seemed ashamed.
The next day, during workouts, we saluted each other but we never spoke about our encounter.
The fact that he was African American made me think that something was wrong there. Why was he on the side of the police, on the side of the military, on the side of those who had traditionally oppressed people of color?
I shudder when I see or hear some Black or Brown person holding a sign that says “Blacks (or Latinos) for Trump.” How, in the name of all that makes sense, does this nonsense takes place? Why do so many poor and oppressed people profess to love those who keep them down?
Let me refocus on artists and sports figures who also get involved in politics, consciously or not.
About a month ago, Draymond Green, a basketball player for the Golden State Warriors, posed in Israel with a toothy grin, while holding a big gun, surrounded by members of the Israel Defense Forces.
Before him, Natalie Portman, the Oscar-winning, Israeli-born actress, bowed out of a prestigious Israeli award ceremony in protest of that country’s “atrocities.”
For going (or not going) to Israel, Green and Portman have been harshly criticized. Natalie Portman was attacked by the Israeli establishment, especially by its most hawkish elements. Green has been criticized from more liberal and radical, pro-Palestinian people, especially on social media.
Fame brings privileges and duties. Fame also demands answers. Neutrality is not an answer.
As Desmond Tutu, the South African activist said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”