Gabby "The Fabulous" - Gabby "The Great" wins Gold

Gabrielle Douglas / Getty Images

Gabrielle "Gabby" Douglas prompted me to cry 3 times. First, when I received the alert from my Associated Press App, hearing she won the gold medal. The second cry hit me when a colleague asked me if I had heard the news. My third cry came when I saw her astounding performances in the all-around. See Tribune article.

After wiping tears and drying my face, I pondered one of the human family's greatest strengths and weaknesses: expectation. We can accomplish so much more than we think, but the road block is... "what we think."

Gabrielle Douglas is a force of nature because of her ability, belief, coaching, family backing, training, support, and God-given abilities. But her confident mindset and disregard of African American inferiority punch through the veil of disbelief which is so often embraced by Black people in America. Many times, Blacks think that the odds are stacked against us because sometimes - they are...but sometimes those odds are imaginary demons that become real when we believe in their reality and power.

The dream and the hope of the slave is to be free. Gabby is free. She is more human than Black. She is more human than gymnast. She is more human than female. She is Gabrielle Douglas: a Human Intellectual and Athletic Genius. Go Gabby!

So now the first African-American Olympic gymnastics all-around champion is in the history books - pressing toward the mark of the highest athletic calling.
Can we move on now? I hope so.

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