Sean Strickland is a bad dude. He’s the current middleweight champion of Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA. He’s knocked out 11 other fighters in his career. He’s known for his striking skills, with years of training in boxing and kickboxing.
He’s also said some bad things. Like, “We need to put women back in the kitchen.” And, “China’s biggest exports [are] plastic and Covid.” And, “If I had a gay son, I would think I failed as a man, to create such weakness.”
I’d never heard of Strickland until a few days ago.
I don’t watch MMA. It wasn’t until a friend texted me a YouTube clip that I became fascinated with (and conflicted by) this guy.
The clip is a 16-minute section of an interview Strickland did with the comedian Theo Von. It’s gone viral, viewed over a million times in less than two weeks. Strickland talks about growing up a “piece of white trash ... Neo-Nazi, angry fucking kid” who was kicked out of school multiple times for “hate crimes.” He tells stories about his “piece of shit grandfather who was super racist.” He talks about regularly sleeping in his parents’ room, “because I thought my dad was going to kill my mom ... I would miss school, because my dad would be up until 3:00 A.M. drinking and telling my mom he’s going to kill her.” And, “I had so much anxiety as a kid, I used to scratch my gum until I’d bleed.” He talks about the first time he trained as a fighter in 9th grade: “I got the shit kicked out of me, covered in blood. It was the first moment in my life I ever felt happy.”
For 16 minutes, Strickland chokes up and cries. He sits in silence for long periods of time, seemingly replaying the memories in his head. He’s clearly in pain but laughs it off with jokes and platitudes like, “It’s all good,” and, “We’ve all got this shit.”
As a therapist, I’ve worked with many clients who’ve experienced similar emotional and physical abuse early in life.
While I can’t and won’t diagnose anyone from a YouTube clip, I can say that Strickland has clearly gone through repeated trauma. “When I think back to being a kid, I can’t recall one good memory,” he says. Because he rapidly shifts between crying, getting angry, and laughing, I’m guessing that he’s yet to heal that trauma. (He’s said elsewhere that going to a therapist would probably make him want to “start killing everybody.”)
What has me conflicted is what he said during the rest of the full interview. Strickland shares his thoughts on how “the government has slowly taken the nuts away from men,” why kids these days are “weak men,” and how “we gave women too much power.” He calls gay men “faggots” (yet, says “I don’t hate fucking gays”). He calls people with disabilities “cripples” and people of Asian descent “Chinamen.”
I can’t stand the guy. He’s either deeply hateful or purposely saying hateful stuff for attention—or, most likely, both. I want to sit him down and tell him how fucked up his views are. I want to shake him until he shuts up—though I know he’d kick my ass in a heartbeat. If there’s someone who needs to be cancelled, it’s Sean Strickland.
But I also feel bad for him. It hurt me to watch him tell stories of fighting his father to protect his mother and getting disciplined by teachers for falling asleep at school. I want to sit with him and listen, like Theo Von did. I want to offer him a hug. He reminds me of my buddies who’ve been through tough shit and only talk about it late at night when their drunk, crying on my couch. Buddies who I love.
So, which is it? Is he a hateful “piece of shit” that needs to be cancelled? Or is he a flawed human being who’s acting out after years of trauma? Who is the real Sean Strickland?
That’s why I’ve been increasingly drawn to the ideas of prison abolitionists.
People like the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, and the activist and writer adrienne maree brown. I won’t be able to sum up their ideas here (I’m still learning). But how I understand their work is this: If our goal is to reduce harm, then is it truly effective to call out, cancel, dispose of, or even imprison people?
adrienne maree brown says:
“Disposability might be the most villainous [concept] for our species: to think that there’s some way we can get rid of people who commit harm, and that will remove the harmful behavior and the harmful belief systems from our communities.”
In other words, we can’t call out, cancel, and imprison our way to a truly safer society. I’m not going to get into the question of whether we actually need police and prisons. Though, while were here, the data is pretty conclusive that putting people in prisons isn’t working and the vast majority of policing has nothing to do with preventing violence. But I digress.
What I want to get into is it’s too easy to judge and cancel someone like Sean Strickland. Just as it’s too easy to say, “He’s just joking,” and let him off the hook. Clearly, he needs help. Whether he gets that help is up to him. But wouldn’t it be better if when people said hateful, misogynistic, racist, homophobic things in public, we didn’t attack and banish them from public life—or we didn’t just laugh and encourage more of it—but instead there was some process to help them stop being so hateful? Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if we recognized that hurt people hurt people? Wouldn’t it be better if we focused on the root causes of hate and harm rather than try to cancel the symptoms?
A core abolitionist idea is that there is no binary between good and bad people. Which is also how I feel as a therapist, working with my clients who’ve messed up in some way and hurt people but have also been hurt too. This is because, at some level, in some way, we’ve all done harm. I’ve said some messed up things. I’ve made women and people of color feel hurt or at least uncomfortable. Who knows? If I’d experienced Sean Strickland’s upbringing, I might’ve turned out exactly the same.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: How do we hold people accountable for their actions? What about the rapists and murderers?
I’ll point you to Kaba’s and brown’s writings. Kaba has a great Twitter feed (that she recently stopped posting to) and email newsletter. brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us is a good intro to abolitionist ideas. They address these very understandable questions and more. And I want to be clear that no one has claimed that Sean Strickland has physically hurt anyone outside of an MMA fight.
But you’re right, that is THE question. brown asks:
“What would actually create the boundaries and the spaciousness that we’re trying to give to survivors [of harm] for their healing, while also helping the person who has created this offense to break the cycle of harm within them?”
One of the important words here is “we.” If I, individually, feel threatened by someone, it’s totally okay for me to set a boundary and get myself away from a harmful individual. I can refuse to interact with people who say messed up stuff. But what do we, as a society, do about people who hurt other people? What do we do about people who say hateful things?
These are the questions I’m sitting with after watching the full interview. After feeling so much compassion for this guy, and then hearing him call people “cripples” and “Chinamen.” I’m writing about all of this in this newsletter because a lot of the people who say hateful things and cause harm are men. My thinking about this stuff is still evolving, and I’m still learning. But at this point I’m convinced that there are men who do and say bad things, but there are no bad men.
Now, a question for the comments below (or email me: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): How do you feel about “cancel culture”?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll be able to comment and join our community call about this topic in early 2024. I’d love to have you there!)