Kobe Bryant: On Empathy, Power, Agency, and Legacies
In death, we are mystified and emptied. Things begin to feel blurry, irrational, dizzying. The grief we feel when we lose someone we’ve never met, but feel connected to; the sense of personal loss that comes when our heroes disappear; they are real, they are valid, and they can cut to our core.
Likewise, in trauma, we are similarly emptied and dizzied. In the wake of trauma, we find lifelong journeys, sometimes unsuccessful, towards repairing the relationship between mind and body; extended journeys into the darkness of mental illness and emotional struggle; disassociation from self and from others; a life where our trauma seems to lurk in every nook, cranny, corner, face, movie, and day.
Badly, we need to talk about how all of these things simultaneously produce a treacherous landscape that can feel impossible to traverse.
The experience of learning that Kobe Bryant had died, and seeing the outpouring of every type of emotional response to that news, has been… intense.
Those who know me or who have followed my work over these past many years might have been surprised to have seen my silence in response to this all-consuming social event. It felt like it was being discussed and unpacked everywhere I turned, and it intersects with some of the issues that I’ve chosen to make my life and work dedicated to.
As is the case in 2020, and has been for some time, much of our world processes their lives, emotions, and milestones in real-time on social media.
The tweetstorms and Twitter threads; the Instagram stories and live videos; the hashtags, vlogs, and long-reads - Kobe Bryant has been everywhere.
It makes sense. As an NBA fanatic myself, he is seen in so many of my favourite players. He has been a foundational pillar upon which much of my favourite league has been built. If you were to survey NBA players and ask them who their favourite NBA player was growing up, I would put every penny on Kobe Bryant being the most common answer. He’s been a transcendent force in the world of sports.
He’s similarly been a major figure in another very central part of my life: sexual violence and rape culture.
Now, if you read that sentence and immediately felt angry, frustrated, or fed up, I get it. This was a piece I've waited weeks to publish to intentionally allow time for mourning and grieving to make this conversation easier to have. That said, this conversation is of paramount importance. Kobe Bryant did some bad things that caused immense damage. We need to talk about what that means and how we collectively frame and process them.
February is also well underway, meaning Black History Month is in full swing. Mixed into all of these narratives and discussions about Kobe are the racial power structures wherein Bryant has meant intangibly and transcendently much to so many Black folks. It’s important that non-Black people, such as myself, are aware that we can’t understand what those relationships and symbolisms are. We shouldn’t pretend to; we shouldn’t attempt to; we shouldn’t demean them.
We are left with a particularly emotional, difficult, and complicated landscape to work through as we try and work together to be better at dealing with losses like Kobe’s.
Black folks are in pain. The basketball community is in pain. The Bryants, Altobellis, Chesters, and Mausers are in pain. Survivors and victims of sexual violence are in pain. Kobe Bryant’s survivor/victim is in pain. The world is in pain.
It can be easy to start to build a hierarchical list of whose pain matters the most; to try and parse together a system of attributing value to the pain and suffering so many are feeling right now, for different reasons. I don’t think that is a necessary or worthwhile exercise.
If you’re looking for the answer of what we ought to be doing — of what the absolute right path through this maze is — that’s not what this piece is. I don’t think that’s possible. Rather, I’m going to do my darn best to outline the complexities that live within each of the most difficult conversations we need to be having right now.
Our task, I believe, should be to derive as many lessons as we can about how we respond to the loss of our icons, how we craft narratives of the legacies of our heroes, and become more empathetic in our engagement with those who are experiencing a different emotional response than we are.
Before I get into each of these conversations, let me first make a brief note about language. I don’t love the implications of referring to the woman who experienced sexual violence at the hands of Kobe Bryant as “Bryant’s survivor/victim”, as there is an uncomfortable connotation with regards to ownership that makes me uneasy. That said, with so many references to this story throughout this piece, it becomes unreadable to frame it any differently. For the purposes of helping you work through this piece, this suboptimal framing is used with this caveat.
On grief and mourning
This piece is being published nearly a full month after Kobe Bryant’s death. I don’t point this out to suggest that those who wrote about these same things in the days following his death are wrong in some way or another, but merely as an entry-point into how I’ve been thinking about and working through the grief and mourning that followed this news.
I don’t know if there is ever a “right” time, nor really an objectively “wrong” time to start having important conversations, even when they are difficult and complicated. For me personally, seeing as I wanted to delve quite deeply into some emotionally-charged debates, I chose to delay this piece until a time that I thought it might more readily be consumed and considered by those whose mourning, while still ongoing, is likely less potent than in the days and weeks immediately following Bryant’s death.
When we talk about loss and emotional pain following one’s death, we think immediately of friends, family, and close connections. In the case of Kobe Bryant, we also think about the entire basketball community, fans from around the world, the city of Los Angeles, and every global community who felt connected to his life and legacy. His loss was felt around the world, and in many cases, was felt very, very intensely. That grief and pain is real. It’s valid. And thus, it makes sense that conversations about the darker parts of Kobe’s legacy spark visceral, emotional reactions, ranging from the “can we not talk about this now, please?” to the far nastier.
Here, the problem is that fans, friends, and family of Kobe Bryant do not have a monopoly on pain, grief, and suffering. In the same way that their pain is valid and real, is not the pain and suffering of Kobe Bryant’s survivor/victim valid and real, too?
Why is it too soon, or the wrong time, to make sure we aren’t committing collective erasure of her life? Of her pain? Of the fact that she matters every bit as much to her friends and family as Kobe does to his?
So, yes, I’ve waited to weigh in, but this choice is very imperfect. It is littered with potentially negative consequences, and in this situation, I don’t think the point is to find a perfect solution; I’m not sure one exists. Rather, I think to be intentional in our compassion and be pointed in our power-conscious sensitivity has to be the end goal.
To have thought about what we are saying, when we are saying it, to whom we are speaking, and why we have chosen that moment &medium to populate the discourse with that particular message.
All I know is the relationship I personally have to these questions. In my case, I have thought repeatedly of Vanessa Bryant, how her year has started, and what these past several weeks must have looked and felt like for her and her family. That’s why I chose to wait, and others did not. I’m back and forth between which path makes the most intuitive sense to me, but there are lessons beyond getting this absolutely right upon which I’m intently focused:
Even if it is not something one personally felt, the pain, grief, and suffering that followed Kobe Bryant’s death has been real, valid, and difficult to navigate for so many people. To mock or minimize this emotional pain is not only unkind, but will almost always lead to a visceral, emotional, and often unkind reaction in turn.
Other people, for very different reasons, are suffering and in pain, too. Just as a critique of Kobe Bryant’s legacy hurts his fans, friends, family, and admirers, leaving his legacy in the hallowed halls of idolatry causes real pain to victims &survivors of sexual violence, their friends, their families, and their admirers. No one has a monopoly on grief.
On agency and survivor-centricity
The general sentiment within my circles of sexual violence educators and advocates has been that the truest form of solidarity in response to Kobe Bryant’s death has been to ensure his past is adjudicated on the full scope of its merits and mistakes, and to ensure that Bryant’s survivor/victim is not erased from the public record. Her story matters, too.
Celebrating and discussing Kobe Bryant without acknowledging his relationship to sexual violence and rape culture can serve as an erasure of the experiences of survivors &victims across the world. Generally, those committed to the fight against rape culture and sexual violence have made it their goal to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Though this makes a good deal of intuitive sense to me, I am afraid I don’t think it is quite that simple.
When advocating for enhanced protections for survivors or victims of sexual violence, putting together educational programs about sexual violence, harassment, and consent, writing sexual violence prevention and response policy, or attempting to raise collective social consciousness in the name of dismantling rape culture needs to centre and be driven by the experiences and perspectives of survivors and victims of sexual violence. In short, we call this being “survivor-centric”.
It should follow that conversations surrounding Kobe Bryant’s relationship to sexual violence and rape culture should be guided by these same principles.
The notion that ensuring Bryant’s survivor/victim’s story is part of the parsing out of his legacy might feel or seem like the most survivor-centric way to proceed. Heck, it very well might be exactly the best and right thing to do.
That said, I don’t know if this has been cross-examined nearly enough. I not sure we have put this under a strong enough microscope to ensure this response is properly survivor-centric.
What about a situation wherein Bryant’s survivor/victim would rather her name and story wasn’t brought up repeatedly when talking about his legacy?
What about her right to choose how, if, and to what extent her experience is made part of the public discourse surrounding his death?
What if well-intended efforts to show solidarity with Bryant’s survivor/victim, and survivors &victims around the world, have served to make these past several weeks harder and more traumatizing for her, rather than easier and more empowering?
It’s really impossible to know, and I think that’s the point.
I wanted badly to say something about Kobe’s legacy that ensured our conversation wasn’t replicating the model of power within rape culture that serves to erase the stories and agency of survivors and victims. There is a pull we feel in today’s world to piece together the perfect tweet, seen across the world, that gives voice to survivors/victims of sexual violence who so often are made to be, or feel, silent.
But we need to think about who a contribution to the conversation serves.
From my perspective, I couldn’t know for certain that my and many others’ contributions to the conversation, focused on sexual violence, would make things better and not worse for Bryant’s survivor/victim. Yet, I felt frozen and unsure even of this realization, as I felt my silence represents a complicity in the power structures that render survivors/victims, far and wide, feeling vulnerable, unsafe, and unseen.
On the one hand, there is the opportunity to ensure our conversations about Kobe Bryant and his legacy tell every part of the story and do not serve to erase the existence and voice of his survivor/victim; on the other hand, there is the very real possibility that every time his survivor/victim saw mention of her experience, story, and in some cases even her name, that she experienced some level of retraumatization.
The point is that I couldn’t ask her. I am going out on a limb in assuming that 99.9% of those who inserted her story into the public discourse following Bryant’s death didn’t either, and there is a discomfort here that we need to detect and discuss.
Sharing someone’s story, without their consent and blessing, is a way of perpetuating the lack of agency that most survivors/victims feel throughout every part of their journey.
Thinking critically in this way, in the name of prioritizing survivor-centricity, means that supporting survivors/victims of sexual violence, in this case, and beyond, isn’t as simple as making sure Kobe Bryant’s fans and supporters are also thinking about his rape case. It’s also not as simple as remaining silent just in case speaking up would cause more harm, so it becomes another example of how complicated and messy this whole conversation is.
I don’t think the goal of this piece, or this section, in particular, is to ever try and stop vocalized solidarity with survivors/victims of sexual violence. I think that would be a rather shameful outcome. Rather, my hope is that we are actively considering how our thoughts, words, and actions will affect those who matter most, at every stage.
How might this tweet make his survivor/victim feel? How might my silence make them feel? How might this article make them feel?
When we cannot access these answers, I hope the consequence of asking these questions is a more thoughtful, nuanced, and survivor-centric discourse that intentionally considers the comfort and safety of survivors/victims above all else.
On racial hierarchies and white feminism's limitations
Empathy and intersectionality have a dynamic, essentially symbiotic relationship with each other. Kobe Bryant’s death, among many other lessons, teaches us as much.
Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, which has taken on a life of its own as it has evolved since she coined it in 1989, has grown to encompass every aspect of human lived experience. Similarly, empathy, though a concept nearly as old as time, has started showing up all over the place with a frequency and fervor that is ever-increasing.
Together, they are a powerful tool for navigating our world.
Empathy doesn’t demand that we fully understand each other and what we are all going through; rather, it asks us to hold space for and be intentional about considering how other people might feel, and to allow that process to inform our decisions, thoughts, and actions.
Using my own experience thinking about Kobe Bryant’s death, for example, I cannot possibly know what it is like to be a Black kid from Los Angeles, growing up in difficult circumstances, and seeing Kobe in the gold and purple as a beacon of hope. I don’t know what it must feel like to see yourself reflected in him on the court, look up to him, felt driven to grow and master my craft, only to see him taken from me before I was ready.
I especially do not know what it is like to experience any of these things in a world that prioritizes and favours white people.
My whiteness means I cannot understand how and what Kobe meant to Black folks in and beyond the United States. But that does not mean I cannot practice empathy for those who do.
Empathy, when removed from intersectionality, might mean using my own experiences to feel with those around me who are experiencing things I myself have gone through. It becomes limited to my own life and worldview, and what lies beyond is dark and unknown.
An intersectional practice of empathy ensures we understand and are accounting for the fact that human beings, and the emotions they experience, are far from one-dimensional.
It means not only considering what Kobe’s death might mean for basketball fans, among whom I consider myself a member and can directly relate to, but also thinking about how his loss affects Black folks, survivors/victims, poor folks, disabled folks, lifelong Laker fans, and beyond.
Unfortunately, there was a chorus of white feminist voices following Bryant’s passing that served to erase the experiences of Black folks and invalidate their unique pain and loss. There was a glaring lack of empathy, informed by intersectionality, within so many of the pieces I read in response to his passing.
The caveat here, of course, is that beyond the pieces shared within my immediate circles and that I was able to find via a Google search in researching this piece, perhaps there were feminist perspectives on Bryant’s death that properly and wholly accounted for the multiplicities of human emotion, experience, and identity that play into how one engages with an event such as this.
Perhaps there were some I missed, but I think that is part of the problem.
I saw several Black feminists working hard to populate the discourse on the praxis of race, most of whom were expressing frustration with a white feminist response that was perpetuating racial erasure. In essence, many Black folks were being told by white feminists that “because I care about sexual violence and rape culture, I don’t care (or haven’t stopped to consider) how my white privilege might make me ignorant about what Kobe Bryant meant to Black people en masse."
This is a generalization, and there were some really thoughtful perspectives, albeit badly outnumbered, from brilliant white folks who were pleading with other white folks to think critically about their racial privilege or to take a step back altogether.
These efforts, though, always seem to be the minority. White western feminism has such a long way to go when it comes to nuance, empathy, and a navigation of privilege that is worthy of the “intersectional” label so many among us liberally apply to ourselves.
Just in the way that being a hero to Black folks, a legend in sport, and by all accounts (especially later in his life) an inspiringly dedicated father and family man does not absolve Kobe Bryant of his perpetuation of rape culture, his perpetuation of rape culture needs to not erase or invalidate what he means to Black communities across the world.
To be clear, for many survivors/victims of sexual violence, Kobe Bryant not only served to perpetuate rape culture, but was a symbol that represented so many of the power imbalances embedded within it. This is not to say that anyone ought to downplay the intensity or the consequences of this positioning.
White feminists feel able to deal with Kobe’s representation of rape culture in isolation from different aspects of his identity and story that mean vastly different things to the Black community. This is a symptom of white privilege, and dealing with Bryant in this way is irresponsible.
Our empathy needs to be truly intersectional, which means extending it to Black folks who are hurting in their own way right now, both by his loss and by the way their pain is being ignored by a white feminist discourse that needs to be better.
On what this all means when parsing out the legacies of cultural icons
I feel the collective yearning we have to boil down the legacies of our icons into neat little nuggets that are a breeze to digest. In reality, legacies are tapestries composed of hieroglyphics that we need to take our time with, deeply complicated by lives that touch so many in starkly unique ways.
We have seen myriad examples over the course of the last couple years, as we take our time to debate whether one should be “allowed" to watch and enjoy the Cosby show, whether House of Cards was “ruined” or not by the revelations of Kevin Spacey’s gross behaviour, or whether mourning Michael Jackson was valid given his own wildly complicated legacy.
Does this mean I should give away my vinyl copy of Thriller?
These, as I’ve attempted to outline with this piece, are precisely the wrong questions to be asking. Rather than asking questions and expecting definitive answers, perhaps we can reconstitute our methodology.
People live complicated lives. When it comes to famous people and cultural icons, actions, both successes and failures, often have far-reaching impacts. Their complicated lives become intertwined with our own, and we feel disappointed, inspired, excited, and heartbroken alongside our heroes as we follow them throughout their careers.
Rather than asking whether Kobe Bryant is good or bad; rather than trying to determine the net gain or loss stemming from human lives, can’t we just have power-conscious, empathetic, patient, human conversations about how they have impacted us?
Can’t we talk about Kobe Bryant, the symbol of rape culture for many, while also talking about Kobe Bryant, the Black Mamba Basketball God to others?
Regardless of the extent to which we feel able to have these conversations, lest we erase the experiences of anyone who is feeling strongly during this time. Lest we fail to make space for those voices that are feeling strained or silenced. Lest we be reckless with each other as we try and grow; try to heal and survive.
Kobe Bryant is gone, and with him, memories of intense joy are lined up with experiences of trauma and pain.
What means the most to me about Kobe may not mean the most to you about him.
When someone is saying something difficult or critical about our heroes, may we grow stronger and braver in our ability to hold space for their pain alongside our own.
May we become better at facilitating conversations that make us feel seen, safe, and understood.