“We’re solid in the midfield and the backline, but we’re tentative up front.”
I make this remark to my former wife. We are standing on the sidelines of a soccer field in Culver City, watching our daughter’s team.
There’s a lot of debate these days about pronouns, particularly the gendered ones. In recent days, I’ve been thinking about the pronoun I used three times in the first three sentences above: the first-person plural. The “we.”
On Twitter recently, someone named @polokerber – the head of marketing for a sports company called Playmaker – slammed the use of the first-person plural: Hot take: I hate when sports fans say “we” in reference to their favorite team. You’re not part of the organization lol.
The tweet engendered considerable debate. It pointed directly to a larger question about fandom and identity. As several people pointed out to Kerber, the entire business of sports (which employs him) hinges on the desire of the fan to identify with a team. Why else do we buy the jerseys, the hats, the scarves, the license plate frames? Very few people are willing to spend money to sit as a neutral objective observer of a game – they crave the experience of being part of a mass and a collective.
I like the way that this gets put in British English. Someone might ask, referring to the Premier League, “Who do you support?” To which you might reply, “I’m Newcastle” or “I’m Liverpool.” You don’t say, “I am a fan of Tottenham Hotspur;” you say simply, “I’m Spurs.” There’s no dishonest preposition – you’re not saying, “I am on Spurs,” as if you were insinuating you’re a player or a staff member for the team. You are simply making it clear that to be a fan is to be bound so tightly to a club that it is part and parcel of your identity. And when the you that is Spurs goes to a match or a pub or a living room filled with fellow supporters, that I becomes a very intense, passionate, we.
(I am, in fact, a very strong supporter of Tottenham. It has a lot to do with the historic ties between British Jews and the team.)
It is good to understand the limits of the first-person plural. The most famous example of those limits comes in a joke that Bill Cosby made famous, but which is much older than him. The standard version goes like this: The Lone Ranger and Tonto are watching a horde of Indian braves bear down on them in full battle fury. “Looks like we’re in trouble, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger to his pal. “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?,” Tonto responds. (We spent a whole hour on this one joke and its meaning in an Introduction to Ethnic Studies class I took at Cal many years ago). “We” can be loaded with dangers.
My daughter’s match this past weekend ended in a narrow defeat. As we debriefed over dinner, her mother and I told the Mooser (Heloise’s nickname) that she had played her best game of the year, with crisp passing and a stern patrolling of the right and center backlines. “You are all getting better each week,” her mother said, and I agreed.
When our kid was not in earshot, the team was “we” as her mother and I spoke of it on the sidelines. To Mooser’s face, the team is second person plural. To say to a teenager, “We need to get better at scoring goals” or “We need to stop procrastinating on English homework” is inflammatory and foolish indeed. The “we” that Eira and I use to describe our daughter’s commitments is used in love – and out of her hearing. It is human to recoil, however, when a parent or authority figure uses “We” out of turn. (Imagine your reaction should you be feeling down, only to have your spouse turn to you and say, in a patronizing tone, “Are we having a bad day?”) What’s so infuriating about the misuse of the first-person plural is that it is, of course staggeringly presumptuous. Sometimes that presumption is accidental. Sometimes, as a few of you who have been through a rough marriage or five know, it isn’t unintentional at all.
The ”we” changes. When I was a boy growing up in the Bay Area media market, “we” was the San Francisco 49ers. Now, my son and I use “we” for the 49ers’ rivals, the Rams. I’ve been divorced five times, but each of my wives and I were, for a season, a “we.” Five times a woman and I have lived under the same roof and promised each other, “You and me, kid, against the world.” Then the world, one way or another, won. Four times, the first person plural split back into the first-person singular; with the mother of my children, we are still a “we,” still a team, standing together on the sidelines of endless soccer matches. Eira and I don’t share a roof or a bed, but we share the most important obligation that could possibly be, and we will share it for the rest of our lives and beyond.
As we confront the crisis in Israel and Gaza – wait. Even as I start a transition to something immediate and topical, I realize the reflexive urge to rally my readers into the embrace of the “first person plural” is automatic. It is standard rhetoric, but also much abused. It is true that all of us have at least heard of what happened on October 7 and what has happened since. Look at social media; look at the marches in the streets. It is clear that there is no consensus about how we confront the crisis. We don’t agree on where the blame should lie. We don’t agree on how to solve what seems like an intractable problem. We certainly don’t agree on how to deploy the first-person plural effectively: look at the division among American Jews, with some denouncing Israel and others standing strong in solidarity with the world’s only Jewish state. Anyone who dares begin a sentence, “We Jews feel that…” will get the “Tonto treatment,” and probably rightly so.
This is familiar to Americans. Look at the divisions over the 2020 election, over COVID, over parental choice, gun ownership, abortion, and transgender sports. One side says, “We want this!” and another says, “We cannot permit it!” We deploy the first-person plural to rally our allies, and to warn our opponents that they stand against a united and determined force. Our email inboxes are full of frantic appeals crafted by political operatives, all of which boil down to the claim that “Everything we cherish is in danger if you don’t rush $25 by tonight.”
I do not have a solution, as I am not in the solution business. I do know that the “we” of the sports fan, of the family member, and of the citizen make very different claims, and that is dangerous to confuse them. “I am Spurs,” I say, announcing my support for Tottenham; “We are top of the league table!” (We are.) I love Spurs in a world that would be poorer if everyone felt as I did, because then only one team would have fans, and the spirit of competition that I relish would vanish. I need someone to “be” Arsenal, so that the rivalry can be better enjoyed. With Heloise, the Beverly Hills AYSO Girls Under-16 team is hers because she plays on it, and it her family’s team because we love her. Her mother, brother, and I alternate which plural pronoun we use in order to honor both our support and her role.
I know that when it comes to my kids’ mom, there is no we of marriage, but there is a we of coparenting.
When it comes to the terrible scenes from Israel and Gaza this month, we filter the horror through the lens of our priors. “We must stop this,” we say, but when pressed, we disagree about whether the first thing to stop is Israeli bombing or Hamas terrorism. You first, we say to the other side; We know you started this.
I know that when it comes to these United States, we live in tension between what I hope are still-shared goals (prosperity, peace, liberty) and deep divisions about how we sustain and expand those good things. The fight between the left is not like that between Tottenham and Arsenal, or the Rams and the 49ers. The stakes are desperately real, and they permit no indulgence of individual preference. The Yankees fan can accept that someone could love the Red Sox because of an accident of family or geography or memory. The left-leaning Democrat cannot accept that someone could rationally, thoughtfully embrace Donald Trump. We can agree to disagree about this, but not that. We have no common ground, we tell ourselves, and when there is no common ground, there is only an existential battle to the (literal or proverbial) death. Either we survive, or they do, but it can’t be both.
So, no answers, only observations. And a link, and a poem. For the first, I wrote the following just after the 2020 election:
If you’re of a certain age, you may have grown up with the extraordinary PBS series, “The Ascent of Man,” by the Polish-born historian and mathematician, Jacob Bronowski. His final episode famously concludes in Auschwitz, with Bronowski wading in the mud outside the crematoriums. Bronowski summarizes what led to the Holocaust, which was carried out more by men of science than by religious fanatics. Moral and intellectual certainty without compassion, even affection is deadly, he says, and reaches down into the muck, raising it in his fists. “We must learn to touch people,” he declares.
And an Adrienne Rich poem:
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I