ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is, quite plainly, a war against black people in this country. We will be tolerated if we do not speak, do not challenge, and appear grateful for everything we have, grateful that our lives are not worse. Our successes are treated as opportunities given and not earned. We do not have the right to address injustices or imbalances, regardless of their historical and statistical obviousness, and when we do the campaigns to smother, discredit, and ignore our perspectives are immediate and unrelenting. Against this backdrop of hostility in reality, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. As so many writers know, being published is not a given.

Many thanks to Helene Atwan, Pamela McColl, Alyssa Hassan, and the entire team at Beacon Press for always being enthusiastic about promoting and supporting the work. Having worked together on two books now, I know that any author working with Rakia Clark as their editor is a lucky one. So many of the concepts in this originated in the pages of ESPN the Magazine. Scott Burton, Rebecca Hudson, and Jena Janovy have always been encouraging journalistic voices to challenging our assumptions and conventions, especially on subjects that are not particularly popular to the corners of the sports world who only want the final score.

I am always thankful for a wonderful inner circle who helped shape and refine thoughts and were gracious enough with their time to look at sections of the manuscript. David Kutzmann has been a peerless editor for two decades of book projects. Many phone calls, lunches, and dinners with Tisa Bryant, Christopher Sauceda, Peg Kern, Glenn Stout, Laura Harrington, and my agent, Deirdre Mullane at Mullane Literary, turned ideas into paragraphs. Molly Yanity has my thanks for reading portions of the manuscript and I am grateful for John Hoberman, who is like a walking clipping service. Important conversations with Toni Smith-Thompson, whose ideas and perspectives on race, class, and the chilling, increased presence of police in our schools and communities, are deeply interwoven within these pages.

I am grateful to the writers who inspire me to write, whose phrases do not belong to me but have often found their way into my work because they are so good, so appropriate. The term “magical thinking” stayed with me after reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. In considering the runaway grift and graft of the millionaires Donald Trump installed in his cabinet to profit from and weaken the government, I use the term “spectacular con,” which Naomi Klein used perfectly in No Is Not Enough. On two occasions, the phrase “There are many ways to tell a lie” appears in the text, which is a shout-out to Rebecca Solnit, who captured the sly practice with those words in her essay “Politics and the American Language,” the foreword to her essay collection Call Them by Their True Names.

Part of the writing journey is finding comfort with the organic places it will take you. There is a war against black people in this country but there is also a massive assault against truth and poor people and ethics. These times feel dark and defining. Friendships and relationships have been tested. Some have survived. Others have not. If the times have felt like a severing, a bitter reckoning with Trump and a country that increasingly embraces white nationalism, reckless capitalism, and sustained racial incuriosity, they also represent an opportunity to explore what lies in front of us with different eyes, with new people who share similar values. I am grateful for the inner circle that remains intact and for the new voices that have joined it. We will start a new story together. Or, as they say in Spanish, juntos.