Riley Gaines Quotes

Bravado tends to drown out the sound of wonder. Perhaps you've known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight, but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.

Yet between 1972 and 2011—that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs—it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20

Between 1990 and 2000 the number of elected officials grew by 23 percent among blacks but only by 4 percent among Asians. Even Asian voter participation lags behind other groups; in 2008, Asians were significantly less likely than both blacks and whites to have voted. A similar pattern can be found among Chinese populations in southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the English in Argentina, Italians in the United States, and Jews in Britain. In each case, economic gains have generally preceded political gains.

My jaw tightened. “You mean to tell me any man can walk into our locker room?” He said nothing, avoiding eye contact. Just a few years ago, if a man walked in the women’s locker room, he would be arrested and thrown in jail and thought of as a sexual predator.

I believe being forced to use preferred pronouns promotes reality distortion and a lack of basic respect for biology. Since I started advocating for women’s sex-based rights, I began to realize that even when I tried to be what I thought was kind and inclusive and used preferred pronouns, it wasn’t enough. Unless we undoubtedly believed men could turn into women and experience all the same things women do while not daring to question it, then you were showcasing transphobia. I was fully embracing fiction in the guise of showing respect.

Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented—some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance—it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America.

A few months later, in honor of Women’s History Month, ESPN released a special on Thomas. Of all the female athletes who could have been chosen, someone who was not even born a female was handpicked. These actions are regressive and misogynistic. No female swimmer was honored during this Women’s History Month special by ESPN. Only Thomas.

It never escaped my notice that Riley was dealing with some shit. He wanted the world to believe he was all easy smiles and goofy commentary, but those were the layers he used to gain distance. No one stopped to look under the surface when he was recapping sports highlights with his wonky brand of wit, or diffusing situations with self-depreciating humor. But it was all there, right under the radar.

I would find out later that Kylee Alons of North Carolina State University, who is a 31x All-American, was so uncomfortable at having to share a locker room with a naked male, she changed in a storage closet. Kylee, NC State’s most decorated swimmer of all time, admitted to being constantly on edge whenever she had to go to the locker room. Knowing Thomas could walk in at any given moment, she always had a towel and parka nearby.

I did not think you would come back.” Cas’s heart bled for the pain he’d caused his prince. “I did not think I would either,” he answered honestly. Merrick whipped his head up at that. “Not because I didn’t want to. You have much to lose, my prince. More than I could ever give you in return.” “Should I not be the one who decides how much what I lose or gain means to me?” He shook his head. “You do not get to make that decision for me, Cas, just as I cannot make it for you…and that is what I did by approaching you at the ball. I apologize for that. I should not have done it so publicly, but that doesn’t change what I want. You think you don’t give me much, but your love gives more than any title ever could. It is with you that I am the truest form of myself.” Cassius’s knees went weak. His heart thudded in his ears, and his vision blurred. “It is with you that I am the truest form of myself as well. I could not separate my love for you from my fear of what you would sacrifice for me. I could not see how the trade was fair to you…to the people of Evergreen.

One more thing to mention that is unique to swimming locker rooms is that there is a lot of undressing, multiple times a session. We arrived in our clothes and changed into our practice suits to warm up, then we changed from our practice suits into our racing suits, then from our racing suits back into our practice suits to finish warming down, and then from our practice suits back into our clothes. So just in one session, you would undress down to nothing four times. Then we would come back for finals that same day and repeat the process all over again. Just trying to hit home the fact that there were lots of opportunities to be seen fully exposed each day.

My teammates and I cut wide eyes with each other, not really understanding our emotions in that moment. Of course, we felt awkward, embarrassed, and uncomfortable. I remember specifically feeling betrayed. I thought of how our privacy as females had been entirely dismissed, violated, and ignored. There was no thought to how we would respond or how uncomfortable a male sharing this changing space with us would make us feel. It felt like we were pawns in a sick game catering to the male who claimed our identity but didn’t have the same physiology, anatomy, or chromosomes, to name a few… I desperately wanted to call my mom and dad and tell them of this situation in hopes they would reassure me that I wasn’t crazy in experiencing this as a total violation of our rights to privacy as women.

In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby was the featured speaker at an NAACP awards ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Cosby used the occasion to offer a stinging critique of contemporary black culture. He said that blacks today are squandering the gains of the civil rights movement, and white racism is not to blame. “We, as black folks, have to do a better job,” he stated. “We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.” Today in our cities, he said, we have 50 percent [school] dropout [rates] in our neighborhoods. We have . . . men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because [she is] pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father.

tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams have experienced losing to a male with not nearly as much notoriety as they have… in a blowout. In 1998, in a matchup against Karsten Braasch, the 203rd ranked male tennis player from Germany, Serena lost 6–1 and Venus lost 6–2. Keep in mind Serena is a 23-time Grand Champion and her sister a 7-time Grand Champion. Serena herself said, “I hit shots that would have been winners on the women’s Tour, and he got to them easily.” Is it a good time to mention at the time Braasch was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and smoked during changeovers the day of the match? He also admitted to playing a round of golf and drinking a few cocktails before facing the Williams sisters as well as performing like “a guy ranked 600th.” Thirteen years later, in an interview with David Letterman, Serena noted she would lose to Andy Murray 6–0 in just a matter of minutes. She went as far to say men and women’s tennis is a totally different sport. Serena told Letterman, “I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed.

It’s becoming clearer daily that we’ve been thrust into a fourth wave of feminism, the most ironic and contradictory wave yet: the wave where men make the best women. The objective of this wave is equal outcomes for all humans rather than individual freedoms, opportunities, and the ending of sex-based discrimination. This ideology is in direct opposition to traditional American values. Fourth-wave feminism no longer just attends to the struggles of women; it’s a demand for the elimination of “men” and “women” by rendering them the same and interchangeable. While many modern Americans wouldn’t consider themselves feminists, most still support legal, social, and economic equality between the sexes. Most of those who openly and proudly call themselves feminists believe men and women are equal and the same, which is why I mentioned I wouldn’t have previously considered myself a feminist. While I certainly believe men and women were created equal and in God’s image, I don’t believe they are the same. Men and women are inherently and beautifully different. Neither is inferior to the other, as we each have unique strengths and weaknesses.

When trying to understand why people acted in a certain way, you might use a short checklist to guide your probing: their knowledge, beliefs and experience, motivation and competing priorities, and their constraints. •​Knowledge. Did the person know something, some fact, that others didn’t? Or was the person missing some knowledge you would take for granted? Devorah was puzzled by the elderly gentleman’s resistance until she discovered that he didn’t know how many books could be stored on an e-book reader. Mitchell knew that his client wasn’t attuned to narcissistic personality disorders and was therefore at a loss to explain her cousin’s actions. Walter Reed’s colleagues relied on the information that mosquitoes needed a two- to three-week incubation period before they could infect people with yellow fever. •​Beliefs and experience. Can you explain the behavior in terms of the person’s beliefs or perceptual skills or the patterns the person used, or judgments of typicality? These are kinds of tacit knowledge—knowledge that hasn’t been reduced to instructions or facts. Mike Riley relied on the patterns he’d seen and his sense of the typical first appearance of a radar blip, so he noticed the anomalous blip that first appeared far off the coastline. Harry Markopolos looked at the trends of Bernie Madoff’s trades and knew they were highly atypical. •​Motivation and competing priorities. Cheryl Cain used our greed for chocolate kisses to get us to fill in our time cards. Dennis wanted the page job more than he needed to prove he was right. My Procter & Gamble sponsors weren’t aware of the way the homemakers juggled the needs for saving money with their concern for keeping their clothes clean and their families happy. •​Constraints. Daniel Boone knew how to ambush the kidnappers because he knew where they would have to cross the river. He knew the constraints they were operating under. Ginger expected the compliance officer to release her from the noncompete clause she’d signed because his company would never release a client list to an outsider.

My voice got dull. I spoke like a machine that was running down, while he seemed only to gain energy.

Call it archaic, but I think confession is liberation. It is easy to think that in injustice only the oppressed have their freedom to gain. In truth, the liberation of the oppressor is also at stake. Whether it’s the privilege we’ve inherited or space we’ve stolen, what began as guilt will mutate into shame, which is much more sinister and decidedly heavier on the soul. It doesn’t just weigh on the heart; it slithers into the gap of every joint, making everything swollen and tender. We learn to walk differently in order to carry the shame, but then we become prone to manipulate things like nearness and connection just to relieve our own swelling. When wounders, finally becoming exhausted of their dominion, dismantle their delusion of heroism or victimhood and begin to tell the truth of their offense, a sacred rest becomes available to them. You are no longer fighting to suspend the delusion of self. You can just lie down and be in your own flawed skin. And as you rest, the conscience you were born with slowly begins to regenerate, and your mobility changes. You walk past the shattered porch light without your nose to the ground. You can look your father in the eyes. You realize there are other ways to move in the world. It’s not only relief, it’s freedom. Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone—which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed—will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled. What has been stolen must be returned. This is not vengeance, it’s restoration. Maybe you know the verse that says if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and bare your left cheek to them too. But before all that, Exodus says eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn. Payment, consequence. Any injustice demands something of us. But the only thing more healing than forcing someone to pay is when a person chooses to pay by their own conviction. I have always wondered why Christ had to die. If we needed saving, if wrath was to be had, couldn’t God just snap his fingers or send a great wind or blink and have everything wrong made right again? Why is it nothing but the blood? Nothing else? This will always be strange to me. But if it’s true, the law is cosmic and eternal. Maybe it’s written into everything, and even God themself is not too bold to undo the way things were meant to be. Maybe they needed to show us what the most tragic and noble reparation could look like, the sacrifice of life itself, so we might learn the courage to choose to make repairs when our moments come. But some will die in their cowardice.

I was getting dressed back into my clothes from my practice suit when it was like someone unplugged the sound. Dead silence. My back was turned toward the door, but before I even turned around, I knew what this silence meant. It would answer my curious question of what the locker room would look like. Upon turning around and shifting my eyes upward to the 6′4″ Thomas, I immediately felt the inherent need to cover my chest, as someone with a male gaze and a male voice entered the room. Some of the girls grabbed towels, shirts, or whatever was close by and covered the exposed parts of their body. Other girls looked the other way. We were all in various stages of nakedness. None of us said a word. I can’t accurately put into words the feelings of violation when hearing a man’s voice in the locker room where you are fully nude. Thomas walked toward the corner of the locker room and began to change out of a women’s practice suit and get naked. Right in front of us. No introduction, no “Excuse me,” no explanation, no privacy for us. My teammates and I cut wide eyes with each other, not really understanding our emotions in that moment. Of course, we felt awkward, embarrassed, and uncomfortable. I remember specifically feeling betrayed. I thought of how our privacy as females had been entirely dismissed, violated, and ignored. There was no thought to how we would respond or how uncomfortable a male sharing this changing space with us would make us feel. It felt like we were pawns in a sick game catering to the male who claimed our identity but didn’t have the same physiology, anatomy, or chromosomes, to name a few… I desperately wanted to call my mom and dad and tell them of this situation in hopes they would reassure me that I wasn’t crazy in experiencing this as a total violation of our rights to privacy as women.

Swimming is a sport that measured down to the hundredth of a second. To have one person beating every girl in the entire country by nearly two full seconds is an anomaly. Instead of the expected celebratory cheers from a usually boisterous crowd, the audience’s response to Thomas’s win fell unusually flat. There were even audible boos from the stands. Weyant’s announcement was a different story. When her second-place victory was broadcast, the aquatic center exploded in applause, whistles, and shouts of acclaim. The difference between the two swimmers couldn’t have been more obvious. People were saying with applause and cheers what they couldn’t or wouldn’t say with their words.

CLXI. “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.

Black incarceration rates are not driven by drug laws; empirical research shows that employers who check criminal histories are more likely to hire blacks; and polls have long shown that most black people have no interest in living in mostly white neighborhoods. Yet these kinds of measures are used to foster an “us-versus-them” mentality among blacks and then exploit such thinking for partisan political gain.

Call it archaic, but I think confession is liberation. It is easy to think that in injustice only the oppressed have their freedom to gain. In truth, the liberation of the oppressor is also at stake. Whether it's the privilege we've inherited or space we've stolen, what began as guilt will mutate into shame, which is much more sinister and decidedly heavier on the soul. It doesn't just weigh on the heart; it slithers into the gap of every joint, making everything swollen and tender. We learn to walk differently in order to carry the shame, but then we become prone to manipulate things like nearness and connection just to relieve our own swelling […] Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone—which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed—will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled. What has been stolen must be returned. This is not vengeance, it's restoration.

Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I've come to believe that our beholding—seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment—is no small form of salvation. When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic—the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the sea—but also the perfectly mundane—that soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidized underbelly of that stainless steel pan. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop. When people or groups become too enamoured with mountaintops, we should ask ourselves whether their euphoria comes from love or from the experience of supremacy. For example, whiteness, as a sociological force and practice, loves mountaintops. Being born of an appetite not for flourishing but for domination, it loves the ascent, the conquering. It will tell you about the view from there, but be assured that it is only its view of itself that rouses its spirit. It is about bravado and triumph. There is nothing wrong with climbing the mountain, but bravado tends to drown out the sound of wonder. Perhaps you've known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.

A few years ago, I reached the conclusion that I will no longer accept an unspecific apology for specific wrongs. If you cut me, I want you to apologize with grave specificity for the blood running down my back. And I want you to describe what in you made you do it. When you gain the courage to look at me, I want your soul to writhe like it was the back of God that was cut. This would make any sorry truer. A friend once explained to me the second and often forgotten part of apology, which I now believe to be one of the holiest: when one asks to be forgiven. Mercy requires nothing from the offender, but to ask forgiveness is to shift the balance of power in favor of the wounded. It requires you to become vulnerable to their denial. For a moment or perhaps many moments, the weight of your soul depends on the humanity of the one you sought to demean. Will you forgive me? Please forgive me?