A lot of people are going to get pissed off at me for this.
Being awarded a black belt by a legitimate instructor gives any individual more power than they may realize. They possess power both in techniques that they have learned as well as power over lives of people who may be influenced by them.
Today on another site that blogs for the jiu-jitsu community I saw a report about a black belt based in Chicago who allegedly was kicked out of his team for trying to start a fight with a lesser ranked student. This was not the first incident in which this black belt was accused of poor conduct. There have been many incidents reported on Reddit including one caught on video in which he was submitted in a tournament, clearly tapped, and then briefly protested.
The saddest part of all of this is that this individual isn’t even the worst example of the kinds of people that sometimes manage to make it to black belt. I see reports more often than I’d like to of sexual predator black belts, of black belts who are violent, maladjusted people. There is even a team that gained notoriety a few years back for various allegations of sexual assault and rape but that is still allowed to compete in our sport, and its members, even one who was convicted of a sexually-based offense, are able to continue to get matches at major invitational events.
We as a community need to hold each other to a higher level of accountability.
If some black belts have the disposition that would allow them to get into a fight with someone, they shouldn’t have made it to blue or purple, much less the esteemed professor’s rank. Is the douchebag filter that BJJ is supposed to be broken?
Now, I am not saying which if any of these situations are true examples of what I am illustrating. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. The individuals alluded to here may be entirely innocent of all accusations. However, I’ve seen with my own two eyes behavior from upper belts in our community that is not befitting a person who may be allowed to affect vulnerable lives. This behavior should exclude these individuals from learning the skill sets needed to make it through the ranks in our sport.
We need to set a higher standard for what it takes to make it past white belt.
Regardless of guilt, these allegations shine a negative light on our art, and if we truly love BJJ, we should want to protect it from this sort of light. Jiu-jitsu is the gentle art, which means that those within it should be gentle people by nature. If someone doesn’t have a gentle nature, maybe they shouldn’t have the privilege of growing in the art.
And by gentle, I don’t mean that people shouldn’t develop the ability to fight, or for that matter that jiujiteiros shouldn’t step into an MMA cage and do real damage. But at the end of the day, outside of the sportive arena, we should be seen as examples to follow. People should be drawn to our art because of the kind of people that spend time practicing it, and the kinds of allegations that I see far too often are an indication that we simply don’t set a high enough standard.
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