Rowing toward equality

In a powerful passage from Arshay Cooper’s “A Most Beautiful Thing,” the author reflects on the time when a police officer flipped his backpack upside down and forced him to pick up his books.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag, I help old ladies cross the street, and I work with kids,” writes Cooper, who is Black. “I want to stand up for myself, but any wrong move can scare him and get me killed, then what? What will they say about me?”

“A Most Beautiful Thing,” this year’s One Book One Community selection in Alliance, is Cooper’s reminiscence about his place in history as a member of the first all-Black high school rowing team. It is also a testament to the challenges of growing up on Chicago’s West Side, where the writer had to navigate the dangers of gangs, drugs and poverty.

Rowing was more than just an extracurricular for Cooper. It was a lifeline. Through rowing, he was exposed to entrepreneurial classes, elite college campuses and summer job opportunities.

The rest was up to him.

Nevertheless, the book isn’t a “bootstraps” story, the kind of tale certain politicians use to sell constituents on the idea that a person can surmount any obstacles through sheer determination alone, and that those who can’t or don’t are somehow lacking.

Make no mistake, Cooper demonstrates that he has more than enough determination. But he also credits many people in his life without whom he wouldn’t have had such opportunities – a church member who paid him to read books, a mother who overcame addiction to become a stable influence, and the stockbroker-turned-coach who started the inner-city rowing program.

Cooper also notes the sadder fate of some of his equally gifted contemporaries, including a friend who started selling drugs to support his family, and former athletes who were coddled in school when they were winning, but then quickly discarded once their playing days were over.

“I feel like the coaches develop them too much as athletes and not as good human beings,” Cooper writes. “It’s almost as if their existence is about basketball skills and not life skills.”

If readers finish the book thinking Cooper is an anomaly, one of only a small number of deserving people who escape poverty in America, they will have gleaned the wrong message.

The book is a reminder that many, many worthy people, especially minorities, are chewed up by the system each day, their potential squandered, pawns in a political game that finds them courted at every election and then largely forgotten until the next time their votes are needed.

Meanwhile, the stereotyping and inequities for Black Americans continue — by police, courts, schools, employers, and the housing market, despite laws and policies to discourage it. Maybe the reason Critical Race Theory is disparaged by so many conservatives is not that it skews the study of America’s history, but that it reveals the faults of America’s present.

This is a reality that receives perfunctory acknowledgment during Black History Month before returning to the backburner for the rest of the year.

Arshay Cooper’s story is the optimistic tale of one person who beats the odds, an example of the underdog formula that holds so much appeal, the “Rocky” of rowing. Yet it is also a reminder of a popular saying from a few years back: It takes a village.

The book is a challenge for society to create conditions where all underdogs have such a village, in the form of scaffolding and mentoring to ensure they don’t have to paddle so hard just to reach the starting line.

“A Most Beautiful Thing” is available to purchase or borrow at Rodman Public Library. Cooper visits Alliance on March 31.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.