"If your child has musical talent, break their hands."

Taking the racial element out of it entirely, ballet is a terrible career. But I don't care, there are lots of terrible careers. What I mind is children making a decision when they are very small to devote hours a day in pursuit of those careers. It's extra bad when the chances of achieving that job are slim, when those skills won't be applicable anywhere else, and when the pursuit of that career causes physical damage. If kids were pursuing dance- or gymnastics, or sports, or music- because they were enjoying that activity at that moment, without considering their professional future, I'd feel better about it. Ballet seems extra special awful because "When you're working with something like ballet, you're changing the way your body is shaped and how your body grows.", but so does gymnastics, or any male sport where steroids have infiltrated the high school. I think I maybe want to get rid of ballet all together because I can't support something that chews people- children- up like that.*

That said, I went back and read the original interview**, and some stuff got lost in context. "The more people we have auditioning, they can't deny talent." was said directly in response to "What message do you have for other black women or curvy women who want to be classical ballet dancers?", a far cry from my accusation of encouraging young girls to ruin their bodies pursuing a terrible career***. She also seems to be aiming her message and girls and women who have already decided they want to dance but are being steered away from classical ballet. I have the vague sense that ballet is more destructive than modern, but I could easily be wrong on that.

Terrible career it may be, I do think there would be benefits to everyone to having more black ballerinas. It would help change the perception of beauty and class as white things, it would provide a counter to certain stereotypes
And if an adult wanted to take the sacrifices (long hours, physical destruction, low pay) on herself to contribute to those improvements, I would applaud her. What bothers me is the idea of children committing to that sacrifice before they're old enough to understand it.

Bookkeeping: some comments on the last post make me think we're not all on the same page on the costs of ballet. My understanding is that, like girl's gymnastics, ballet takes an incredible toll on the human body. As someone who's suffered from small but overwhelming musculoskeletal issues, I have serious body horror over this. I walk out of sparring with bruises twice a week, fracturing my finger didn't do more than annoy me with potential lifestyle changes, even when it looked like it might be serious, but the idea of deliberately hurting my hip alignment triggers a genuine fight or flight response. I didn't realize till just now how much emotional charge that was giving my analysis. Yay, writing is pulling its weight.

*Ta-Nehisi Coates occasionally has fascinating posts in which you can see his changing attitude towards football. He loves the game, he has a lot of history and connection with the game, but he's questioning whether he can morally watch it, given the toll it takes on the players.

**I know I should always read the primary sources, but I don't, because humans are rambling and humans talking out loud to a question they were just asked are more rambling.

***My defense: I never actually made it about her, she was just a jumping off point. But that might be perceptible to only me.

This was totally hilarious when it happened

I recently had coffee with a friend I hadn't talked to in six years. One of the fascinating things to observe is the ways our politics have changed, and our reactions to that. In college we shared fairly similar libertarian views. Since then, we've grown in parallel in some ways (number of use of the word privilege/minute), and apart in others- I'm still libertarian and he's now pretty liberal. I'm sure that will lead to fascinating stories later, but for now the interesting part is how we're politely feeling out the others views.

For reasons that will become obvious, it's important that you know the history of Orson Scott Card. He was at one point capable of writing fantastic things, although never consistently. Once the internet came around we were able to discover he had all sorts of horrible views on gay people and GWB and watches Fox News because it's the only patriotic news station. Around the same time, he stopped writing good works to concentrate on crap.

Here is the conversation I had with my friend:

Me: [Passage from an old, good Card book that I found really meaningful].
Me: Ah, back when Card was good.
Friend: Oh good, I was wondering how to check to see if you still liked him.