Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Perspectives on a Multiracial America)

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Commodified and Criminalized

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Perspectives on a Multiracial America series Joe R. Feagin, Texas A&M University, series editor The racial composition of the United States is rapidly changing. Books in the series will explore various aspects of the coming multiracial society, one in which European Americans are no longer the majority and where issues of white-on-black racism have been joined by many other challenges to white dominance. Titles: David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports Melanie Bush, Breaking the Code of Good Intentions Amir Mavasti and Karyn McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America Richard Rees, Shades of Difference: A History of Ethnicity in America Katheryn Russell-Brown, Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans Elizabeth M. Aranda, Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the Struggles of Incorporation Victoria Kaplan, Structural Inequality: Black Architects in the United States Angela J. Hattery, David G. Embrick, and Earl Smith, Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights, and Inequality Pamela Anne Quiroz, Adoption in a Color-Blind Society Adia Harvey Wingfield, Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy Erica Chito Childs, Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights Teun A. van Dijk, Racism and Discourse in Latin America

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Commodified and Criminalized New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports

Edited by David J. Leonard and C. Richard King

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Commodified and criminalized : new racism and African Americans in contemporary sports / edited by David J. Leonard and C. Richard King. p. cm. — (Perspectives on a multiracial America series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-0677-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0679-3 (electronic) 1. Racism in sports—United States. 2. Discrimination in sports—United States. 3. African American athletes. 4. United States—Race relations. I. Leonard, David J. II. King, C. Richard, 1968GV706.32.C66 2011 796.089—dc22 2010028542

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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For our families To Sophie Nicole Leonard for teaching life’s greatest lessons: humility, courage, and perspective To Anna, Rea, and Sam: You remind everyday what it means to be loved and what love is all about To my brothers, Jason and Seth, for enduring my poor sportsmanship, knowing more than I ever will about the facts of life some dismiss as mere trivia, and having a grasp of the heart of the game To Marcie, Abigail, and Ellory for inspiring, empowering, and enriching me

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Celebrities, Commodities, and Criminals: African American Athletes and the Racial Politics of Culture David J. Leonard and C. Richard King 1

2

America’s New Son: Tiger Woods and America’s Multiculturalism C. L. Cole and David L. Andrews

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Sister Act VI: Venus and Serena Williams at Indian Wells: “Sincere Fictions” and White Racism Nancy E. Spencer

41

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Ghettocentrism and the Essentialized Black Male Athlete David L. Andrews, Ronald L. Mower, and Michael L. Silk

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Why Can’t Kobe Pass (the Ball)? Race and the NBA in an Age of Neoliberalism Anoop Mirpuri

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1

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One Nation under a Hoop: Race, Meritocracy, and Messiahs in the NBA Lisa Guerrero

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Much Adu about Nothing? Freddy Adu and Neoliberal Racism in New Millennium America Kyle W. Kusz

147

vii

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Me and Bonnie Blair: Shani Davis, Racial Myths, and the Reiteration of the Facts of Blackness C. Richard King

165

The Dennis Rodman of Hockey: Ray Emery and the Policing of Blackness in the Great White North Stacy L. Lorenz and Rod Murray

183

Contesting the Closet: Sheryl Swoopes, Racialized Sexuality, and Media Culture Samantha King

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“Life with no hoop”: Black Pride, State Power Jared Sexton

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Postscript: America’s Son? Tiger Woods as Commodification and Criminalization David L. Andrews, C. Richard King, and David J. Leonard

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Index

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This collection began as an individual passion, later morphing into a joint project. Although we both have written extensively on racism and sport, particularly as it targets the black athlete, this collaborative work began to take shape in conversations between Leonard and Mark Anthony Neal, who inspired and nurtured it. In common with other books of its kind, this collection evolved in response to myriad conversations, experiences, and influences. In the process, we have encumbered debts too numerous to repay, which have greatly benefited the work before you. At the risk of omission, we wish to pause and briefly extend our gratitude to those who impacted our thinking and enhanced this collection. Without the efforts of the faculty, students, and staff of the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies (CES) at Washington State University, this work would have surely suffered, perhaps never materializing. First and foremost, we must acknowledge the dedicated support and unending assistance of our staff, Rose Smetana and Debbie Brudie, as well as Patricia Thorsten-Mickelson and Lisa McMullen, who wrestled with the mundane and mastered the logistical, allowing us to be better scholars. Moreover, our students made a profound difference. Whether listening intently as we rehearsed arguments or posing questions that led us to rethink things in class discussion, this book would look much different, and undoubtedly be inferior, without them. In particular, we wish to thank Alicia Mackay, Pete Caster, Stephen Norris, Martin Boston, Kelvin Monroe, Kristal T. Moore, Paul Sweeney, Jared Johnson, Cameron Sparks, Paris Jackson, and Walter Washington. Even more important has been the intellectual and pedagogical community at Washington State University, whose support, scholarship on race and popular/sports culture, and support for us as people has been ix

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x

Acknowledgments

crucial in the completion of this project. Big thanks to Lisa Guerrero, Carmen Lugo-Lugo, Jose Alamillo, Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo, and Rory Ong. All deserve credit in the development of this project. We give special thanks to Heidi Harting-Rex and Jessica Hulst, both of whom offered assistance and expertise along the way. While we have each been influenced by an array of scholars and intellectuals inside and outside the world of sports studies, we would like to highlight and celebrate the influence Harry Edwards had on each of us. His work and commitment to critically examining the cultural, political, and social importance of sports established a path for this project (and countless others). More importantly, his commitment to social justice and career of showing that sports is always more than a game informs our work, and this project reveals the stakes for and the importance of discussing the meaning of the black athlete in the twenty-first century. Finally, to the contributors, much credit and thanks goes to you, for only through your work and inspiration, we have been able to put together a collection that offers important and timely analyses not just about sports or the black athlete, but race in the twenty-first century. As with a victory on the field, this book is the work of many individuals, whose love and influence, whose commitment to social justice and critical examinations of sports, resonates in these pages. Just like the Los Angeles Lakers (for DJL) and the Kansas Jayhawks (for CRK) you are an exceptional team, a dynasty, and one that we are proud to be members of each and every day. To our families, we owe special debts of gratitude that these words can only begin to repay. Their love and support have meant more than they know to us. David J. Leonard owes a special and significant debt of gratitude that these words can only begin to repay. To his parents and siblings for instilling in him not just a passion for sports but the necessary tools of critical sports literacy that made this project possible. Their love, support, tolerance, and patience (especially watching the NBA television and ESPN all the time as part of my RESEARCH) have meant more than they know to him. To Rea Jadyn Leonard for bringing the joys of life each and every day with cookies, smiles, and kisses. To Sam Holden Leonard, your arrival into our lives has brought so much happiness and clarity. Your innocence and your happiness give him hope in the face of so much despair. And finally, to Anna Chow, thanks for the encouragement, the love, the respect, and daily insights. C. Richard King thanks his daughters, Ellory and Abigail, for reminding him of what really matters in life: charades and make-believe, homemade pizza, crime dramas, exploring new places with familiar souls, laughter, and big questions. To his soul mate and better half, Marcie Gilliland, who is not a sports fan, but a rare jewel, he can only begin to express his gratitude for her perspective and presence, which always challenge and comfort him.

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Introduction Celebrities, Commodities, and Criminals: African American Athletes and the Racial Politics of Culture David J. Leonard and C. Richard King Growing up in Hawaii with his white mother and white grandparents, Barack Obama often struggled to understand his own racial identity. Basketball emerged as one of the few spaces in which his racial identity became effervescent and where he connected with African American history and culture. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama described the basketball court in the following way: “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts” (qtd. in Kantor 2007). Similarly, Craig Robinson, his brother-in-law and now coach of the Oregon State University men’s basketball squad, identified basketball as racially transformative for Obama: “He didn’t know who he was until he found basketball. It was the first time he really met black people” (Kantor 2007). Functioning as a “tutorial in race,” basketball not only contributed to his racial identity formation but also served as a space of authentication. On the court, despite being mixed race, despite having grown up in the absence of his African father, and despite being reared by a white family, he and others saw Obama as black. In many ways, little has changed through his life, as this self-described “gym rat” (Crowe 2008) still finds solace on the court, and importantly throughout his run for the White House, basketball remained central to efforts to define the senator from Illinois. In fact, even as Obama sought to present himself as raceless, for many Americans, the linkages among Obama, blackness, and basketball were unsurprising, even natural, facts: playing basketball affirmed his blackness and being black made him a baller. As one blogger ranted, following Steve Kroft’s interview with Obama on 60 Minutes:

1

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Introduction Seriously. They asked him if he was “black enough” or why people say he isn’t “black enough” (they never actually got around to telling us what he had to be “black enough” for—like Are you black enough to be President? as if that’s some sort of qualification or something, If only he were black enough France would love us again!) and he said he played basketball! Well, hey, he plays basketball, fellas, I guess he’s “black enough” for whatever it is he has to be “black enough” for! That’ll keep jihadists from destroying the one fully functional democracy in the Middle East! Let’s go, Abbas! One-on-one to 21, I win you set up a state NEXT to Israel and learn to play nice, you win we leave and you get to kill all the jews you can find! Is that the sort of thing 60 Minutes has in mind? (“Barack Obama Is BLACK?!” 2007)

An absurd equation to be sure, one rooted in reductive identitarian politics, rearticulated stereotypes of black physicality, and fundamental misunderstandings of the African American community and its complex histories. Even for a presidential candidate at the start of the twenty-first century, it seems, athletics operates to produce difference, to create inescapable alterity. Indeed, throughout the campaign, sport would be a preferred register for pundits, bloggers, and analysts to render otherness. To take but one example, in late March 2008, on MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews and regular commentators Howard Fineman, editor at Newsweek, and political analyst Michelle Bernard discussed Obama’s efforts to connect with white, working-class voters and his recent poor performance in a staged game of bowling. The three pundits agreed that bowling was a poor fit, particularly in light of the candidate’s affinity for basketball. Fineman: He definitely needs some bowling lessons . . . He should have stuck to shooting hoops— Matthews: Yeah, I know. Fineman:—which he’s very, very good at, by the way, and which translates racially, too, especially during the NCAA basketball tournament. Don’t do something you’ve never tried before in front of a national television audience, OK? Matthews: You know, Michelle—and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder— Fineman: That doesn’t surprise anybody either. Bernard: Well, it certainly doesn’t surprise anybody black, I can tell you that. Matthews: Is black a bowling— Fineman: This is just killing him. Matthews: I don’t know, I guess everybody bowls. (“Matthews on Obama” 2008)


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Obama did stick with basketball, and it continued throughout the campaign to reiterate the facts of blackness. It was as if his basketball prowess (here juxtaposed with ineptness at bowling) prompted commentators to gasp: look, a negro. In other words, while Obama’s blackness was never in question, his skills on the basketball court and not in the bowling alley further demonstrated his racial identity—his otherness. As in the case studies that follow, his play of the game, coverage of his run for the White House, and the public fixation on basketball demonstrate the powerful ways to which sport and racial identity operate at multiple levels, whether in the media, political sphere, or broader social discourse. There exists a dialectical relationship between sporting cultures and racial identity formation. Yet, we don’t simply evoke Obama to illustrate this fact but also to illustrate the significance of our title: throughout the campaign and even through his electoral victory, Obama, within the dominant white imagination, functioned as both a criminalized and commodified body: on the one hand, he was regularly identified as un-/anti-American, as someone who pals around with terrorists, as an Arab and Muslim, as urban, and as an unknown who has the potential to harm the nation; on the other hand Obama signified the American Dream, commodified as someone who trampled over the obstacles, lifted himself up by his bootstraps, and found success in a purportedly postracial America. His relationship to sporting cultures embodied the tensions of race and the contradictions emanating from being both a criminalized and commodified body.

SPORTS: MORE THAN A GAME We start with the basic premise that sports are more than a game. Arguing that sports have increasingly become a site of individualized consumption, Gary Whannel (1998) identifies sporting cultures as a spectacle of sorts. “Sports is presented largely in terms of stars and narratives: the media narratives the events of sports, transforming them into stories with stars and characters; heroes and villains” (qtd. in Andrews and Jackson 2001, p. 7). David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson similarly concur, noting that in today’s multilayered “promotional culture” (Wernick 1991) “the sports celebrity is effectively a multi-textual and multi-platform promotional entity” (2001, p. 7). Building upon the work of Andrews and Silk (2001), Michael Giardina and Cameron McCarthy conclude that “sports carries with it the most legible form of cultural shorthand for understanding the operation of power in a given context” (2005, p. 146). Additionally, it is crucial to understand that sport is more than a game. “Sport and the sports media,” argues David Rowe, “as cultural gods


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Introduction

par excellence, are clearly a central element in the larger process (or set of processes) that is reshaping society and culture” (qtd. in Giardina and McCarthy 2005, p. 146). While dialectically connected to other institutions and broader discursive, sports, according to Ferber (2007), “is a particularly powerful institution, ‘a cultural text’ central to American identity (Leonard 2004, p. 285) formation” (Ferber 2007, p. 19). Or as noted by Mary Jo Kane, “Sports consists of a set of ideological beliefs and practices that are closely tied to traditional power structures. . . . Sport has become such a bedrock of our national psyche that sport figures often come to symbolize larger pressing concerns” (qtd. in Ferber 2007, p. 19). While imagined as cultural events, apolitical competitions, distractions, or pure entertainment, the world of sports is “also sites where racial and ethnic relations happen and change” (qtd. in Ferber 2007, p. 19). In this regard, sports is inherently a contradictory space, especially as it relates to race and difference: “Sport is a contradictory space, for while it is an area where black athletic achievement and success are visible, the physicality of sport performance simultaneously reinscribes beliefs that blacks are inherently superior athletes” (Douglas 2002, p. 9). Notwithstanding the success and popularity of contemporary black athletes, as well as the significant level of commodification, sports also operates as space and place of hypersurveillance. “Media messages operate as a surveillance mechanism, monitoring, coding and recording virtually every element of our daily lives. Together, the pervasive gaze of the predominantly white media and sport commentators continually observe, categorize and impose norms that seek to fix in the public imaginary the myriad ways in which” black athletes are different from white athletes and the white population as a whole (Douglas 2002, p. 12). In true neoliberal fashion, the ascent to sport celebrityhood is habitually reduced to individual qualities such as innate talent, dedication, and good fortune, thus positioning the sport star as a deserving benefactor of his/her devotion to success within the popular imaginary (Andrews and Jackson 2001, p. 8). Notwithstanding claims that sport is simply a game, entertainment, and a political distraction, sport is rife with ideological, racial, gender, and national meaning. According to Norman Denzin, it is “only a slight exaggeration to conclude that sports in all facets is the most significant feature of contemporary racial order” (1996, p. 319). Contemporary sporting representations, whether those emanating from televisual sports media or the rhetorical devices offered on the Internet, through newspaper commentaries, or other elements of the sports media complex (Rowe 2003), provides “stereotypical and divisive yet common sense, articulations of race and racial difference” (Andrews 1996, p. 132). Toni Bruce, building on the insights of David Andrews (1996) and C. L. Cole (1996), argues that, “In sports discourses particularly, black bodies are consistently marked as Other” (Bruce 2004, p. 862). The task of this collection is to examine the


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complex and contradictory process of othering of black bodies and practices within contemporary sports discourses. Black athletes are confined to a perpetual state of hypercriminalization and commodification, controlled and used in a myriad of ways. To fully understand the textual and contextual meaning of contemporary sporting figures and cultures, race (as well as gender, nationality, and sexuality) must serve as a primary locus of examination, providing an entryway toward comprehension and exploration of sports at its new racist crossroads in the twenty-first century. This collection, while bringing together chapters that reflect on a myriad of sports and contexts, across a spectrum of geographies, time, and discursive placement, reflects on several key themes and concepts, which together unifies the collection: color blindness, commodification, (racialized) culture wars, criminalization (demonization), and globalization and new racism (especially in relationship to color blindness, neoliberalism, meritocracy, the American Dream, and persistent inequality).

NEW RACISM AS ANTIBLACK RACISM At its core, Commodified and Criminalized challenges claims of racial transcendence within sporting culture, demonstrating the ways in which race infects the textual/representational utterances, the context of fan reception, media culture, and the larger social, cultural, and economic landscape. The contributions to this collection unpack and trouble articulations of race and power central to dominant framings of black athletes today, idioms and ideologies that purport to be color-blind. As they clarify the shifting terms and terrain of antiblack racism, challenging the ways in which it finds expression in contemporary sports culture, they labor to illuminate the changing scope and foci of what Joe Feagin (2006) dubs the white racial frame. According to Feagin, “the socially inherited racial frame is a comprehensive orienting structure, a ‘tool kit’ that whites and others have long used to understand, interpret, and act in social settings” (Feagin 2009, p. 13). Inside the “tool kit” sits stereotypes, which Picca and Feagin describe as “filters, straining out information inconsistent with the dominant racial frame” and “‘big picture’ narratives that connect frame elements into historically oriented stories with morals that are especially important to white Americans” (Feagin 2009, 13). Feagin’s articulation of white racial framing offers a conceptualization of systematic racism that weaves together cognitive, interpretive, emotional, and practical elements as well as sights, sensations, sounds, and even smells, imprinting individuals with a shared lens through which they organize and act upon the world around


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Introduction them through stereotypes, metaphors, images, emotions, and inclinations. It orbits around white actors and actions, applauds white ways of thinking and being, and embraces whiteness as the standard or norm and the superior or exception; at the same time, it conceives of non-whites as supplemental, alien, and transgressive, dismisses non-white achievements as substandard, deviant, and inconsequential, and implements projects intent to probe, problematize, and police non-white communities for their purported inferiority, deviance, and inhumanity. (King, Bloodsworth-Lugo, and Lugo-Lugo 2009)

Today, as the contributions attest, the white racial frame reconciles the fundamental contradiction of contemporary multiracial democracies: even as color blindness works to deemphasize race, multiculturalism celebrates difference, and neoliberalism extols opportunity, equality, and individual effort, racial inequalities and hierarchies are as perverse and pervasive as they were at the height of the freedom struggles. Importantly, to achieve this mediation in a mass-mediated world, the white racial frame has split, fostering a shift in public conversations about and conventions surrounding racial difference, social relations, and personal identities. Overt expressions of antiblack racism, once common and acceptable, have largely receded from an increasingly multicultural public culture, yet it thrives in new forms, especially in all-white spaces. Joe Feagin and Leslie Houts Picca (2007) contend that the changing moralities and mannerisms emergent in the wake of the civil rights movement have created a two-faced racism, which condones distinct renderings of racial difference in distinct social settings, namely public (front stage) and private (back stage). A telling example of the persistence of antiblack racism and the shifting norms for its expression can be glimpsed in Don Imus’s description of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos” and the condemnation rained down upon it: he affirmed the prevalence of racist sentiments, the thin membrane between public and private, the limits of acceptable, and the white privilege of using black forms of expression. Moreover, the assembled essays here illustrated the blurry and ambiguous lines between the front stage and back stage within sporting culture, given the ways in which biological arguments of racial difference, tropes of black criminality, and expression of racial hatred manifest themselves within online sports chats. Yet, whether looking at public or private expressions of antiblack racism within a sporting context, the contributors here highlight both the fluidity as well as the dialects in that both the front stage (the commodified) and the back stage (the criminalized) feed off one another and jointly reduce black bodies to object of desire and disdain or simply an other to be controlled. Writing about the experiences of the Williams sisters in general and more specifically the racialized heckling directed at Serena Williams’s 2001 match, Delia Douglas (2005) highlights another novel dimension


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of antiblack racism: “In the absence of ‘spectacular’ acts of discrimination, no harm was seen to have been done” (p. 265). Henry Giroux too argues against prevailing assessments of the declining or diminishing significance of race, stressing instead its fluidity, its contradictions, its metamorphosis, and the ubiquity of denials of the importance of race since the dawn of the civil rights movement. “The importance of race and the enduring fact of racism are relegated to the dustbin of history at a time in American life when the discourses of race and the spectacle of racial representation saturate the dominant media and public life,” writes Giroux. “The politics of the color line and representations of race have become far more subtle and complicated than they were in the Jim Crow era” (2003, p. 192). More broadly Giroux identifies the specific dimensions of new racism in the following way: Unlike the old racism, which defined racial difference in terms of fixed biological categories organized hierarchically, the new racism operates in various guises proclaiming among other things race neutrality, asserting culture as a market of racial difference, or making race as a private matter. Unlike the crude racism with its biological referents and pseudoscientific legitimizations, buttressing its appeal to white racial superiority, the new racism cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary of the civil rights movement. (2003, p. 192)

Amy Elizabeth Ansell similarly focused on the ways in which cultural differences mark and rationalize the existence of inequality: It is a form of racism that utilizes themes related to culture and nation as a replacement for the now discredited biological referents of the old racism. It is concerned less with notions of racial superiority in the narrow sense than with the alleged “threat” people of color pose—either because of their mere presence or because of their demand for “special privileges”—to economic, socio-political, and cultural vitality of the dominant (White) society. It is, in short, a new form of racism that operates with the category of “race.” It is a new form of exclusionary politics that operates indirectly and in stealth via the rhetorical inclusion of people of color and the sanitized nature of its racist appeal. (1997, pp. 20–21)

Whereas biological explanations guided past debates on race, current configurations focus on cultural attributes and personal choices. The sports media is a particularly powerful institution in the dissemination of arguments that contribute to a hegemony of cultural racism. According to Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald, “cultural racism posits that although different ethnic groups or ‘races’ may not exist in a hierarchical biological relationship, they are nevertheless culturally distinct, each group having their own incompatible lifestyles, customs and ways of seeing the world” (2001, p. 1). Similarly, Nancy Spencer concludes, “Cultural racism is thus


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Introduction

predicated on an understanding of culture as a whole way of life and has implications for racism in sport” (2004, p. 121). Our efforts here go to illustrate how these stereotypes and “big picture narratives” play out within contemporary sporting discourses, literally on the bodies of black athletes, elucidating how the dominant racial—antiblack—frame guides both the consumption and demonization of black athletes and in turn “structures [white] events and performances” (Feagin 2006, p. 12) outside the arena of sports.

COMMODIFICATION AMID DEMONIZATION Another prominent theme unifying this collection is the way in which blackness is commodified even as it is pathologized and criminalized within public discourse. New racism, although articulating dominant white narratives and stereotypes, is equally defined by the consumption and celebration of commodified blackness. “Black male bodies are increasingly admired and commodified, in rap, hip hop, and certain sports, such as basketball, but at the same time they continue to be used to invoke fear,” writes Abby Ferber (2007, p. 12). According to William C. Rhoden (2006) Black athletes are running faster and jumping higher than ever before. They earn more money in one season than their predecessors earned during their entire career. Such contemporary African American athletes like LeBron James, Michael Vick, and Tiger Woods are worshiped almost as gods. At a time when the number of black males attending college is increasing at a slower rate than the number being incarcerated, young black men with stellar athletic ability are still hotly pursued, coddled, and showered with gifts and promises to attend major colleges and universities. Black faces and black bodies are used to sell everything from clothing to deodorant and soft drinks. Their gestures, colorful language, and overall style are used by Madison Avenue to project the feel and fashion of inner-city America to an eager global marketplace—they’re the stealth ambassadors of hip-hop culture and capitalism, bridges between the “street” and the mainstream. (p. 1)

Amid the shrinking opportunities afforded to African American youth, alongside clear messages about the path to desired black masculinity (Neal 2005; Watkins 1998; West 1994), black youth are pushed into a sports world where the possibility of striking it rich leads to a “win at all costs” attitude. Robin D. G. Kelley (1998) argues that African American youth participate in sports or engage in other cultural practices as an attempt to resist or negotiate the inherent contradictions of postindustrial American capitalism. Patricia Hill Collins describes this process in the


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following terms: “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, they put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own. The message was clear—‘the world may be against us, but we are here and we intend to get paid’” (2006, p. 298). Collins notes further that the process of commodification is not simply about selling “an essentialized black culture,” but rather a particular construction of blackness that has proven beneficial to white owners. “Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons” (2006, p. 311). The commodification of black athletes is not simply about generating profit, but it also functions as an ideological and discursive commodity used to sell the American Dream and color blindness in post–civil rights America. “They underscore the assumption that we now live in a color-blind nation and that racism is a thing of the past,” writes Abbey Ferber. “Any inequality is now seen as the result of natural and cultural differences of African Americans’ own poor choices. Although the construction of Black masculinity has remained virtually unchanged from slaver through the present, it has been malleable enough to reinforce both old and new racism” (Ferber 2007, p. 22). More bluntly, Yousman, with his polemical challenge to those who see white consumption of hip-hop as having antiracist possibilities (see Kitwana 2006), concludes that the commodification of blackness, whether athletes or musicians, “allows Whites to contain their fears and animosities toward Blacks through rituals not of ridicule, as in the previous eras, but of adoration” which nonetheless “is still a manifestation of White supremacy” (2003, p. 369). More significantly in regard to sports, public figures and sports stars of color are commodified as evidence of the hegemony of color blindness, as the necessary evidence for a postrace place in American society (Andrews and Jackson 2001; Cole and Andrews 2001; Denzin 2001; King and Springwood 2001). While writing about Michael Jordan in the context of the New Right and the rise of Reagan conservativism during the 1980s and early 1990s, Mary McDonald and David L. Andrews find that, not only was he “portrayed as the moral obverse of the masses of African Americans vilified by the New Right for allegedly lacking the (new) right stuff” (2001, p. 26), but as evidence for the possibility of all securing the American Dream, the central place of meritocracy in American life, and the ways in which America had transcended the stains of racism where all not had an equal footing and chance of succeeding. “Jordan is thus aligned with other African American stars of this era such as Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, and Oprah Winfrey whose high-profile success stories further condemned the struggling African American masses for lacking


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the personal resolution,” writes McDonald and Andrews. “Reaganism’s doctrine of rugged individualism and color-blind bigotry was all that was required to achieve in American society” (2001, p. 27). To understand sports, whether looking into the predominantly white stands to media culture and to the backlash against those who threaten the existence of both a commodifiable and pleasurable black athletic body, it is crucial to think about the dialectics between race and commodification, to think about sports, in all its forms, as a playground, where black bodies become the feature and the most lucrative attraction thus elicits the greatest level of animosity when it (he) does not deliver profit, pleasure, and affirmation of dominant narratives and myths, all with a smile. Although the commodification of black bodies amid state violence and widespread racism is nothing new, considering the histories of Hollywood, jazz, minstrelsy, or even athletes enslaved on plantations (see Rhoden 2006), the hypercommodification of the contemporary black athlete, alongside expansive processes of globalization, growth in the profitability of black bodies, and their importance within color-blind discourse, demonstrates the importance of commodification within our new racist moment. Commodified and Criminalized explores, documents, and illustrates the various manifestations of the narrative, ideological, and financial commodification of black athletes and athletics all while highlighting the dominant frames that facilitate, fuel, and in turn generate through sporting cultures.

OUR PURPOSE This collection ultimately gives voice to how the simultaneity of commodification and demonization of sports styles and its predominately black male signifiers within contemporary sports becomes visible, illustrating the complex and contradictory place of aesthetics, cultural values, and bodies that are constructed as both fashionable (desirable and cool) and suspect (dangerous). It is through a series of case studies that we work to demonstrate the meaning behind Essex Hemphill’s poem “American Hero,” in which he pens the following: I scored thirty-two points this game and they love me for it. Everyone hollering is a friend tonight. But there are towns, certain neighborhoods where I’d be hard pressed to hear them cheer if I move on the block. (qtd. in Ferber 2007, p. 12)


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Such discursive practice remains prominent today, as evident in the discussions of countless black athletes who are deployed as free-floating signifiers and symbols of the American Dream, of opportunity available to those who follow the right path, as well as symbols of a postrace America, whereupon these BLACK athletes are not only accepted but also celebrated and praised; they are “the moral obverse” of those black athletes who are condemned, vilified, and policed inside and outside of sports (Kusz 2007; Rhoden 2006; Boyd 2003; King and Springwood 2001; Gray 1995). Notwithstanding the visibility and prominence of black celebrities within the entertainment and sporting worlds, popularity and cultural relevance is neither evidence of racial progress nor an agent of antiracist activism. “The meaning of race and color is now mined for exotic commodities that can be sold to White youth in the form of rap music, hip-hop dancing and sports gear. African American celebrities such as Michael Jordan, Etta James, and George Foreman are used to give market legitimacy to everything from clothes to high-end luxury cars” (Giroux 2003, pp. 192–93). In other words “while the color line has been modified and dismantled in places, race and racial hierarchies still exercise a profound influence on how most people in the United States experience their daily lives” (Giroux 2003, p. 193). Evident in the sports world, “Black men are both held in contempt, and valued as entertainment (Collins 2004, p. 155; Leonard 2004). Yet this is really nothing new. “Black men have been defined as a threat throughout American history, while accepted in roles that serve and entertain white people, where they can ostensibly be controlled and made to appear nonthreatening” (Ferber 2007, p. 12). In this regard, it is our task to examine the ways in which race and racial hierarchies not only impact sporting cultures and the broader media culture but also the dialects between sports and institutional and cultural formation in the twenty-first century. This collection thus accepts the task of analyzing, deconstructing, and offering contextual meaning to a series of sporting issues (spectacles/debates/events) and the larger discursive field that provides a context of understanding the contemporary place of black athletes and athletics. Given the importance of sports within American culture and its existence as “one of the few places in American society where there is a consistent racial discourse” (gender as well), it is crucial that we offer critical, in the moment, yet accessible scholarship that reflects on the current cultural significance of American professional basketball. Offering critical analysis of the textual and contextual, racial and cultural, commodified and free-floating signifiers of LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Randy Moss, Freddy Adu, the Williams sisters, Shani Davis, Cheryl Swoops, and various mediated representations not only sheds light on these rich cultural events as powerful pedagogies of race, gender, culture, and national memory but also offers insight into


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the dominant public discourses of hip-hop, law and order, cultural values, criminality and accountability, in and around contemporary sports cultures, all of which illustrate the powerful, yet often coded, place of race in American society.

A NOTE ON THE CONTENTS What binds together the chapters within this collection, irrespective of the sports/athletes discussed, the popularity or lack thereof of particular athletes, the theoretical arguments, and the specific points of discussion is the ways in which antiblack racism penetrates, infects, and defines American sports culture. At one level, as evident in media coverage, commodity culture, and the sporting landscape itself are the ways in which “bad boy Black athletes” (Collins 2004, p. 153), who are rendered as “overly physical, out of control, prone to violence, driven by instinct, and hypersexual”—they are “unruly and disrespectful,” “inherently dangerous,” and “in need of civilizing” (Ferber 2007, p. 20), are castigated as threats to the profitability, moral values, and cultural significance of sporting culture. Their bodies and performative actions are routinely scapegoated and demonized, and in turn are subjected to discipline and punishment for the good of the game and society. At another level black athletes, who “are perceived as controlled by White males” (Ferber 2007, p. 20) and are “defined as the ‘good Blacks’” are not only praised and celebrated as a financial windfall but praised as evident of our postracial moment (Ferber 2007, p. 20). In the context of persistent inequality and poverty, a racially based system of mass incarceration, and other forms of systemic discrimination, the visibility and presumed acceptance (and financial compensation) of black athletes represents a hegemonic counterargument to claims of antiblack racism. “This is where black exceptionalism comes in. Highly visible examples of black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness,” writes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow. “Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if you only try hard enough. These stories ‘prove’ that race is no longer relevant” (2010, p. 235). That is, their purported personal and financial successes overshadows the realities of segregated schools, police brutality, unemployment, and the white supremacist criminal justice system. The deployment of evidence that purports to affirm color blindness erases those many institutions and occurrences that demonstrate the continued relevance of race. Worse yet, as illustrated through the essays included here, the contemporary discourse not only erases present-day inequities and persistent color lines but also fa-


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cilitates, naturalizes, and justifies contemporary racism and white privilege. Both denying and reaffirming the relevance of race, all while maintaining a façade of color blindness, contemporary sporting culture exists as a powerful vehicle of our racial status quo. The collection thus provides a context to understand the dominant white racial frame/antiblack frame within contemporary sports culture while also illustrating the importance of talking about the rhetorical devices and ideological pronouncements that define our world of sports. It represents an effort to bring together scholars who offer a counterframe, one that demonstrates that “that race” is indeed “relevant” inside and outside of sports. In recent years, the NBA black body becomes a stand-in for broader discussion of race; in a sense, the black NBA baller has come to embody the essentialized black subject within the white imagination. Discussing the media coverage of Latrell Sprewell’s conflict with then coach P. J. Carlesimo, Linda Tucker argues that the media consistently “represented the incident in ways that vilified Sprewell through the use of derogatory images of black men” (2003, p. 401). Moreover, Sarah Banet-Weiser concludes that the “NBA exploits and makes exotic the racist discourse of the Black menace even as it domesticates this cultural figure” (1999, p. 406). Not surprisingly much of existing literature dealing with race and sports focuses on basketball (Markovitz 2006; Leonard 2006; Hughes 2004; Leonard 2004; Boyd 2003; Andrews 2001; Cole 2001; Denzin 2001; Boyd 2000; Banet-Weiser 1999; Boyd 1997, Andrews 1996; Cole and Andrews 1996; Cole 1996; Denzin 1996). Linda Tucker argues that it is not surprising how central race/blackness is to NBA discourse, and more revealing is how central the NBA’s racialized discourse is to broader discussions of race inside and outside of sporting cultures. “In ways absent from other sports, then Blackness, sexuality, and the physical and emotional vulnerability of the majority of players are stamped on the face of the game of basketball” (2003, p. 313). Similarly, Jonathan Markovitz, in his discussion of the Kobe Bryant rape case, concludes that “because NBA players are always already at the center of an eroticized and racialized mass-media spectacle, it is not surprising that allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of an NBA superstar should be immediately seized on and scrutinized for larger lessons about celebrity, gender, and racial conflict in American society” (2006, p. 401). Given our focus on demonization and commodification, on the contradictory yet inevitable imagination of black athletes as both thugs and dollar signs, it is not surprising that several papers here touch upon, focus their attention on, the world of basketball. In fact, the inclusion of a disproportionate number of pieces focusing on basketball is purposeful not only because of the ubiquity of discursive interest on blackness within the NBA but also because of the ways in which those “white racial frames” that emanate from a basketball-specific discourse fuel


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and impact the representational and rhetorical field within other sports (and of course outside of sports as well). So while there is certainly a focus on race and the NBA, we also push the discourse beyond basketball, especially into the realm of individualized sports and those sports not associated with blackness but rather whiteness, with papers focusing on hockey, tennis, golf, and speed skating. Racial hostility and the “continuing violence of everyday violence” (qtd. in Douglas 2005, p. 265) thus operate in distinct ways, depending on the demographics and history of a particular sport. Those sports imagined as white, as protected from the infiltration of bodies of color, facilitate racialized hostility and opposition in distinct ways. This expressed concern is part of a racial discourse that marks social boundaries of insider and outsider. Moreover, the “disembodied position” from which this notion is being asserted in one white racial power. Although it is not made explicit, the narrative assumes whiteness is constitutive of the norm in tennis, as in society. Venus’ and Serena’s arrival and subsequent success on the tour challenged the prevailing social arrangements and cultural representations that have structured and promoted women’s professional tennis as a white middle-class sport. In effect their ascendance to the top of women’s tennis had put the dominant (white) culture of tennis at risk. . . . The primarily white audience, their white opponents, and the dominant media have struggled to deal with the unparalleled accomplishments of the Williams sisters. (Douglas 2005, p. 268; p. 275)

As such, the demonization and experienced racialized violence by athletes of color involved in those sports traditionally limited to the white middleclass is unique or distinct from the discursive formulations experienced by black NBA or NFL stars. Black athletes who challenge white hegemony in hockey, speed skating, tennis, golf, mixed martial arts, and even car racing not only challenge hegemonic notions of race, difference, and identity but also contest by their mere presence the racial hierarchy, segmentation, and identity of these sports themselves. With these initial chapters C. L. Cole and David Andrews (with their discussion of Tiger Woods) and Nancy Spencer (examining the racial discourse and the Williams sisters) elucidate the powerful and contradictory ways that blackness is deployed, represented, and contained within contemporary sporting discourse. Each illustrates the hegemony of antiblack racism and discourse surrounding commodified multiculturalism. These chapters foreground the central focus of the collection, providing a theoretical foundation for the collection. Collectively, they highlight “the competing and often contradictory messages being disseminated through popular forms of sporting culture” (Giardina 2005, p. 7). We also include a postscript for each of these key works not insomuch as they are no longer relevant but rather that the arguments and analyses continue to evolve amid shifting contexts. For example, Nancy


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Spencer offers a discussion of Serena Williams’s recent autobiography and more recent scholarship to enhance our understanding of the racial framing of 2001 Indian Wells tournament. Spencer’s discussion demonstrates the ways in which black athletes, whether via new media or more traditional sources, are offering counternarratives. Even with this postscript exploring recent events, the 2009 controversy involving Serena Williams at the U.S. Open is not included in the conversation, although the backlash and the focus on her menacing body is illustrative of Spencer’s analysis. In the next section, Andrews, Mower, and Silk discuss the ghetto imagination within both the NBA and NFL. In Anoop Mirpuri’s discussion of Kobe Bryant and Lisa Guerrero’s examination of LeBron James, we focus the reader’s attention on both the familiar—in terms of athletes and issues surrounding race and basketball/football—and the commonplace within their collective emphasis on demonization. And while these works certainly build upon the literature (Leonard 2004; Andrews 2001; Cole 2001; King and Springwood 2001; Baker and Boyd 1997; Andrews 1996; Denzin 1996), particularly the ubiquitous examination of Michael Jordan, these two works push the conversation in important ways. These works focus on the ways in which hypervisible and globally popular black athletes represent a mediated racial body that bridges the gap between hip-hop and race neutrality and negotiates the tensions that result from hypercommodification and hyperdemonization. In other words, whereas Jordan’s success and popularity reflected his ability to function as a symbol of color blindness, James, Bryant, Anthony, and several black NFL stars have come to represent a new inscription of blackness. As part of their efforts to “creatively manage their incontrovertible Blackness” (Andrews, Mower, and Silk), logics that have resulted amid a climate of postindustrialism and post-Fordism, the NBA and NFL have sought to capitalize and control the essential black athletic subject: pathological and presumably criminal. Exploring representations that emanate from the athletic signifiers of the leagues and their commercial enterprises, Andrews, Mower, and Silk argue that the contemporary black NFL and NBA stars have “come to occupy a third space prefigured on a financially inspired and commercially engineered engagement with the discourses of urban Blackness.” Similarly, LeBron James, as evident by the wall-to-wall coverage of his impending preagency and fears and hopes for both the basketball teams and a city based upon his potential signing, is the most recent reworking of the black athlete as a commodity. In other words, James has come to embody a redemptive project for an explicitly black aesthetic within the league. The recent media speculation about and the panic resulting from his possible departure from Cleveland demonstrate his power as a source of hope for Cleveland, the NBA, and the American sports establishment. Lisa Guerrero rightly asks: “Why are today’s black NBA players forced to negotiate the fickle ideological pressure that


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demands that they sell an illusion of a constructed black ‘realness’ as long as they don’t ‘buy into it’ themselves . . . even as the rest of America, and the world, does? They also demonstrate just how far, and how quickly, one young man from Akron, Ohio, has ascended to the heart of the tempest that is race and sports in America in the 21st century, a tempest that has made the path toward American racial redemption uncertain. Increasingly, that road to redemption has come to more closely resemble the road to perdition . . . on and off the court.” Similarly, whereas Leonard’s (2004) piece focuses specifically on the allegation of rape and media coverage that surrounded Bryant’s legal troubles, Mirpuri offers an examination that reveals the contradictions (and the relationship between those contradictions and capitalist formation) in Kobe Bryant’s mediated representation. He argues: Regardless of the commercial’s veracity, however, the particular narrative which it constructs—Bryant’s embrace of the public’s simultaneous antipathy and adoration—allows Nike to draw upon his vexed history as a public figure in order to market its global brand. In other words, it is as much Bryant’s problematic character already ingrained in the public imagination—Kobe the (alleged) rapist, the ball-hog, the loner—that is being narrativized and marketed, as it is Kobe the extraordinary baller. Even two years later, following Bryant’s first MVP season in 2007–08, his unchallenged position as the greatest player in the game is never more than a step ahead of a profusion of commentary insistently questioning the extent to which Bryant has changed on and off the court.

In offering a persuasive and sophisticated Marxist analysis of Kobe’s career, he goes to demonstrate how: Bryant’s figure has come to serve as a cultural symbol—underwritten by an extensive state and corporate apparatus—the public construction of which shapes and regulates the terms by which “race” is read and deployed in popular discourse. I argue that this specific construction and regulation of the discourse of race, in turn, becomes a crucial method in the way in which neoliberal capitalism organizes consumers, producers, raw materials and cultural representations in maintaining and legitimating the racial stratifications through which it flourishes.

As with much of the collection, there is an effort to highlight and examine particular black athletes and the ways in which narratives, discourse, and ideologies flow from and through their mediated representations. In the third section, we bring into focus less familiar and less noteworthy black athletes and sporting cultures. For different reasons, from the lack of popularity of particular sports, the perceived incompatibility of


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blackness and sports other than football and basketball, and the ways in which sport discourse render certain bodies (immigrant, women, queer) as uncomodifiable (and therefore undesirable), these athletes and sporting cultures have been rendered invisible. One of the key elements of the collection is to reflect and challenge the narrow ways to which sports media imagines and constructs black athleticism. The hyperfocus on blackness within basketball and football and the erasure of black bodies, experiences, and mediated representations from other sporting projects is an important racial project. To replicate that would simply reify a racial discourse that narrowly defines sporting blackness. We hope to give voice to this invisible, offering counternarratives through these works, yet elucidating the continuity between the representational field of the familiar and unfamiliar black sport body. More specifically, each chapter offers an important specificity to the ways in which blackness functions as both a commodified and criminalized sign within contemporary sporting cultures. For example, Kyle Kusz, with his discussion of Freddy Adu, offers an insightful examination of the ways in which neoliberal discourse, with an emphasis on markets, meritocracy, and individual success, impacts the discursive engagement with Adu and the narrative surrounding his immigrant blackness. Likewise, Stacy Lorenz and Rod Murray explore black Canadian identity in the context of hockey with their discussion of Ray Emery. Illustrating the ways in which blackness functions within an explicitly white sporting context and the dialects that exist between anti–African American sporting discourse and those north of the border, this chapter demonstrates the diasporic nature of both criminalization and commodification of black sport identities. Likewise, Richard King, with his discussion of Shani Davis, highlights the commonplace and omnipresent racial and racializing discourse, tropes, narratives, and representations of contemporary sporting cultures in the unfamiliar world of African Americans and winter sports. And finally, Samantha King bridges the gap between familiar and unfamiliar with her discussion of Sheryl Swoopes. Blackness and basketball are commonly linked, yet the hyperfocus on black heterosexual men erases women and queer black athletes. In this regard, Swoopes as a black basketball player and as heterosexual (pregnant) functioned as an accepted and familiar commodity, yet queer women complicated (but did not disrupt) her placement within the cultural landscape. At the same, her body and cultural visibility is mediated by the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality operate together in sporting contexts. Indeed, she reminds us that these axes of identity, ideology, and oppression always converge in the production of bodies in contemporary (physical) culture. King provides an eloquent example of what is possible when one takes intersectionality seriously.


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The final chapter, which examines the 2007 film Pride within a broader racial history, brings together the core themes of this text: mediated black representations, contemporary sports culture, dominant narratives, and ongoing state violence. With this piece Jared Sexton highlights the dialectics that exist between the myriad signs and symbols within contemporary black sporting culture, whether as celebrated dollar signs and symbols of racial progress or objects of scorn and derision. It points to the powerful ways in which these contradictory yet complementary renderings of black athletic bodies circulate within contemporary culture. We use this chapter to demonstrate the fluidity of meaning attributed to black athlete bodies, highlighting the contested meaning and significance in the commodification and demonization of black athlete bodies, within and beyond the playfields, sporting courts, and swimming pools. The collection concludes with a postscript addressing the media and public spectacle surrounding Tiger Woods. Here we explore the myriad controversies and media scrutiny, all the while underscoring the meaning of his racial identity within the contemporary ideological and commercial landscape, illustrating the intersections of commodity and criminality. Yet amid the denunciations and the questions about losses (financial power, narrative usefulness, golfing prowess), the circumstances illustrate the power and possibilities of redemption and how race overdetermines this process. Together, the chapters contained within this collection are concerned with what we can learn about race, racism, and ongoing racial discourse through an examination of contemporary sporting cultures and black athletes. In this regard, contemporary black athletes and the discourse that regulates both consumptions and demonization represent a point of entry for discussions of new racism. “Today, in their . . . media a great many whites tell themselves and others false and fabricated narratives of how this country was created,” writes Joe Feagin. This collection examines these narratives and the corresponding frames—e.g., color-blind, equality-and-justice, meritocracy, American Dream. It pushes the existing discussion of race and sports beyond the playing fields, beyond the athletes, beyond the media narratives, and beyond the familiarized and hypercommodified bodies to provide insight as to how sports fuels and interplays within new racism. This collection brings into the fold questions about national memory, collective/societal conversations, which bodies require surveillance and policing, racialization, celebrity, color-blind/race-based discourses, masculinity, global capitalism, and America’s ongoing sport/hip-hop cultural/race war. With its focus on blackness and contemporary athletics, on commodification and demonization as central elements of new racism, Commodified and Criminalized not only builds on existing sports literature but also moves beyond these confines toward engagement and development with black cultural studies and those scholars and discourses concerned with new racism.


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Tucker, L. (2003, November). Blackballed: Basketball and representations of the black male athlete. American Behavioral Scientist, 47 (3), 306–28. Watkins, S. C. (1998). Representing: Hip hop culture and the production of black cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology, and symbolic expression. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. West, C. (1994). Race matters. New York: Vintage Press. Whannel, G. (1998). Individual stars and collective identities in media sport. In M. Roche, ed. Sport, popular culture, and identity, pp. 23–36. Aachen: Meyer and Meyer. Yousman, B. (2003). Blackophilia and blackophobia: White youth, the consumption of rap music, and white supremacy. Communication Theory, 13 (4), 366–91.


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1 America’s New Son: Tiger Woods and America’s Multiculturalism1 C. L. Cole and David L. Andrews

Oprah Winfrey: Well, you don’t have to know what a birdie or bogey is to love my guest today. You don’t need to understand par. You don’t even have to like golf, because Tiger Woods transcends golf. He is magical and he’s mesmerizing. He’s just what our world needs right now, don’t you think? Audience: (In unison). Yeah! Oprah Winfrey: Whoo! Whoo! I call him America’s son. (Oprah Winfrey Show, April 24, 1997)

Typical of her inspiring insights that resonate with mainstream sensibilities and which have made her the most influential woman in American entertainment today, Oprah Winfrey’s declaration extends the euphoric public consensus evidently reached over Tiger Woods (the show was taped soon after Woods’s victory at the 1997 U.S. Masters). Winfrey’s proclamation enlists elements embedded in popular discourses—particularly elements encoded through and aligned with race, family, and nation—that facilitated and framed Woods’s march into the American consciousness. Invoking the national familial bond, Winfrey identifies Woods as an “antidote” to the anxieties weighing down America (“the world”) at the end century. Although the anxieties remain unnamed, Woods enters a context defined by the regular fanning of apprehensions about and celebrations of America’s multicultural racial future: racially coded celebrations that deny social problems and promote the idea that America has achieved its multicultural ideal. At the same time, racially thematized crises related to sexuality, family, crime, welfare, and moral depravity normalize the policing and punishment of already vulnerable 23


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populations. This dynamic is encoded and enacted in the rhetoric of color blindness that guides, for example, the argument that America no longer needs race-conscious affirmative action programs. Ironically, contemporary debates about the role of race and ethnicity in public policy declare the importance of not being classified by race while panics regularly surface over the ever-impending demotion of the white population from the statistical majority. Woods, an appointed symbol of national multiracial hybridity, is an element in the stabilizing “narrative of continuity” (Jeffords 1993) that furnishes Oprah’s American audience with a reassuring sense of self. After all, the virtuous Woods was born from a contemporary America defined by affirmations of color blindness and the close association of, even slippage between, America and the world. The universalism invoked by Winfrey’s extended valorization of America’s new son directs attention to an imagined international-national future-present. In that imagination and in an era of global restructuring, America has assigned itself a privileged and superior moral position. We contend that Winfrey’s rhetorical question and directive, “He’s just what our world needs right now, don’t you think?”, references dominant ways of thinking about nation, race, and progress that govern American popular cultural politics. Thus, we seek to investigate how the narrative around Woods participates in normalizing and routinizing these ways of thinking. In particular, we consider the relations among a prominent reactionary sensibility and politics (as they are regularly expressed in the related logics of antiaffirmative action and white victim masculinity) and the facilitation of a multinational (upwardly mobile) sporting figure as the prototypical future-present American. In order to begin to “make sense” of the duplicitous optimism invested in the national icon Tiger Woods, we build on Lauren Berlant’s (1996) analysis of the state of American citizenship in the last decades of the twentieth century.

FACING AMERICA’S FUTURE Berlant argues that the contemporary formation of American citizenship pivots around heteronormativity, personal acts, and a national intimacy generated through the mass media. Within this conjuncture, a new sexual politics (expressed and authorized most virulently through the hypermythologized American family) now regularly trades places with and suppresses the experience of economic and political injustice. Moreover, the mass media—with the exception of a slew of populist products aligned with the new moral politics—replaces and demonizes any semblance of public debate and activism.


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Central to Berlant’s explanation of the new citizenship is the invention and promotion of a series of new “faces of America”: computer-generated, racially hybridized, feminine representations of a future, postwhite American populace. Such simulations have appeared on the covers of Time and Mirabella and have even shaped the latest rendition of the Betty Crocker brand embodiment. As Berlant depicts it, these cybergenetic visions of the future, multiracial American citizenry are constituted by an amalgam of racially hybridized phenotypes (skin tone, facial structure, hair, etc.). Such simulations, Berlant argues, are imagined to be civic and commercial solutions to the “problems of immigration, multiculturalism, sexuality, gender, and (trans)national identity that haunt the U.S. in the present tense” (1996, p. 398). Like Berlant, we contend that despite their progressive appearance, such representations of America’s racial future are aligned with a regressive racial politics. This racial politics is embedded in a national familial politics that, by our view, has accompanied and is inseparable from the crisis of white masculinity. In its most recent version, a prominent masculinity is figured around the popular belief that white men (the future minority) are the new persecuted majority. Moreover, in post–civil rights America, minuscule advances made by women and people of color are imagined as the impediments to white men’s access to the means of making their own destinies. In other words, women and people of color are perceived as the restraints on white men’s realization of the American way of life. In the white male victim imaginary, the American Dream itself has been extinguished . . . for white men. The campaign to strengthen white masculine privilege routinely escalates the rhetoric of family values. Enter Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, characterized as “a breath of fresh air.” Indeed, Wood’s cultural significance is inseparable from the figures (explicit and implicit) over and against which he is defined. Woods, a critic for Business Week explains, is a breath of fresh air for an American public “tired of trash-talking, spit-hurling, head-butting sports millionaires . . .” (Stodghill 1997, p. 32). Although race is not explicitly mentioned, Stodghill’s reference is clearly to African American professional basketball players who are routinely depicted in the popular media as selfish, insufferable, and morally reprehensible. Woods’s cultural significance is further implicated in the politics of postnational familial multiculturalism and mediated intimacy that govern ways of thinking about America’s future citizenry: But times are changing. Interracial marriage and reproduction are on the upswing, and a new generation of post-1960s multiracial children is demanding recognition, not in the margins of society but as a mainstream of their own . . . To get a glimpse of its future, look at Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, the golf prodigy. His mother, from Thailand, is half Thai, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter white. His father is half black, a quarter Chinese and a quarter American Indian. (Page 1996, pp. 284–85).


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It is our contention that Tiger Woods is an extraordinary exemplar of the new American logic. That is, Woods is the masculine extension of the already familiar hybridized American [feminine] face invested in white American culture. As such, he is the latest (but perhaps the first masculinized) rendition of the American supericon: a commercial emblem who makes visible and concrete late modern America’s narrative of itself as a posthistorical nation of immigrants. Woods thus embodies the imagined ideal of being and becoming American which, in its contemporary form, requires proper familial affiliations and becoming the global American. As a figure embedded in and who renders multiple national narratives comprehensible, it is no wonder Woods appears to be a “universally celebrated” example of the “America’s son”—the “new commercial stereotype advertising the future of national culture” (Berlant 1996, p. 417). In this chapter, our preliminary discussion of the unfolding Tiger Woods phenomenon, we seek to clarify some of the dynamics governing the national euphoria inscribed on Woods. Here, we offer a critical-contextualbased reading of the promotional discourses (primarily, but not exclusively, those emanating from Nike, Inc.) which contributed to the fabrication of Tiger Woods as a national crisis resolving the new face of America. We concentrate on a period defined by his joining the PGA Tour (August 1996) and his winning the U.S. Masters in April 1997. We contend that the commercialized multicultural masculinity advanced through and around Woods is the latest in America’s imagined realization of its ideals (agency, equality, responsibility, and freedom) and its imagined transformed sense of national self (America has become the world that came to it). Indeed, we argue that the representation of national ideals through the global multiculturalism inscribed on Woods tacitly extends optimistic ways of thinking about the nation (the post–Cold War resurgence of American nationalism) which are constitutive of racism directed at America’s nonwhite populations in general and the African American population in particular. The multicultural futurepresent embodied by Tiger Woods is deeply implicated in expressions related to America’s declared color blindness and white-male-as-victim fantasies.

NIKE’S NATIONAL MOMENT IN THE MAKING According to the “origin stories” which ostensibly document Woods’s rise to national prominence, the American public has long recognized Tiger Woods’s exceptionalism. Numerous videoclips of the child Tiger’s accomplishments are sutured together and recirculated to provide evidence of an America collectively anticipating a sporting, cultural, and economic phenomenon in the making. We (the American populace) watch America watching a precocious (in terms of ability) and atypical (in terms of racial


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difference) child golfer drawing the attention of the “human interest” popular media. Clips featuring the child Tiger from television programs such as The Mike Douglas Show, That’s Incredible, and Eye on L.A. are recast in ways that position each as a snapshot in the national family album. Images of a playful freedom embodied by the young Woods are accompanied by clips of a comically impressed Bob Hope, James Stewart, and Mike Douglas. Such images evoke sentimental feelings as they suggest that we have caught a glimpse of the national record of America’s white patriarchs previewing and approving the figure of the nation’s future. National intimacy was encoded and enacted through these recontextualized media clips of the child Woods. Through the trite machinations of the American popular media, Tiger Woods was positioned and confirmed as America’s son. Relatedly, Woods’s personal achievements were easily translated into national accomplishments. Recollections of his groundbreaking successes on the golf course (most notably winning his first tournament at the age of eight, an unprecedented three U.S. Junior National Championships, three straight U.S. Amateur Tournaments, and appearing in the 1992 Nissan Los Angeles Open as a high school sophomore) corroborate the fantasy of a conflict-free and color-blind America. Stirred by the aftermath of his record-breaking third consecutive victory at the U.S. Amateur Championship and media speculation over his decision to leave the amateur ranks during August of 1996, Woods’s popular presence reached a new intensity. Indeed, Woods’s immediate future became a focal point of media, and therefore, national attention. His announced decision to enter the PGA Tour was greeted with much enthusiasm by Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner. Finchem, speaking on ABC’s Nightline, defined the characteristics that made Woods a welcome addition into the professional fold: I just think that there are three major elements to Tiger Woods. One is his, his, the level of his competitive skills he has demonstrated time and time again. Secondly, he is from a multi-racial ethnic background which makes him unique. And, third is, he has exhibited the poise, and the integrity, and the image, of the kind of players who have performed well on the PGA Tour. And that is the package, and it’s a very marketable package. (September 2, 1996)

Finchem’s very marketable package was taken up, in much the same vein, by the expectant titans of the American sport industry. Mark McCormack’s International Management Group (IMG) had so aggressively courted the fifteen-year-old Woods that they offered his father, Earl Woods, a paid position as “talent scout” for the American Junior Golf Association (whose tournaments his son was then dominating). Upon turning professional, Woods officially signed with IMG. He also signed a $40 million, five-year sponsorship deal with Nike, which expected that Woods’s racial difference


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and prodigious talent would “revolutionize” the public’s relation to golf. That is, Nike anticipated that Woods, as a multimarket endorser, would resuscitate their stagnant golf division and, in so doing, significantly bolster the company’s overall profits. The success of America’s latest revolution, orchestrated around Woods’s body and style, would be measured in terms of the diversification and expansion of the market for golf-related products and services both within the United States and abroad. On Wednesday, August 28, 1996, two days after Tiger turned professional and on the eve of the Greater Milwaukee Open, Woods held his first press conference as a PGA Tour player. At the microphone, a seemingly sheepish Woods intoned, “I guess, hello world.” The familiar global address simultaneously insinuated the decline of national boundaries and trumpeted the significance of Nike’s latest worldly American citizen. The faux spontaneity of this carefully scripted sound bite was made evident when, the next day, Nike launched a print and television advertising campaign featuring Woods, entitled “Hello World.” Despite a chain of events intimating Nike’s swift and creative response to a national moment in the making, the national moment in the making, was, no doubt, an example of the sort of strategic marketing that placed Nike at the vanguard of contemporary promotional culture (Wernick 1991). The “Hello World” television campaign introduced Woods (as he was apparently introducing himself to “the world at large” [Allen 1996, p. 11C]), by interspersing and overlaying the following text between and upon images of his early golfing exploits and recent successes at U.S. Amateur championships: Hello world. I shot in the 70s when I was 8. I shot in the 60s when I was 12. I won the U.S. Junior Amateur when I was 15. Hello world. I played in the Nissan Open when I was 16. Hello world. I won the U.S. Amateur when I was 18. I played in the Masters when I was 19. I am the only man to win three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles. Hello world. There are still courses in the U.S. I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin. Hello world. I’ve heard I am not ready for you. Are you ready for me?


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Wood’s recitation was accompanied by an emotive musical score, whose pseudo-African tones and timbre added to the dramatic—and the familiarly exotic—content of the visual narrative. As Nike’s “Hello World” advertisement reinforced a familiar aesthetic, it seemingly presented a challenge to America by disrupting and violating America’s unwritten racist (“no national critique, particularly in terms of racism or sexism”) code. By highlighting Woods’s energy, skill, and earned successes, and then deliberately confronting America with a “racial dilemma,” America’s ideals of color blindness and proper citizenship were— at least apparently—frankly violated and questioned. Moreover, while previous annotations to the burgeoning Woods phenomenon exploited his difference in ways that maintained a nonthreatening ambiguity concerning his precise racial identity, the “Hello World” campaign flouted such American racial propriety by “determining” his African Americanness. According to Henry Yu, a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA, the “Hello World” campaign was evidence of Nike’s attempt to African Americanize Woods: “To Nike (at least at this juncture), he was African American” (Yu 1996, p. 4M, italics added).

RACE CARDING AND WHITE VICTIM MASCULINITY The abundance of popular counters to the “Hello World” campaign intimate the force accrued by America’s color-blind credo and codification of citizenship—the suppression of the specter of racial politics—over the last two decades. Reactionary critiques habitually invoked the rhetoric of “the race card” which had been exceptionally promoted and legitimated through the media’s coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial (Higginbotham, François, and Yueh 1997). As one critic neatly summarized the accusation: “In Tiger’s case, the race card was quickly slapped on the table. Dealt faceup and from the bottom of the commercial deck” (Spousta 1996, p. 1C). The race card is a primary and explicit expression of the regulatory logic that governs discourses about race in the United States. As an accusatory category, it implies that the introduction of racial divisions is inappropriate and unfair. Moreover, it implies that consciousness of race is itself an obstacle to racial equality. Drawing attention to restrictions based on the color of Woods’s skin violates, according to anti-affirmative-action logic, America’s unquestioned obedience to the doctrines of individualism and meritocracy. At least from one available point of view, then, “Hello World” relies on the strategy of race carding. From this point of view, it is an expression of the imagined victimization of white males. Other criticisms of the campaign are also symptomatic of this barely submerged anxious white masculinity. That Woods’s destiny was not shaped by his talent alone was a popular, repeated, and revealing response:


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It is funny how it works. Part of Woods’ appeal is his race. If he were just another blond-haired, blue-eyed golfer, he wouldn’t be this overnight marketing phenomenon. He would be just another blond-haired, blue-eyed golfer struggling to finish in the top 125 in earnings to gain exempt status on the PGA Tour. (Knott 1996, p. B1)

In his comments about Nike’s promotional strategy, noted sports journalist John Feinstein expressed familiar anti-affirmative-action rhetoric as he named race as the key dimension of his extraordinary marketability. For Feinstein, Woods was: The great black hope for golf . . . The fact that Nike is marketing him as a black player, not just as a talented player, but as a black player, tells you that all this money that’s being thrown in his direction has as much to do with the color of his skin and his ability to be a role model as it does with his golf. (Nightline, September 2, 1996)

While such expressions of resentment are entangled in contemporary white male identity, blame was not directed at Woods. Instead, racial consciousness was seen to be an outgrowth of Nike’s opportunistic politics. For example, Spousta names Nike, not Woods, as the player of the race card: if any of that made you feel uncomfortable, don’t squirm too much. . . . Truth is, Woods never portrayed himself as our social conscious until Nike pushed him across that line . . . But it’s the message that makes you wince, not the messenger, and we should embrace and celebrate Tiger as a person and a player. Watching him develop into a champion should be a great adventure for fans of any color. (Spousta 1996, p. 1C)

And, in one of the most revealing moments of displacement, Advertising Age’s Rance Crain admonished Nike for Woods’s “militant, almost angry stance” (1997, p. 13). The theme of Nike’s mismanagement of Woods’s identity is a rhetorical mechanism that sidesteps critical reflection on national racial politics. In addition, it makes Woods a casualty of Nike, and in so doing, disavows the possibility of Woods’s political assertiveness. This proclamation of political “lack” locates the virtue of his personal acts through terms that designate Woods as apolitical. By extension, his apolitical, even prepolitical classification is crucial to his capacity to signify personal and national “goodness.” As Woods is articulated as innocent, pure, virtuous, and victimized, the possibility for multiple consumer desires and identifications are created and mobilized: The ad agency argues that Woods approved the ad. Woods, 20, might be mature beyond his years, but he still is 20 and perhaps somewhat naive in the ways of the world. . . . Woods has never been inclined to use his influence as a bully pulpit on the issue of race and golf. He disdains the notion that he is


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the great black hope. He has never expressed a desire to be the best black golfer in history, only the best golfer in history . . . The world not only is at Woods’ feet, it is on his side. Why would Nike see fit to embroil him in a senseless, needless controversy that threatens to turn some against him, from day one of his career? (Strege 1996, p. D10)

In response, Nike reclaimed the critics’ charges and announced that it had intentionally fashioned a highly charged advertisement. Jim Small, Nike’s director of public relations, embraced the controversy by depicting the conflict as indicative of Nike’s success: “The very fact that it made people so uncomfortable shows it did what it was intended to. We hit the nail on the head” (qtd. in Custred 1996, p. 27). But the popular investment in Woods, despite the controversy surrounding the advertisement, suggests that the “Hello World” campaign did not significantly discomfort national consumers. Instead, Nike and Tiger Woods were united in the pursuit of another of America’s favorite pastimes—the hailing of American consumers through, by paraphrasing Cornel West (1988), what might be called pragmatic symbols (symbols through which America tells stories about itself). Although the “Hello World” campaign identified and named racism, it did so through the familiar and acceptable terms of social criticism. Capitalizing on narratives already in place—and particularly narratives that America loves to consume through sport—Woods’s entry into professional golf was cast as an event of national magnitude. Consumer identification was invited and secured by cloaking Woods in a swathe of overtly patriotic sentiment: He was vaunted as an emblem of racial progress, a righter of wrongs à la foundational figures such as Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe. Indeed, the extraordinary proliferation of allusions to Jackie Robinson surrounding Tiger underscore the sort of pleasures promised to American consumers. Thus, the “Hello World” campaign announced itself as America’s quintessential tantalizing tale of racial progress: one that combined race, sport, masculinity, national healing, and proper citizenship. As Woods and Nike crossed the final sporting frontier (a remote sector of a frontier typically conflated with the American way of life and the American Dream), consumers, hailed as compassionate, informed citizens, were invited to recollect mediated national-ethical moments of the past and to participate in a national-familial-ethical moment of the present. In this way, Tiger Woods became the latest version of a commercialized raced masculinity implicated in political backlash while certifying national transformation, progress, and equality (see Andrews 1996; Cole 1996). One commentator pointedly captured the conservative “some of my best friends . . .” orientation of Tiger Woods’s enthusiastic appropriation by the hearts and minds of the American establishment: The core constituency of golf, those “members only” who have managed to make the country club, after the church, the most segregated institution in


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America, think Tiger will get people off their backs. How can you call golf racist now, you liberal jogger, just look who we invited to tee? (Lipsyte 1996, p. 11)

Woods, like Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey, was thus used by the populist defenders of core American values and ideologies (i.e., those cultural producers operating within the ratings-driven media and poll-driven centrist politics) as self-evident proof of the existence of a color-blind meritocracy. So, in a time of increasing racial polarization along social and economic lines (c.f. Kelley 1997; Wilson 1997), Tiger Woods emerged as a popular icon from whom the American populace could derive a sense of intimacy, pride, and reassurance. To the extent that Woods was perceived to be an activist, it was clearly a nationally sanctioned activism linked to media, family, and consumption. In this case, a familiar dramatic and heroic narrative—in and through which consumers could participate—was fabricated against the backdrop of an exceptional experience. In a national context ostensibly already devoid of racism, Woods and Nike had identified a local and temporary situation of racial discrimination in the private and protected elite space of golf. Moreover, its already given and expeditious resolution to make golf the place of the people (all people, regardless of race or sex, now seemingly had the right to participate in the multiple consumption practices surrounding golf) would be mediated “live.” Under the guise of public debate and intervention, America’s self-congratulatory mood was affirmed. Rather than encouraging critical thought about contemporary national politics and the complexity of racism, the “Hello World” campaign relied on and reproduced a mediated patriotism. Ironically, racial discrimination, formulated as a holdover from another time, was used to reauthorize the nation’s view of itself as beyond race.

AMERICA’S POSTHISTORICAL EVERYMAN During the fall of 1996, the media coverage of Tiger Woods reached extraordinary proportions following his victories at the 1996 Las Vegas Invitational and 1996 Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic tournaments. As much as they were interested in his exploits on the golf course, the popular media were obsessively concerned with documenting, and thereby advancing, the “Tigermania” seemingly sweeping the nation. Paradoxically, Tigermania was represented through the dramatically increased viewing and attendance figures for tournaments and blanket media coverage incited by the popular media (Potter 1997; Stevens and Winheld 1996; Williams 1996).


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Nike, in a moment symptomatic of the expansion of Woods’s celebrity citizenship, debuted their second Tiger Woods commercial. Nike’s Tiger Woods Mk II was revealed to an expectant prime-time American public during coverage of IMG’s made-for-TV “Skin’s Game,” which ran on the ABC network over the Thanksgiving Day 1996 weekend. Nike undermined any sparks from the “Hello World” backlash as it capitalized on Woods’s accruing cultural capital as the unequivocal embodiment of America’s future multicultural citizenry. Capitulating to dominant cultural norms and values in a more banal—and therefore even more powerful—way, Nike contributed to the fabrication of Woods as the latest version of the new face of America. Woods’s apparently reengineered racial image was facilitated via a television commercial entitled “I Am Tiger Woods.” The sixty-second commercial’s visual, a mixture of black-and-white and color images with still, slow, and full-motion footage, was accompanied by a musical soundtrack incorporating an understated mix of drum beats and chorus harmonies. The result was a somewhat pious celebration of that which Tiger Woods had come to represent. This process of deification centered on a cast of racially diverse and geographically dispersed children (on golf courses and distinctly urban settings) who collectively embodied Nike’s vision of Tiger Woods’s essential heterogeneity. Moreover, they signified, by inference, the future American populace. Borrowing the “I am . . .” strategy previously adopted in both Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and more recently Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), each strategic child representative proclaimed, with varying degrees of solemnity, “I am Tiger Woods.” The golfing Woods is periodically glimpsed as young males and females possessing characteristics stereotypically associated with African Americans, Asian Americans, or European Americans offer invocations of “I am Tiger Woods.” The commercial ends with slowmotion footage of Woods hitting a drive down the center of a tree-lined fairway. As he reaches the apex of his follow through, “I am Tiger Woods” in white text appears in the bottom center of the frame, followed by Nike’s international-national sign, the obligatory swoosh. Less than three months earlier, the “Hello World” campaign had enabled, despite its immediate displacement, the possibility of reading Woods as an outspoken racial insurgent. Now, Woods was clearly rearticulated into a multicultural figure who, like his young imitators, was framed as the prepolitical and posthistorical embodied manifestation of contemporary racial politics. Moreover, a significant change is claimed for the golf world: Not only have we witnessed an immediate change in personnel but also golf’s future will include a significantly different cast of characters. Indeed, through what Yu (1996) depicts as a shift away from Nike’s African Americanized representation, Woods, Yu argues, was conclusively cast as “a


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multicultural godsend to the sport of golf” (p. 4M). Under the sign of multiculturalism and in America’s golfing future, everyone will be included. It was the emotive appeal of this posthistorical multiculturalism that situated Oprah Winfrey’s anointing of Woods as “America’s son”: Oprah Winfrey: Can we get this straight? What do call yourself? Do you call yourself African American? I know you are—your—father’s half black, quarter Chinese, quarter American Indian; your mother’s half Thai, quarter Chinese, and quarter white. So you are—that’s why you are America’s son. Tiger Woods: Yes. Oprah Winfrey: You are America’s son. (Oprah Winfrey Show, April 24, 1997)

With Oprah’s designation and the ascending understanding of Woods and the nation as multicultural hybrids in the background, Woods lends authenticity to the imaginary moment by listing his multicultural qualifications. Conjuring up America’s fantasy continuum (marked by a past in which the world had come to America and a present in which America had become the world), Woods locates himself: Tiger Woods: Yeah. I guess two things . . . is that I guess now that I’m on the Ryder Cup team, which—we get to go over and play in Europe in September— that I won’t be representing the United States: I’ll be representing the United Nations . . . which is a little different . . . a little funny thing is, growing up, I came up with this name. I’m a Cablinasian: Ca, Caucasian; bl, black; in, Indian; Asian—Cablinasian. Oprah Winfrey: That’s what you call yourself? Tiger Woods: Yeah. (Oprah Winfrey Show, April 24, 1997)

Woods, denying any particular allegiance, appeals to a mythic globalization and declares himself a citizen of the world. While he and the apparently complex identity he simply claims appear to work against, both are very much part of, the discourse of nationalism. Not only does his refined multiracial category suggest that identity is a factual representation of genetic and cultural heritage, but it, paradoxically, reinforces the notion of the abstract person (detached from time and place) and imagines identity as voluntary (like the identity implanted in the multicultural new face of America). This is not to say that Woods is not implicated in globalization. Indeed, Woods is part of the international community; he is embedded in multiple connections to multiple places. However, those connections are economic and political, not the innocent invention of a child “growing


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up.” National interests are naturalized through mechanisms that imagine larger global loyalties and current and familiar racial categories obsolete. Like the feminine cultural hybrids manufactured by Time, Mirabella, and Betty Crocker, Woods seemingly provides morally sufficient answers to the cultural, economic, and political crises afflicting the contemporary United States and its position in global capitalism.

AFFIRMATIVE CULTURE IN 1990s AMERICA In this chapter, we have introduced the salient and remarkable assertions about identity, community, and culture made in the name of America through Tiger Woods. Indeed, Woods signifies a postnational order, suggests a transnational coalition of sorts, and is imagined as a global-national antidote. In the United States, a global organic community (an organic community that links the local, national, and global) is visualized through thoroughly nationalist terms. Most distinctively, at the level of nation, Woods is coded as a multicultural sign of color blindness. Proclamations of the nation’s venture to be color-blind, as Judith Butler (1998) explains, “is still to be related to race in a mode of blindness. In other words, race does not fall away from view, it becomes produced as the absent object that structures permissible discourse” (p. 156). Keeping the productive dimensions of discursive constraints in mind, we conclude by underscoring the contradictory effects of the national multicultural myth advertised through Woods. We review how disavowals of racism, apparently principled claims of inclusivity, and declarations of color blindness organize the regulatory discourses about race and nation, as they are encoded and enacted around a national event called “Tigermania.” America’s responses to Nike’s “Hello World” campaign, as we have argued, rely on and reactivate the logic guiding opponents of racial consciousness and affirmative action. Anti-affirmative-action sentiment, particularly as it has become entwined with demands for color blindness, was most recently reinvigorated during the mid-1990s as the media focused national attention on the Board of Regents of the University of California. The UC Regents were among the first to repeal their affirmative action program. Despite the perceptible distance (geographically and conceptually) between public affirmative action debates and America’s celebration of Woods, Woods’s intelligibility is deeply embedded in the commonplace values expressed in and through opposition to affirmative action. Thus, Woods is a crucial transfer point in the network of resistance to affirmative action. These dynamics are illustrated in the ambivalent representations of Woods as he is repeatedly designated as a racial sign of America’s radical racial transformation.


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As the “Hello World” campaign identified racism as a contemporary problem, the issue of racism was quickly translated into a problem of race consciousness. Evaluated through the restrictions on post–civil rights discourse, the problem was redefined in terms of how the category was introduced. By associating Woods with a racial category, Nike is deemed an agent of victimization. According to neoliberal and conservative post–civil rights logic, Woods is the victim of an ill-conceived marketing strategy that denies him his deserved transcendent position. Moreover, a logic of reverse discrimination is expressed in another of the popular responses to Woods: “It is funny how it works. Part of Woods’ appeal is his race. If he were just another blond-haired, blue-eyed golfer . . . he would be just another blond-haired, blue-eyed golfer struggling” (Knott 1996, p. B1). Such a reactive comment is symptomatic of the historical moment in which white men claim to be unfairly burdened by history. In particular, white male athletes are introduced as the new class of victims who suffer because race (rather than merit and accomplishment) determines value and marketability. Racial preference, presumed to be and presented as a violation of America’s moral model (the transcendent figure who bears no marks of history is the effect of the moral model), is advanced as a fundamental issue. “The national moment in the making” narrative (exemplified by the invitation to consumers to participate by watching “live” as Woods breaks through what is presumably the final racial barrier) seemingly departs from and intervenes in anti-affirmative-action sentiments. Yet, both antiaffirmative-action arguments and the national-moment-in-the-making narrative draw on the same celebrated morals that are the core of national culture. The isolation technique, which reduces racial discrimination in terms of time and space, is crucial to the event’s national consumer appeal. Moreover, the already in place “hero,” a hero encoded as an antidote to an outdated race discrimination that can be fathomed only because it exists in the “remote and elite” golf world, enhances its marketability. National intimacy is further secured as America imagines itself anticipating this hero’s arrival for more than a decade. Thus, “the national moment in the making” that consumers experience is not simply a celebration of Tiger’s personal accomplishments but of America’s accomplished abolition of golf’s elitism. Both the technique of isolation and the mediation of the event establish a national intimacy that allows consumer-citizens to take part in this intimate national event. Relatedly, Tiger is codified through terms that deny and inscribe, in ways that are specifically anti–African American, racialized othering. Indeed, the precise terms of opposition through which Tiger is interpreted as “a breath of fresh air”(Stodghill 1997, p. 32) are telling. The phrase easily recalls the now familiar demonizing representations of generations of African Ameri-


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can NBA players whose diverse infractions are routinely translated into a criminalized contempt for authority. And, more often than not, those infractions are taken up as a sign of a collective irresponsible sexuality and consumption. Woods, in this case, is offered as a carefully hued multiracial response to what is widely considered to be the primary source of the dissolution of the familial and—by extension—the national core culture: the regularly pathologized African American population (c.f. Reeves and Campbell 1994; Scott 1997; Smith 1994). Given the prominence of reproduction and family in the contemporary national politics of intimacy, the declaration of Woods as America’s new son is telling. Again, in a historical moment in which African American athletes are routinely characterized as engaging in nonfamilial sexual relations, Woods is represented as the embodiment of normal, immigrantfamilial America. Like the other simulated multicultural figures discussed by Berlant, Woods’s very existence sanctions the “disinvestment in many contexts of African-American life in the present tense” and points to a “new citizenship-form that will ensure the political future of the core national culture” (Berlant 1996, p. 424). Woods, America’s multicultural son, is a seductive element in a national image archive figured on the paradoxical claims about the nation. While African American basketball players are regularly charged with violating national core values, Woods has become revered for his cultural heritage and cultural literacy. Aware that earlier promotional incarnations of Tiger Woods’s persona had created media and popular interest but not the desired level of commodity consumption, Nike sought to appeal to the “classic” golfer (i.e., middle class and white) whose high levels of disposable income bolstered the golf economy. So, Nike’s Tiger Woods strategizing sought to evoke a brand image that was “more Armani than Gap” (Meyers 1998, p. 2B). This involved the use of more conservative designs and materials for the Tiger Woods apparel collection and, more crucially, it signaled a distinct change in the way Woods was represented within Nike advertising campaigns. This shift is exemplified in the deeply reverential “I am lucky” Nike advertising campaign which followed the “I am Tiger Woods” commercial: Hogan [Ben Hogan] knows, Snead [Sam Snead] knows, Jack [Jack Nicklaus] knows. I am lucky. Everything I have I owe to golf, and for that I am lucky.

This appeal to Woods’s position among the litany of golfing greats was indicative of the “revamping” of the “Woods brand” (Meyers 1998, p. 1B) in that it highlighted and mobilized another dimension of contemporary cultural dynamics and larger political concerns in America. Its rhetoric, a conservative appeal to tradition, draws a connection between Woods and


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those who came before him, thus furnishing Woods with a reassuring sporting and national cultural lineage. Unlike popular reactions to rank-and-file NBA players, Woods was thus codified as a multicultural agent who restores virtue to, as he is designated an extension of, America’s sporting tradition. Woods’s iconic national sporting pedigree was subsequently underscored by his superlative displays during the 1999 and 2000 PGA seasons. In 1999 Woods won eleven events, including the U.S. PGA Championship (his second major title) to finish at the top of golf’s world rankings and the PGA money list. Even these stellar achievements were surpassed in the 2000 season when Woods won the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the U.S. PGA Championship (three of golf’s four major championships) and a total of nine PGA tour events. In the wake of his domination of golf, Woods— everybody’s favorite multicultural American—has been rendered a cultural phenomenon, distinguished by his ability to stimulate popular interest (as measured by either the number of spectators at events or television audience ratings figures) rather than incite critical reflection. So this potentially progressive cultural figure has effectively been neutered by the forces of corporate capitalism, such that presently Most of us don’t need him to be a savior or a hero or a role model. We simply want the spectacle: Tiger gliding down the fairway, Tiger hitting rainmaker drives, Tiger pummeling his opponents and then putting his arm around them, Tiger hugging his mom. If he turns and winks back at us every once in a while, that will be enough. (Ratnesar 2000, p. 66)

The popular spectacle that Tiger Woods has become was evidently enough for Nike when, in September 2000, they signed him to a new fiveyear endorsement contract worth $100 million: Nike effectively paid this exorbitant sum in order to augment their somewhat faltering brand identity through a continued association with a suitably benign, yet engaging, face of America’s future citizenry that is Tiger Woods. In the end, this national-multicultural icon’s agency is figured through his squeaky-clean image, his enormous smile, and his ability (in terms of cultural work) to reproduce the permissible discourse of nation and race. America’s Tigermania is, finally, a celebration of cultural literacy, of a national myth, projected onto and relayed through Woods, that reinvigorates, rather than contests, white cultural prestige. Threats of cultural miscegenation, interference with the myth’s facile reproduction, are displaced onto racial identities now declared outdated. Thus, the narrative of continuity, Woods’s place within the genealogy of white male golfers and his location in the lineage of black athletes, works to enhance what it means to be an “American” in a global moment, which translates, in the last instance, into augmenting white culture. It is in this sense that Woods is America’s new model entrepreneur and citizen.


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NOTE 1. This version of this paper, which is truly a collaborative project, is meant to be an introduction to what we think are the primary issues surrounding the event that has come to be known as Tigermania.

WORKS CITED Allen, K. (1996, August 29). Advertising blitz to introduce Woods to the world at large. USA Today, 11C. Andrews, D. L. (1996). The fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s blackness: Excavating a floating racial signifier. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13 (2), 125–58. Berlant, L. (1996). Face of America and the state of emergency. In C. Nelson and D. P. Gaonkar (eds.), Disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies (pp. 397-439). New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1998). An affirmative view. In R. Post and M. Rogin (Eds.), Race and representation: Affirmative action (pp. 155–74). New York: ZONE Books. Cole, C. L. (1996). American Jordan: P.L.A.Y., consensus, and punishment. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13 (4), 366–97. Crain, R. (1997, June 23). The unique selling proposition falls prey to ads as entertainment. Advertising Age, 13. Custred, J. (1996, October 6). Swoosh! There it goes: After much debate, Nike pulls controversial Woods spot from TV circulation. Houston Chronicle, 27. Gabriel, J. (1998). Whitewash: Racialized politics in the media. London: Routledge. Higginbotham, A. L., François, A. B., and Yueh, L. Y. (1997). The O. J. Simpson trial: Who was “improperly playing the race card”? In T. Morrison and C. B. Lacour (Eds.), Birth of a nation’hood: Gaze, script, and spectacle in the O. J. Simpson case (pp. 31–56). New York: Pantheon Books. Jeffords, S. (1993). Hard bodies: Hollywood masculinity in the Reagan era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kelley, R. D. G. (1997). Yo’ mama’s disfunktional!: Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston: Beacon Press. Knott, T. (1996, September 11). Hello, Nike, and many thanks for telling Tiger’s tale to America. Washington Times, B1. Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lipsyte, R. (1996, September 8). Woods suits golf’s needs perfectly. New York Times, 11. Meyers, B. (1998, September 18). Nike tees up to try again; Woods brand gets new look. USA Today, 1B–2B. Page, C. (1996). Showing my color: Impolite essays on race and identity. New York: HarperCollins. Potter, J. (1997, January 15). Woods widens game’s appeal: Role model encourages minorities. USA Today, 3C. Ratnesar, R. (2000, August 14). Changing stripes: Just as with his golf game, Tiger has had to adjust his life to meet the demands of celebrity. Time, 62–66.


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Reeves, J. L., and Campbell, R. (1994). Cracked coverage: Television news, the anticocaine crusade, and the Reagan legacy. Durham: Duke University Press. Scott, D. M. (1997). Contempt and pity: Social policy and the image of the damaged black psyche, 1880–1996. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Smith, A. M. (1994). New right discourse on race and sexuality: Britain, 1968–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spousta, T. (1996, September 11). Ready for Tiger, not Nike. Sarasota HeraldTribune, 1C. Stevens, K., and Winheld, M. (1996, September 19). Fans flocking to catch Tiger at brink of fame. USA Today, 16C. Stodghill, R. (1997, April 28). Tiger, inc. Business Week, 32–37. Strege, J. (1996, September 19). Nike in the rough with Tiger’s controversial ad. Orange County Register, D10. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. London: Sage. West, C. (1988). The American evasion of philosophy: A genealogy of pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Williams, S. (1996, April 15). Tiger a ratings master, too: His grand slam triumph is most watched TV golf ever. Daily News, 87. Wilson, W. J. (1997). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Vintage Books. Yu, H. (1996, December 2). Perspective on ethnicity: How Tiger Woods lost his stripes. Los Angeles Times, 4M.


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2 Sister Act VI: Venus and Serena Williams at Indian Wells: “Sincere Fictions” and White Racism Nancy E. Spencer

Richard Williams proclaimed that a dozen fans in the stands used racial slurs and one fan yelled that he would “skin him alive” (Smith 2001b, p. 3C). If Richard says someone yelled something, maybe they did, but I know that’s not Indian Wells people. —Charlie Pasarell, tournament director (qtd. in Smith 2001b, p. 3C)

On March 15, 2001,Venus and Serena Williams were slated to meet in the semifinals at Indian Wells (California) in a match that was anticipated to be a “rare tennis treat” (“Rare Tennis Treat” 2001, p. 1C). The semifinal was to air live on ESPN, marking only the sixth time in their professional careers that the sisters would meet and the first time since their semifinal match-up at Wimbledon 2000. Ever since they met at Wimbledon, rumors had circulated to suggest that perhaps their semifinal match had been fixed by their father, Richard Williams (“Wimbledon Fixed?” 2001). Given an environment filled with rumors, the announced withdrawal of Venus just moments before her scheduled semifinal at Indian Wells “drew loud booing from the crowd of some 10,000 in the main stadium” (“Serena Advances” 2001). Two days later, Serena had to rally to win the final against Belgium’s Kim Clijsters (4–6, 6–4, 6–2) and was booed throughout the match (Smith 2001a). When Venus Williams and her father entered the stadium to watch the final, the elder Williams proclaimed that a dozen fans in the stands used racial slurs and one fan yelled that he would “skin him alive” (Smith 2001b, p. 3C). In an act reminiscent of the “Black power” salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, Mr. Williams turned 41


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toward the crowd and raised his fist in the air. In the aftermath of Indian Wells, Richard proclaimed that he saw evil at work in that angry crowd (Smith 2001b), adding that it was “the worst act of prejudice . . . since they killed Martin Luther King” (“Off-Court Distractions” 2001). Mainstream narrative accounts about superstar tennis players Venus and Serena Williams are frequently inflected with references to ‘race’1 and/or racism. Commentary about Indian Wells parallels similar discussions that focus on whether there is racism in tennis. Most commentary provides little insight to resolve that issue. In fact, perceptions vary from allegations of racism to arguments that the controversy is not about race. In particular, some tennis writers suggest that Richard Williams is responsible for instilling a “siege mentality” in his daughters by raising the specter of racism and/or by making accusations of racially motivated behavior (Celizic 2001; Kirkpatrick 1997; Schoenfeld 1999). Others dismiss charges of racism in women’s tennis by noting that it cannot be about racism because there are black players who have been welcomed onto the tour in recent years—for example, Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil, and Chanda Rubin (Evans 1997; Price 1997). Only a few acknowledge that racism contributes to the impression of the players closing ranks on the Williams sisters since the 1997 U.S. Open semifinals, when Venus and Irina Spirlea literally “bumped” into one another (Pentz 1997; Wolverton 1997). The incident at Indian Wells bears resemblance to what Feagin and Vera (1995) refer to as racialized events in the United States that occurred during the 1990s, including the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the Charles Stuart murder in Boston. To make sense of such incidents, many whites create “sincere fictions” that serve to sustain racist attitudes (Feagin and Vera 1995). By creating fictive accounts, whites make sense of their complicity in racist behaviors that are considered to be politically incorrect. In this article, I focus on mainstream narratives about the Williams sisters at Indians Wells to explore the persistence of white racism, also referred to as “dysconscious racism” (King 1997). The term dysconscious racism was coined by King to describe the uncritical ways of thinking about race that lead to tacit acceptance of “dominant White norms and privileges” (p. 128). Implicit in this uncritical stance toward racial inequity is the acceptance of “certain culturally sanctioned assumptions, myths and beliefs” underlying the racial order (p. 128). The notion of sincere fictions employed by Feagin and Vera (1995) helps to explain the integral role played by myths in sustaining white racism while obscuring how the terms of racism have shifted. Whether scholars refer to scientific racism, the new cultural racism, or commodity racism, I argue that the dynamics of white racism continue to operate through the mechanism of sincere fictions, as suggested by Feagin and Vera.


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COMING TO TERMS: THE “END OF RACE”? OR A RECONFIGURATION OF TERMS? New York Times journalist Vecsey (2002) contended that the Williams sisters’ domination of women’s tennis should lead the game into a more enlightened era “by forcing tennis to come to terms with racial issues” (p. 80). The difficulty in achieving this enlightenment stems from what Vecsey described as the “solipsism” of most tennis players, who have little context for comprehending issues of race and/or racism. Perhaps tennis players are no different from others who are unaware of the historical specificity of terms. To interrogate allegations of race and/or racism within the historical context of professional women’s tennis, I draw on Ben Carrington and Mary McDonald’s (2001) emphasis on the importance of pursuing informed sociological research in “specific historical periods in particular social contexts” (p. 2). George Fredrickson (2002) noted that the concept of race has a long history, while Fleming (2001) cited the first recorded use of the word in a poem by William Dunbar in 1508. In its current usage, race is described as a “loaded and ambiguous term” that, on one hand, can mean “a lamentable absence of ‘color blindness’” and, on the other, can refer to “insensitivity to past and present discrimination against groups that to be helped must be racially categorized” (Fredrickson 2002, p. 151). Fredrickson warns that the lack of precision in defining race and/or racism may threaten its utility as an “analytical tool for historians and social scientists examining the relations among human groups or collectivities” (p. 151). In the early twentieth century, the notion of racism began to circulate when historians and others expressed their understandings about a questionable set of beliefs and practices in relation to race (Fredrickson 2002). In its most conspicuous form, racism was historically manifest as white supremacy in the extreme racist regimes of South African apartheid, Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South, and the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany (Fredrickson 2002). Although some contend that “black racism” is now more problematic than white racism, most scholars consider white supremacy to be more dangerous (Fredrickson 2002; Goldberg 1997; hooks 1989). Several schools of thought that are used to explore contemporary operations of race include the “race over” thesis, critical race theory, and critical white studies. During the 1990s, a number of writers (including Crouch, D’Souza, and Patterson) began to forward the notion that “race was over,” or “at least doomed” (Roediger 2002, p. 6). Among the factors that supposedly contributed to the end of racism were new patterns of immigration, intermarriage, and global consumption of commodities associated with


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“exotic others.” In critiquing this school of thought, Roediger noted that the race-is-over thesis tends to sever discussions about “the present and future from any serious relationship to the past” (p. 7). Roediger’s critique is consistent with Carrington and McDonald’s (2001) admonition for scholars to use historical specificity in pursuing informed sociological research. In contrast to the race-is-over thesis, a number of legal scholars (including Bell, Crenshaw, and Thomas) have critiqued liberalism and espouse critical race theory as an antidote to liberal beliefs in “color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law” (Delgado and Stefancic 2001, p. 21). Of particular interest to critical race theorists is the transformation of “the relationship among race, racism, and power” (p. 7). Originating in the mid-1970s, critical race theory gained momentum among legal scholars and activists, especially during the past decade. Although it originally emerged within legal scholarship, fields as diverse as education, ethnic studies, political science, and sociology now employ critical race theory. Many scholars are also influenced by an emerging emphasis on critical white studies. Although considerations of race have typically focused on racialized “others,” some scholars have recently called for an examination of whiteness (Delgado and Stefancic 1997; hooks 1990; Roediger 2002). hooks (1990) contended that “only a persistent, rigorous, and informed critique of Whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear, and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on ‘race’ that perpetuates racial domination” (p. 54). Feagin and Vera’s (1995) examination of sincere fictions provides a means of exploring how the dynamics of white racism currently operate. The work of some scholars (most notably Delgado and Stefancic 1997, 2001) encompasses critical race theory and critical white studies. Whatever explanation of racism informs scholars, many agree that the terms of racism have been reconfigured (Carrington and McDonald 2001; Goldberg 1997; Marable 2000; Reeves and Campbell 1994). This reconfiguration is reflected by references to the new cultural racism (Denzin 1991; Fredrickson 2002), dysconscious racism (King 1997), commodity racism (Lury 1996; McClintock 1998; Willis 1995), and perhaps the most insidious form of white-over-black supremacy—white racism (Feagin and Vera 1995; hooks 1989; Roediger 2002). In the next section, I draw primarily on scholarship in critical race theory and critical white studies to explain how the dynamics of white racism can provide a basis for understanding the racialized incident that occurred at Indian Wells in 2001.


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WHITE RACISM AND THE OPERATION OF SINCERE FICTIONS The most notorious form of white-over-black supremacy (Fredrickson 2002) is referred to variously as white racism (Dyson 1997; Feagin and Vera 1995; hooks 1989; Lipsitz 1997) or dysconscious racism (King 1997). hooks (1989) considers white supremacy to be a more useful term than racism in describing forms of exploitation she has experienced. To elucidate the notion of white racism, Feagin and Vera noted that because racism is currently held in such opprobrium, few whites are willing to identify themselves as racist. Despite most whites distancing themselves from it, racism continues to be “a fundamental part of U.S. culture and is spread throughout the social fabric. Because virtually all Whites participate in the racist culture, most harbor some racist images or views” (Feagin and Vera 1995, p. 13). What obscures the reality of racism for most (whites) is the creation of sincere fictions that enable whites to resolve the dissonance between beliefs in equality and participation in a racist society. This form of white racism is usually predicated on the “belief that White prejudice is no longer a factor” (Reeves and Campbell 1994, p. 73). The assumption of innocence in relation to prejudice enables whites to construct an internal representation of the self that denies negative attitudes toward others (Feagin and Vera 1995) while still participating in discriminatory practices. In the words of Feagin and Vera (1995), the creation of sincere fictions (or “personal mythologies”) works to “reproduce societal mythologies at the individual level” (p. 14). To illustrate: Whites generally use these fictions to define themselves as “not racist,” as “good people,” even as they think and act in anti-Black ways. It is common for a White person to say, “I am not a racist,” often, and ironically, in conjunction with negative comments about people of color. The sincere fictions embedded in White personalities and White society are about both the Black other and [italics in original] the White self. (p. 14)

In the United States, where slavery ended with the Civil War and legal segregation officially ended in the 1960s, many whites continue to harbor negative attitudes that constitute “a well-developed White mythology about African Americans” (Feagin and Vera 1995, p. 136). That mythology stems from what came to be known as scientific racism that emerged in the seventeenth century.

SCIENTIFIC RACISM Racist theories that legitimized the institution of slavery began to circulate in Europe and later appeared in colonial America as early as the 1600s.


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These theories provided the basis for the ideology of scientific racism that became especially prevalent in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century (Andrews 2001; Feagin and Vera 1995). This ideology was manifest in practices known as craniometry (the scientific measurement of cranial or skull size) and phrenology (a belief that studying the conformation of skull size enabled measurement of mental capacity). Malik (1996) explained that phrenology provided the “basis for future racial science by insisting that external signs could provide a true indication of innate ability” (p. 87). This correlation between external signs and innate abilities became the basis for establishing differences not only between individuals but also between whole groups of people (Malik 1996). Phrenology also laid the foundation for Victorian beliefs in social evolution, which held that “different groups had diverged, stopped or regressed along the evolutionary path, according to their racial capacities” (p. 88). What was ultimately conflated in this emergent concept of race was the notion that “social inequalities became regarded as natural ones” (p. 71). Scientific racism prevailed until World War II, when its application fell into disrepute as a result of racist practices employed by Hitler in Nazi Germany. In the United States after World War II, condemnation of Hitler’s regime was accompanied by a civil rights movement located largely in the South that eventually “succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination” (Fredrickson 2002, p. 3). The move to outlaw segregation in the United States was enhanced by the increasingly global spotlight on how American “interests were threatened when Blacks in the U.S. were mistreated and abused” (p. 3). As a response to negative impressions that were conveyed by discrimination in the 1950s, the U.S. State Department chose tennis player Althea Gibson (1958) to travel to various countries throughout the world as a “race ambassador.” That opportunity provided the experience that would enable her to win the 1956 French singles title, as well as Wimbledon and the U.S. National Championships in 1957 and 1958 (Collins and Hollander 1994). She remained the only African American female to win those titles until Serena Williams captured the U.S. Open Singles title in 1999. Even though scientific racism was largely discredited after World War II, evidence of it remains in sport, albeit a “more subtle form of coded racism—based on cultural rather than crude biological difference” (Carrington and McDonald 2001, p. 1). The most visible traces of scientific racism remain in the obsession with black athletic bodies. Andrews (2001) linked this obsession/racist discourse to the historic era when scientific racism prevailed as the most commonly accepted explanation for the institution of slavery. Thus, the construction of naturally black sporting bodies is predicated on “a common assumption of the innate physicality of the Black body” (p. 121). That link helps to explain the cultural fascination with


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Michael Jordan’s physical prowess as witnessed by “Air Jordan” signifiers (Andrews 2001). Venus and Serena Williams have been characterized in terms of their physicality since their arrival within the popular imaginary as well. According to Daniels (2000), the physicality of Venus’s and Serena’s bodies clearly “communicate athletic training and prowess” (p. 26). Several examples illustrate how early commentary reinforced the emphasis on their physical attributes. Mewshaw (1993) reported that when Venus was a preteen, tennis coach Rick Macci observed her doing handsprings and likened her athleticism to Michael Jordan. Later as a teenager, journalist Bud Collins (1995) described Venus in her professional debut at the Bank of the West Classic as having “reedy limbs” that propelled her around the court “like an impala” (p. 8). Venus and Serena have been described in terms of their muscular, superconfident styles that set them apart not because of their race but because of their “raw talent” (Peyser and Samuels 1998). In particular, Chris Evert described the athletic ability and raw aggression of both sisters as making it difficult for the “women who aren’t Amazons” to compete with them (p. 46). On the May 2002 cover of Tennis magazine, Venus and Serena Williams are featured in a photograph that is accompanied by the words “Fitness Special: The Bod Squad/Working Out with Venus and Serena.” The photograph no doubt resonates with consumers who associate the Williams sisters with their strong bodies. As Daniels (2000) noted, it is not unusual for black athletes to be “celebrated in terms of a brute physicality and innate athleticism” (p. 26); however, the problem arises when this occurs to the exclusion of recognizing the role played by intelligence and/or hard work. In using such representations, Daniels reminded us of the importance of acknowledging that “the Williams’ superior physical conditioning should not be used to eclipse their use of intellect, tactics, and strategies” (p. 26). In the article titled “Bod Squad” that accompanied the cover photo of Venus and Serena, Brooks (2002) acknowledged that the Williams sisters worked hard to obtain their “hard bodies.”

CULTURAL RACISM The demise of scientific racism after World War II did not necessarily spell the end to racial hierarchies. Instead, a shift occurred in the racial hierarchy (Andrews 2001; Carrington and McDonald 2001; Fredrickson 2002; Lury 1996; McClintock 1998), leading to what Denzin (1991) referred to as the “new cultural racism” (p. 7). Whereas scientific racism relied on the appearance of external visage as the basis for differentiation in the racial hierarchy, identifiable signifiers of this new cultural racism included “language, dress,


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musical preferences, sporting identifications and religion” (Carrington and McDonald 2001, p. 1). As Carrington and McDonald explained, “cultural racism posits that although different ethnic groups or ‘races’ may not exist in a hierarchical biological relationship, they are nevertheless culturally distinct, each group having their own incompatible life-styles, customs and ways of seeing the world” (p. 1). Cultural racism is thus predicated on an understanding of culture as a whole way of life and has implications for racism in sport. The operation of cultural racism appears to legitimize black culture as it is conveyed through the media. Ironically, media access facilitates consumption of black culture by whites who do not even have direct contact with blacks. As Cashmore (1997) explained, Aspects of the Black experience can be integrated into the mainstream and, with the advent of the mass media, consumed without even going near Black people. Hit a remote control button and summon the sounds and images of the ghetto. This is culture as the antidote to racism, a way of removing the complexities of history and society from the mind by introducing a painless cure: legitimize Black culture, its literature, its religions, its athleticism and, perhaps above all, its music. (p. 3)

In the “Black culture industry,” there are clearly parallels between the roles played by music and sport. As Carrington and McDonald (2001) stressed, the relationship between sport and racism is intricate and paradoxical. On one hand, cultural racism has been most effectively challenged, while sport has also provided a platform wherein racist sentiments are often most clearly expressed (Carrington and McDonald 2001). The paradoxical quality of cultural racism provides insight into verbal and visual media representations of the Williams sisters as well, as evidenced by earlier references to the distinctive multicolor beads formerly worn by Venus and Serena (Peyser and Samuels 1998). Vecsey (1998) noted that numerous references were made to the “clattering colored beads” that they wore in braided cornrows (p. 438). In one analysis of their “Got milk?” photograph, Daniels (2000) described them as follows: The sisters Williams, two young Black women, stars of the women’s professional tennis circuit, are pictured each with one arm around the waist of the other and a second arm bent with a hand on their respective hips. Serena also holds a racket in her hand. The Williams sisters wear their trademark form-fitting athletic gear, milk mustaches, and their signature beaded corn rows. This time the beads are white, a nice contrast to their black outfits and skin. (p. 26)

Although they no longer wear their signature beaded cornrows, it was not unusual when they did to hear tennis analysts comment on their distinctive appearance. Although several commentators (Chris Evert and John


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McEnroe) discussed their opinions of the beads, another (Mary Carillo) characterized their hair as “noisy and disruptive” (Daniels 2000, p. 26). Commentary that dismisses their unique cultural hairstyles serves to mark the Williams sisters as “others,” just as descriptors that focus on their physicality often obscure the intelligence and hard work needed to obtain such results. One instance that illustrates the former occurred when Chris Evert and John McEnroe provided commentary for a 1998 French Open Mixed Doubles match between Venus Williams and Justin Gimelstob against Serena Williams and Louis Lobo. During the match, McEnroe asked Evert what she thought of the beads worn by the Williams sisters. In a somewhat bewildered response, Evert proclaimed that she was tired of the beads! This discussion and commentary about the Williams sisters’ hairstyles reflect how “sportscasters often seem challenged and mystified by what to say about them” (Daniels 2000, p. 26).

COMMODITY RACISM The shift to cultural racism also provides the basis for understanding the emergence of commodity racism (Lury 1996; McClintock 1998). Lury (1996) explained how this shift is represented by styles that are on offer for consumption through a form of commodity racism that has contributed to shifts in how racism operates, specifically to the shift from [italics in original] a racism tied to a biological understanding of “race” in which identity is fixed or naturalized to a racism in which “race” is a cultural category in which racial identity is represented as a matter of style, and is the subject of choice. (p. 169)

As a cultural or aesthetic category, Willis suggested that race is regarded “as a matter of style, something that can be put on or taken off at will” (as qtd. in Lury 1996, p. 165). This form of racism operates to commodify black culture in much the same way that commodity feminism works through the marketing of commodities to reflect the conjuncture between femininity and feminism. As a result of the latter process, discourses about women are reflected in “objects like Hanes hose, Nike shoes, Esprit [italics in original] jeans. Sign-objects are thus made to stand for, and made equivalent to feminist goals of independence and professional success” (Goldman 1992, p. 131).2 McClintock (1998) marked the advent of commodity racism in the mid-nineteenth century when the Pears soap campaign introduced the exhibition of commodities “as an organized system of images” (p. 305). To illustrate the whitening power of soap, one advertisement for Pears soap featured before and after images of two young children—one black and the


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other white. In the first photograph, the white child stands by a bathtub as the black child bathes. In the second photograph, the previously black child emerges from the bathtub to reveal a whitened body, albeit his head remains black. The apparent implication is that the Pears soap product has transformed the black child’s body. As the conjuncture between advertising and the manufacture of soap became part of international commerce, soap operated symbolically to expand the British Empire (McClintock 1998). By featuring scenes of the Victorian cult of domesticity on its packages, “advertising took the intimate signs of domesticity . . . into the public realm” and subsequently “took scenes of empire into every corner of the home” (McClintock 1998, p. 305). Most important, “Victorian advertising took explicit shape around the reinvention of racial difference” (p. 305). Ultimately, commodity racism became distinct from scientific racism in “its capacity to expand beyond the literate, propertied elite through the marketing of commodity spectacle” (p. 306). The spectacular marketing of commodities that reproduces commodity racism remains visible in the twenty-first century, especially in the global marketing of rap and hip-hop styles (Cashmore 1997; Light 1999; Osumare 2001; Potter 1995). Rather than marketing commodities that promise to erase the external visage of blackness, however, Cashmore (1997) suggested that black culture itself has been converted into commodity form. Following Adorno, who coined the term the culture industry, Cashmore contended that what was once disparaged and mocked is now regarded as part of legitimate culture. Any residual menace still lurking in African American practices and pursuits has been domesticated, leaving a Black culture capable of being adapted, refined, mass-produced and marketed. Whites not only appreciate Black culture: they buy it. (p. 1)

The notion of “residual menace” is evidenced in movie titles such as Menace II Society and rap hits such as Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet,” both released in the 1990s (Light 1999). In rap, hip-hop, and movies that are consumed by white youth, Light (1999) noted that Afrocentricity is provided through the “otherness” of crime and poverty. In addition to offering Afrocentricity as otherness, the co-optation of black culture is problematic in that it leaves the impression that racism has ended while keeping the racial hierarchy intact (Cashmore 1997).

COMMODITY RACISM AND SPORT The commodification of sport stars has been well documented in recent times (Andrews and Jackson 2001; Carrington 2001; Cole and Andrews 2001; LaFeber 1999; McDonald and Andrews 2001). By the 1980s and


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1990s, African American athletes had become among the most marketable, owing largely to what has been termed “the Jordan effect” (Johnson and Harrington 1998). Thus, the potential marketability of Venus and Serena Williams became apparent long before they turned professional in the mid-1990s. Among their predecessors, several (white) American women had realized increasingly lucrative endorsement potential stemming from their commodified celebrity identities (most specifically, Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, and Jennifer Capriati). Yet there was little reason to suggest that extensive endorsement portfolios might accompany the Williams sisters’ rise to fame, especially given the lack of commodification of their African American predecessors in tennis. Before Venus and Serena Williams arose to prominence, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and Zina Garrison were among the most visible and/or successful African Americans in tennis. Althea Gibson was known as the Jackie Robinson of tennis because she broke the color barrier in her sport. Yet her successful accomplishments never translated into earnings that allowed her to sustain a lengthy career. Thus, after capturing titles at the French, Wimbledon, and U.S. National championships, Gibson (1958) retired from tennis to pursue other endeavors. Gibson’s inability to translate success into financial gain owed, in part, to the fact that tennis remained an amateur space until 1968. Even during the nascent period of the “Open era,” when Arthur Ashe enjoyed his greatest success, his victories were accompanied by only modest pecuniary gains. When Zina Garrison later advanced to the Wimbledon women’s singles final in 1990, she was not even offered a clothing contract (with Reebok) until she reached the final against Martina Navratilova (Mewshaw 1993). Despite the reality that their African American predecessors had profited little from their earlier successes, several factors combined to create the possibility of commodification for the Williams sisters. For one, Venus was featured as a preteen in a front-page story in the New York Times, where she was touted as a potential successor to the young phenom, Jennifer Capriati (Mewshaw 1993). The significance of being identified as the next American celebrity was heightened by the perception that tennis was dying (Jenkins 1994), coupled with Capriati’s detour when she was arrested on charges of possessing marijuana. Narratives about the potential of two African American sisters hailing from south-central Los Angeles (Compton, in particular) appeared at a time that resonated with other cultural influences as well. In particular, the image-driven version of hip-hop that appeared in 1990s America had become a cultural force that was articulated with the Williams sisters coming “Straight outta Compton” (George 1998).3 In one oft-circulated version of their “origins story” (Daniels 2000), Richard Williams proclaimed that Venus and Serena had to dodge bullets while practicing on the debris-strewn courts of Compton, California. Their association with blackness was further


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reinforced by the elder Williams’ repeated references to his daughters as “Cinderellas from the ghetto.” At any other conjunctural moment, such verbiage might have been dismissed; however, given the context of 1990s America, the rhetoric resonated. By the 1990s, the cultural influence of rap and hip-hop styles had begun to surface in sport and contributed largely to the surging popularity of the National Basketball Association (NBA). George (1998) described the emergence of hip-hop as “a product of schizophrenic, post–civil rights movement America” that pervaded all of culture, including sport (p. xiv). In the NBA, the adoption of loose-fitting, baggy shorts and the proclivity of stars to cut rap and/or hip-hop CDs (e.g., Shaq and Allen Iverson) provided evidence of that influence. Cole (2001) suggested that hip-hop culture combined with the films of Spike Lee contributed to the popularity of narratives about Michael Jordan as well. The commodification of black athletes is nowhere more visible than with thrice-retired (most recently from the Washington Wizard’s) star, Michael Jordan, whose economic impact was once estimated at $10 billion and counting (Johnson and Harrington 1998). Although Jordan may be remembered as arguably the best basketball player of all time, some suggest that he leaves a greater legacy by virtue of transforming how celebrity athletes are marketed (McDonald and Andrews 2001). Although his endorsement earnings have since been surpassed by Tiger Woods, the commodification of Michael Jordan led Nike head Phil Knight to proclaim that Jordan was “the greatest endorser of the 20th century” (LaFeber 1999, p. 134). Among the endorsements that earned Jordan $100 million in 1997 were deals with Gatorade, McDonald’s, Nike, Oakley Sunglasses, Rayovac Batteries, Wheaties, and Wilson Sporting Goods, among others (LaFeber 1999). Jordan’s estimated impact of $10 billion and counting is clearly impressive, and yet, that estimate reflects only his impact in the United States and not his global reach (LaFeber 1999). However, because the United States serves as the global media center, the NBA and Nike combined to package their product and use the popularity of Air Jordan as a vehicle for a new form of imperialism (LaFeber 1999). Thus, it is useful to note that the Williams sisters emerged at a conjunctural moment when three critical factors converged: a perceived crisis in women’s tennis, the emergence of hip-hop, and imperialism on offer, initially through the commodified persona of Michael Jordan and subsequently through Tiger Woods. Aspiring to become the “Michael Jordan of golf ” (Rosaforte 1997), Tiger Woods burst onto the international scene in 1997 with a stunning performance at the Master’s Golf Tournament in Augusta. Although Woods’s success and charismatic presence provided the impetus for soaring interest in golf, his popularity also prompted tennis (and other sports) to search for the “Tiger” of their respective sports. Woods was initially perceived in


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relationship to blackness despite his attempts to identify himself as racially diverse. In particular, Woods articulated his identity as Cablinasian, a term he explained to Oprah Winfrey as representing “Ca, Caucasian; bl, Black; in, Indian; Asian—Cablinasian” (Cole and Andrews 2001, p. 81). Nonetheless, his association with blackness was conveyed by the Nike “Hello World” ad4, in which he posed the question “Are you ready for me?” (p. 75). The emergence of Tiger Woods coincided with several other noteworthy events that were significant to the timing of Venus Williams’s advance to the finals of the 1997 U.S. Open as well. The year 1997 marked the fiftyyear anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s crossing the color barrier in baseball. Also in 1997, then U.S. president Bill Clinton initiated a dialogue on race. In tennis, this was the year that marked completion of the Arthur Ashe Tennis Stadium that was dedicated at the 1997 U.S. Open. Given this confluence of events, Venus Williams’s advance to the 1997 U.S. Open finals took on added significance despite her eventual loss to top-seeded Martina Hingis, 6–0, 6–4. After years of hype, Venus Williams’s advance to the finals of the 1997 U.S. Open seemed to indicate that she might actually live up to her potential. Yet despite a storybook ending to her appearance in the finals, an incident occurred in the semifinal match between Venus Williams and Irina Spirlea that threatened to mar the event. As the two players switched sides during the second set of their closely contested match, Venus and Irina literally bumped into one another. Although both later claimed not to see one another at the time, Richard Williams immediately construed the incident as being racially motivated. Several weeks after Venus Williams lost to Martina Hingis in the 1997 final match, questions began to surface about whether tour tensions would hurt Venus’s marketing appeal (Wolverton 1997). Despite being hailed as the “Tiger Woods of tennis” (Wolverton 1997, p. 40), Venus’s perceived arrogance toward other players coupled with her father’s allegations of racism appeared to be problematic. Nonetheless, some companies admittedly welcomed the controversy. Even the overseers of the staid world of tennis failed to voice concern about the controversy if it meant greater visibility for women’s tennis. In fact, David Falk—who is better known as Michael Jordan’s agent—suggested that Venus’s “unique look, dynamic personality, and power game could help her set a new standard for tennis marketers” (Wolverton 1997, p. 140). Certainly the global appeal of tennis promised to enhance the marketability of Venus and Serena Williams. In the spring of 1998, the potential global appeal of tennis received a boost when the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) signed a multiyear pact with film producer Arnon Milchan of Regency Enterprises (Smith 1998). Milchan envisioned expanding the exposure of women’s tennis


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through a synergy with his entertainment resources. Among his long-term goals were to broaden tennis coverage in Europe and to include the Williams sisters and other top female tennis stars in entertainment ventures such as movies and game shows. That partnership would eventually contribute to the prime-time televising of the 2001 U.S. Open women’s singles final, where Venus and Serena Williams met one another for the first time in a Grand Slam final. At the beginning of 2000, the Williams sisters turned over management of their careers to IMG in what appears in retrospect to have been a savvy move that broadened their visibility and appeal (Weintraub 2001). As a result, IMG began “to make a targeted push to expand their appeal with their new agent (and former player) Stephanie Tolleson contacting several major non-sports companies” (Nichols 2001, p. 33). As both sisters continued to amass endorsement deals, their celebrity appeal was likened to their two predecessors—Michael Jordan in the 1980s and Tiger Woods in the 1990s (Nichols 2001). In December 2000, Venus Williams “signed a multiyear contract extension with Reebok that (was) believed to be the most lucrative endorsement deal for a female athlete” (Smith 2000a, p. 1C). The reported deal worth $40 million was thought to be for three years and made Venus the “highestpaid female endorser in sports history” (Smith 2000b, p. 14C). At the time, Smith (2000b) reported that “Venus also ha(d) multiyear endorsement deals with Wilson (rackets), Wilson Leather, Avon, Sega and Nortel” (p. 14C). The estimated total value of all deals was said to be about $70 million (Smith 2000b). Venus was not alone in lining up corporate sponsors. In 2000, she and Serena “raked in $17.5 million . . . between them” (Stein 2001, p. 56). Among their joint efforts, Cepeda (2001) reported that the sisters “entered a three-year, $7 million contract to endorse Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum” (p. 192). Several full-page ads have appeared in ESPN: The Magazine, a site that rarely features female athletes (much less African American female athletes) unless they are scantily clad. In the Wrigley ads that have appeared, the Williams sisters are fully engulfed by green spearmint leaves that reveal only small headshots of each. On one hand, the accompanying tagline may be a double entendre in suggesting that consumers “double your pleasure.” On the other hand, the ad could be read as a reflection of progress, given that African American female athletes once faced double jeopardy in the marketing arena by virtue of being female and black. While Venus inked a $40 million deal with Reebok on the clothing front, Serena “sealed a $12 million deal with Puma” (Cepeda 2001, p. 192). The sisters also signed on as spokespeople for Avon’s first-ever global campaign in television spots that “feature(d) Venus and Serena in a personal dialogue” about its products (p. 192). Serena had already begun to diversify


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her portfolio by adding several gigs in the entertainment industry—appearing “in rapper Memphis Bleek’s ‘Do My’ video featuring Jay-Z” (p. 192), and she appeared in a cameo role in a comedy starring Martin Lawrence, Black Knight, and had taken a job designing for Wilson’s Leather.

SINCERE FICTIONS AND COMMODITY RACISM Given the context of early twenty-first-century U.S. culture and the dominance of the Williams sisters, it should come as no surprise that they have been able to secure lucrative endorsement deals. The shocker is not that they have amassed impressive endorsement portfolios, but rather, how those endorsements have been understood and articulated within the circumscribed world of tennis. In one of the more provocative “takes” on their success, Stein (2001) reported that former No. 1 player Martina Hingis suggested that the Williams sisters receive more endorsements because of their race. According to Hingis: Being Black only helps them . . . (because) . . . many times they get sponsors because they are Black. And they have had a lot of advantages because they can always say, “It’s racism.” They can always come back and say, “Because we are this color, things happen.” (qtd. in Stein 2001, p. 58)

No doubt Hingis is sincere in believing that the Williams sisters receive endorsements because they are black.5 However, this logic obscures the reality that people of color have historically been excluded from tennis and that white racism continues to operate in the new millennium. As Wiley (2001) pointed out, “Hingis’ comment was not intended as sociology” (p. 4). Although I would not argue with Wiley’s conclusion, I want to suggest that her logic actually reveals the connection between sincere fictions and the operation of commodity racism. That connection would be further evidenced in the 2001 U.S. Open where Venus and Serena advanced to the finals.

“THE SUPREMES” AT FLUSHING MEADOW In September 2001, Venus and Serena Williams advanced to the finals of the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadow, New York. Playing in prime time before a record crowd, the event featured entertainment by former lead singer of the Supremes, Diana Ross, who sang “God Bless America” before the Saturday night match (Bodo 2001). When the Williams sisters took center stage for the Women’s Singles finals, it was the first time that tennis had been aired in prime time since the historic Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs match (aka the “Battle of the Sexes”) that was telecast on September 20, 1973. In


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comparison to the Battle of the Sexes that drew an estimated forty million viewers, “The evening’s CBS broadcast (of the Williams sisters) drew 22.7 million people—the biggest audience of any program that night, and nearly double that for the Nebraska-Notre Dame football game on ABC” (Nichols 2001, p. 31). Given the prime-time ambience, it was not surprising to find a plethora of entertainment stars in attendance, including Brandy, Spike Lee, Joe Namath, Sarah Jessica Parker, Robert Redford, Vanessa Williams, and hip-hop mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs, among others (Nichols 2001). Venus and Serena were not only the first sisters to reach the finals of a Grand Slam tournament but also the first African American sisters to do so. In recognition of the momentous occasion, and perhaps also in a desire to atone for the ugly incident at Indian Wells, fans at the 2001 U.S. Open greeted the sisters warmly, giving them a standing ovation. That warm response led commentator Dick Enberg to remark on the touching reception from the crowd. When he spoke of how wonderful it was to see the Williams sisters receive such a warm reception, Enberg may have been alluding to the dramatically different reception they had received at Indian Wells. Perhaps he hoped that this reception would convey the “true” hearts of tennis fans so that the “unfortunate” incident at Indian Wells could be forgotten. In all sincerity, Enberg conveyed the impression that the majority of mainstream (read: white) fans are not similar to those racists who booed and yelled racist epithets at Indian Wells. Yet a tacit caveat accompanied that message, implying that this was all the fans ever wanted—to see the two sisters play each other at the highest level of their sport and to demonstrate the same skillfulness that enabled each to dominate against the rest of the field in women’s tennis. Implicit in that caveat was the unsettling question of whether Richard Williams really did “fix” their previous matches. In the 2001 U.S. Open, Venus dispatched her younger sister (6–2,6–4), just as she had won in their previous meeting at Wimbledon (2000). As at Wimbledon, the historic U.S. Open match was later described as failing to live up to its hype (Bodo 2001). In much of the discussion about matches between Venus and Serena Williams, commentators had focused on the poor quality of their play against one another. For example, NBC commentator Chris Evert expressed her frustration in watching Venus and Serena typically overpower their opponents en route to their encounters only to put in subpar performances when they played against one another. Announcers who tried to make sense of the unique rivalry frequently compared them to other sibling rivalries, including Chris and Jeanne Evert and John and Patrick McEnroe. In both cases, the dynamics were different, in part, because the Everts and McEnroes were white, but also because the younger players never attained the stature of their older siblings and thus never threatened the dominance of Chris Evert and John McEnroe, respectively.


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Given that narratives and commentary about the Williams’ sisters meeting in the 2001 U.S. Open finals conveyed that fans just wanted to see the sisters play a quality match, one could argue that fans just wanted to get their “money’s worth.” Certainly, in light of the spectacular marketing and prime-time ambience, fans are often led to believe in their inalienable right to consume a “commodity spectacle.” Fans are frequently disappointed when the outcome fails to live up to the hype (witness the Super Bowl). Those who had “great expectations” for “Sister Act VI” may have been disappointed by the outcome of the 2001 U.S. Open women’s singles final as well. As Bodo (2001) described the match, it was an “impressive, if not particularly artful, display of power tennis,” leaving him to ponder the question of “whether or not sisters could ever muster the cold-blooded passion and high-quality tennis of serious rivals” (p. 27). In the year since the Williams sisters first met in the finals of the 2001 U.S. Open, they reached the finals of three out of four Grand Slam events (the 2002 French Open, 2002 Wimbledon, and 2002 U.S. Open). Ironically, although their quality of play rose dramatically with each new encounter, the latest criticism now reflects fans being bored by the sisters’ domination of the women’s game. If fans are disappointed when the sisters do not appear to play their best but bored when they play so well that they repeatedly meet in the finals, that does not leave much leeway for fans to get much satisfaction. And that may be a key to understanding how sincere fictions operate. It may be that whatever happens in the rivalry between Venus and Serena Williams, it is important to examine how sincere fictions obscure the operation of white racism.

CONCLUSION In the aftermath of their experiences in 2001, it should come as no surprise that the Williams sisters declined to return to Indian Wells in 2002 and 2003. Reports indicated they had no regrets about skipping the event in 2002 (“Sisters Do Not Regret” 2002). In articulating their rationale for not returning, Serena explained that the sisters like to have fun whenever they play tennis. Venus noted that their job is to entertain, adding that “I don’t think we were doing a great job entertaining them last year” (“Sisters Do Not Regret” 2002). The most unfortunate thing is that the tennis powersthat-be have failed to acknowledge their complicity in perpetuating racism by not addressing (publicly, at least) the event at Indian Wells. As a result, the Williams sisters are compelled to take the rap for fans and officials who seem willing to hide behind sincere fictions.6 Narratives and commentary that document the accomplishments of Venus and Serena Williams in 2001 provide evidence of sincere fictions


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that work in subtle ways to obscure white racism. Among fictions that have circulated, three relate specifically to the Williams sisters’ experiences at Indian Wells. The first is tournament director Charlie Pasarell’s response to Richard Williams’s allegation that the fans who booed and shouted racist epithets were racially motivated. Although Pasarell reported cringing at the unfairness of what happened, he later defended the “predominantly White tennis crowd that angrily booed (Richard Williams) and his superstar daughters” by suggesting that it was not Indian Wells people (Smith 2001b, p. 3C). Certainly, Pasarell’s statement does little to disavow the inexcusable behavior, not to mention that, as tournament director, he might have done something more provocative than cringe. The second example that reflects sincere fictions is Martina Hingis’s suggestion that the Williams sisters use race to obtain endorsements. The rationale of this argument is similar to the logic based on the notion that “sex sells” and therefore should be used to promote female athletes. In response to that notion, Plumer asks whether using sex to sell is “good business” or “sexism” (Levin 1992). Similarly, one might ask whether using race to sell is good business or racism. The irony is that Hingis’s observation reveals the link between sincere fictions and the use of race and/or racism in promoting consumption of athletes (commodity racism). Finally, commentary that alternately critiques the poor quality of play between the Williams sisters yet expresses boredom with their dominance reveals that there is a fine line between sincere fictions and the operation of (white) racism. Commentators who have attempted to account for the poor quality of play suggest that it may be difficult for the Williams sisters to play one another, especially given their well-documented closeness as best friends. Nonetheless, such discussions operate to fuel suspicions that their outcomes may be orchestrated by their father. As a solution, Pam Shriver, Venus’s former mentor on the tour, suggests that Venus and Serena just need to play a match in which both players perform at their highest levels so everyone can see that the matches are not fixed. That suggestion seems curious, especially when it also comes from John McEnroe, who admitted in his recent autobiography that players frequently agree to fix the outcomes (albeit of exhibition matches) to ensure competitive matches that are entertaining (McEnroe and Kaplan 2002). Although such agreements are known to be commonplace among players, there is a certain irony in that former athletes are the ones being so vocal about their suspicions. Then again, perhaps the suspicions are really about the operation of white racism. In light of the continued dominance of the Williams sisters in 2002 and early 2003, their absence from Indian Wells provided one of the few opportunities for other players to win a title. This is one case, however, where winning is not the only thing. The space of tennis has been graced by two


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exceptional women whose hard work, intelligence, and skills are repeatedly underappreciated. Although the spectacle at the 2001 U.S. Open appeared to atone for what happened at Indian Wells, that may be as much about the operation of sincere fictions as well. In fact, under the glare of the international spotlight, the need to put on a show of goodwill is not unlike the pressures that provided an opportunity for Althea Gibson to travel on a State Department–sponsored tennis tour. Thus, the spectacle of the “Supremes” at the 2001 U.S. Open may have been orchestrated to present the face of racial harmony to the rest of the world, whereas the memory of Indian Wells remains obscured for most, just as many other racialized events have demonstrated in the past.

POSTSCRIPT (MAY 2010) Since 2001, when the Williams family encountered hostile fans at Indian Wells, they have remained firm in their refusal to return. In 2009, Serena’s autobiography came out during the U.S. Open, providing insight into the events that occurred eight years earlier. Entering the 2001 tournament, Serena wrote that Indian Wells was her “absolute favorite tournament” (Williams and Paisner 2009, p. 62). In 1999, at the age of seventeen, she had won the title with a three-set victory over Steffi Graf. Since the site of the tournament (Palm Springs) was only a few hours from their home, the Williams family enjoyed spending time together whenever the sisters played there. For months beforehand, both Venus and Serena had looked forward to playing at Indian Wells. Going into the 2001 tournament, Venus had a 4–1 career record against Serena. In their quarterfinal matches, Serena took out Lindsay Davenport 6–1, 6–2, while Venus prevailed in a tough match against Elena Dementieva (Williams and Paisner 2009). Even though Venus won in straight sets, she “came down with heat exhaustion . . . (and) started to cramp” (Williams and Paisner 2009, p. 63). The match took an even greater toll on Venus as she injured her knee, calling into question whether she would be able to play her semifinal against Serena. On the morning of the day they were scheduled to play each other, “Venus checked in with the tour trainer and told him she didn’t think she could play” (Williams and Paisner 2009, p. 64). At that point, it was the trainer’s responsibility to consult with the tournament director so that another match could be rescheduled in its place. That was critical since the Williams sisters were slated to play in prime time and their match was to be aired live on ESPN. Even though Venus initially informed the trainer about her injury, Serena proceeded to warm up for her match as if they were still going to play. After Serena finished her warm-up, Venus told her that she had


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notified tour officials two hours earlier that she would not be able to play and wondered why no announcement had been made (Williams and Paisner 2009). In fact, it was not until five minutes before the match was scheduled to begin that “a tournament spokesperson finally got on the loudspeaker and announced to the packed stadium that Venus was withdrawing due to injury” (p. 67). By waiting until the last moment, it gave the impression that Venus (and not tour officials) was solely responsible for the late withdrawal. To say that fans were upset would be an understatement, although they wrongfully turned their wrath toward the Williams sisters instead of those who should have taken responsibility to announce Venus’s injury earlier in the day when they first learned about it. In the two days between Venus’s default and the finals between Serena and Kim Clijsters, the fans’ anger did not dissipate (Douglas 2005; Spencer 2004; Williams and Paisner 2009). In Serena’s autobiography, she shared how devastated she was by the unprecedented fan behavior during the final (Williams and Paisner 2009). To do it justice, one needs to read the full account of what Serena wrote in her chapter “The Fiery Darts of Indian Wells.” However, for this postscript, I want to highlight some of her observations because I believe they confirm how white racism operates and why the Williams sisters remain steadfast in their decision not to return to Indian Wells. When Serena stepped onto the court for the women’s singles finals against Clijsters, she described the booing fans as “loud, mean, aggressive . . . pissed!” (p. 70) Unlike the normally staid Palm Springs fans who “tended to be pretty well-heeled,” Serena faced “a sea of rich people— mostly older, mostly white—standing and booing lustily, like some kind of genteel lynch mob” (p. 70). In addition to the chorus of boos, she heard shouts of the N-word, as well as “one angry voice telling (us) to go back to Compton” (p. 71). Sadly, the behavior continued throughout the match, with fans cheering vociferously for Kim and booing loudly for Serena’s mistakes. At first, the fans got the better of Serena, and she lost the first set, but she somehow found the audacity to come back and win in three sets, drawing upon the memory of such predecessors as Althea Gibson and Zina Garrison (Williams and Paisner 2009). In looking back on the behavior of the angry fans, Serena wrote that she thought tournament officials could have done something to intervene in the situation: Some tournament official could have gotten on the loudspeaker and explained to the fans that Venus had been legitimately hurt, that I had nothing to do with her withdrawal, that every effort had been made to cancel that semifinal match in a more timely manner. Some effort could have been made to quiet


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the crowd. But no one did anything (italics added). The WTA people just sat there with their mouths open as all these people beat up on a little girl. The Indian Wells people just sat there with their mouths open, too. Everyone was in shock, I think—but that’s no excuse. (Williams and Paisner 2009, p. 81)

No one did anything! That was what amazed me at the time. I remember watching the events unfold on television, thinking that the crowd behavior was reprehensible. One of the announcers, Mary Joe Fernandez, even said that tour officials knew something might happen, and yet, no one did anything! In much of the discussion about the 2001 match at Indian Wells, Richard Williams’s statements about fans using racial slurs have been called into question by the use of qualifiers (Bierley 2009; Garber 2008; Robson 2008; Smith 2001; Vergara 2009). One example is the statement that “Richard Williams proclaimed (italics added) that a dozen fans in the stands used racial slurs and one fan yelled that he would ‘skin him alive’” (Smith 2001, p. 3C—cited in Spencer 2004, p. 115). The statement that he proclaimed that there were racial slurs implies that it was only his perception, and not necessarily what really happened. Another example followed with tournament director Charlie Pasarell’s response, which was “if (italics added) Richard says someone yelled something, maybe they did, but I know that’s not Indian Wells people” (Smith 2001, p. 3C). In my 2004 article, I suggested that Pasarell’s statement illustrates a “sincere fiction” through which white racism operates, according to Feagin and Vera (1995). Delia Douglas (2005) offers an astute analysis of how white racism is constructed through these comments as well. She explains that by questioning “if” this occurred, Pasarell’s statement provides a “partial concession to Richard Williams’ claims of racial harassment,” although he trivialized Richard’s remarks by suggesting that it was only “individuals” who were “making racist comments” (p. 266). Douglas (2005) concludes that, “the tournament director becomes an accomplice in the institutional practices and cultural processes that reproduce and maintain the racial hierarchy” (p. 266). Thus, when the Williams sisters encountered white racism at Indian Wells, it was part of a larger pattern of institutional racism that had been woven into the fabric of tennis historically. That pattern of racism is evidenced by the fact that when Serena won the 1999 U.S. Open Women’s Singles title, she became only the third African American player to win a Grand Slam title. Prior to the 1950s, there was no shortage of interest in tennis among players of color. However, because tennis was segregated, the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was founded in 1916, nurtured the best players (Collins and Hollander 1994). Some of the best women who


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played during the 1920s were Anita Gant, Inez Patterson, and Lucy Slowe (Captain 1991). In 1948, Dr. Reginald Weir first integrated the ranks of amateur tennis when he entered the U.S. Indoor Championship (Collins 2008). Althea Gibson was the first African American to win a Grand Slam title in 1956 when she won the French National Championships (Collins 2008). In 1957 and 1958, she added Women’s Singles titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. National Championships (Gibson 1958). Ten years after Gibson won her last Grand Slam title, Arthur Ashe became the first and only African American male to win a Grand Slam, as he captured the 1968 U.S. Open Men’s Singles and later the 1975 Wimbledon Championships (Collins 2008). Despite the pioneering efforts of Gibson and Ashe, both acknowledged that they faced racism during their tennis careers. In her autobiography, Gibson (1958) included an account of her reception at Wimbledon written by British reporter Scottie Hall in the Sunday Graphic. In describing her match against American Shirley Fry in the 1956 Wimbledon quarterfinals, Hall wrote that the Wimbledon crowd showed bias against Gibson that was palpable, “an unspoken, unexpressed but felt anti-Gibson atmosphere” (Gibson 1958, p. 99). Douglas (2005) contends that this “atmospheric pressure” contributes to the “social construction of whiteness” (p. 257). This notion of “atmosphere” is critical to understand as “a particular site of social struggle by virtue of the fact that it is a location in and through which ‘common-sense’ or taken-for-granted views of the social world are reproduced and disseminated” (Douglas 2005, p. 258). Douglas likens the atmospheric pressure that Gibson faced to that which the Williams sisters encountered at Indian Wells. Although Arthur Ashe played a decade later than Gibson, in the midst of a time when U.S. culture had seemingly made great strides in redistributing civil rights, he still acknowledged that there was a “pall of sadness” hanging over his “life and the lives of almost all African Americans because of what we as a people have experienced historically in America” (Ashe and Rampersad 1993, p. 127). Ashe wrote that he faced continuing evidence of racism each and every day, adding that “the sadness is still there” (p. 127). Serena Williams used similar language in describing the aftermath of her 2001 Indian Wells final against Kim Clijsters. As she and Venus drove back to Los Angeles, she described it as a strange and unsettling ride in which no one really spoke about what had happened (Williams and Paisner 2009). Normally, after a win, the sisters shared in the excitement. But in this case Serena said it was like everyone “had been stunned into silence. We all knew what we’d just seen and experienced, and it just kind of hung there in the car with us, like a pall” (Williams and Paisner 2009, p. 82). Needless to say, that pall provided the incentive for Venus and Serena to decide not


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to return to Indian Wells. Their decision to boycott the tournament has not been without consequences. In 2009, the Williams sisters’ boycott became an issue when the WTA implemented its “Roadmap,” whereby Indian Wells became a premier 1 tournament (Vergara 2009). As a result, it became mandatory to play, which meant that anyone who refused to play would be penalized. This presented a no-win scenario for the Williams sisters. Not only could they potentially lose income but they also ran the risk of losing ranking points. That is exactly what happened in 2009 when for most of the year Dinara Safina held the No. 1 ranking in women’s tennis, despite the fact that she had yet to win a grand slam event. Furthermore, in her meetings with Venus and/or Serena, she lost badly. Yet, because the Williams sisters refused to play at Indian Wells, on principle, they have seemingly been punished in the rankings. Was it intentional that Indian Wells became a premier mandatory tournament? The Tour would probably never admit to that, just as they have never acknowledged evidence of white racism in the egregious behaviors that occurred at Indian Wells in 2001.

NOTES 1. Following Carrington and McDonald (2001), I use single quotation marks around the word race here to indicate that I perceive race as an idea rather than as a term that has “objective biological validity” (p. 19). As the authors explained, ‘race’ becomes “meaningful within society via the ways in which we imagine it to exist, and subsequently organize our lives and identities around it. Put another way, if racism did not exist the term ‘race’ would become meaningless” (Carrington and McDonald 2001, p. 19). 2. See also Cole and Hribar (1995) for an insightful analysis of how “celebrity feminism” operates in sport. 3. “Straight outta Compton” was released in 1988 by the rap group known as N.W.A. (George 1998). Aside from being associated with the emergence of rap and hip-hop, Compton, California, was the home to Venus and Serena Williams. 4. In response to the “Hello World” ad, Nike was criticized for attempting to African Americanize Woods’s racial identity in a move that was perceived as playing the “race card” (Cole and Andrews 2001). 5. This logic is similar to arguments by opponents of affirmative action who suggest that people of color are at an advantage as a result of affirmative action. 6. In response to this statement, one reviewer wrote that by taking the rap, this seems to have IMG written all over it. In fact, Weintraub (2001) documented that since late 1999, when the Williams sisters signed with IMG, they had been coaxed out of their father’s shadow by the management company, convinced that companies were concerned by their father’s boastful and unpredictable behavior. Apparently, IMG’s move paid off as both Williams sisters have enjoyed unprecedented marketing success since then.


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WORKS CITED Andrews, D. L. (2001). The fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s blackness: Excavating a floating racial signifier. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 107–52). Albany: State University of New York Press. Andrews, D. L., and Jackson, S. J. (Eds.). (2001). Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity. London: Routledge. Ashe, A., and Rampersad, A. (1993). Days of grace: A memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Berger, I. (2007, April 9). WTA’s Roadmap 2010 still leading down a few blind alleys. Sportingo. Retrieved September 5, 2009, from www.sportingo.com/tennis/ a3016_wtas-roadmap-still-leading-down. Bierley, S. (2009, March 19). Why the Williams sisters still won’t play Indian Wells. Retrieved April 5, 2009, from www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/mar/19/williamssisters-indian-wells. Bodo, P. (2001, November). Perfect match. Tennis, 22–27. Brooks, K. (2002, May). Training day. Tennis, 34–39. Captain, G. (1991). Enter ladies and gentlemen of color: Gender, sport, and the ideal of African American manhood and womanhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Journal of Sport History, 18 (1), 81–102. Carrington, B. (2001). Postmodern blackness and the celebrity sports star: Ian Wright, “race,” and English identity. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 102–23). London: Routledge. Carrington, B., and McDonald, I. (Eds.). (2001). ‘Race,’ sport, and British society. London: Routledge. Cashmore, E. (1997). The black culture industry. London: Routledge. Celizic, M. (2001, April 1). Richard Williams damaging his daughters’ careers. MSNBC.com. Retrieved August 12, 2001, from http://msnbc.com/news/553159. asp?cp1=1. Cepeda, R. (2001, June). Courting destiny. Essence, 32 (2), 182, 184, 192–93. Clarke, S. A. (1991). Fear of a black planet. Socialist Review, 21 (3–4), 37–59. Cole, C. L. (2001). Nike’s America/America’s Michael Jordan. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc. (pp. 107–52). Albany: State University of New York Press. Cole, C. L., and Andrews, D. L. (2001). America’s new son: Tiger Woods and America’s multiculturalism. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 70–86). London: Routledge. Cole, C. L., and Hribar, A. (1995). Celebrity feminism: Nike style post-Fordism, transcendence, and consumer power. Sociology of Sport Journal, 12, 347–69. Collins, B. (2008). The Bud Collins history of tennis: An authoritative encyclopedia and record book. New York: New Chapter Press. Collins, B. (1995, August 17). 20th century Venus. Tennis Week, 22 (5), 8–9. Collins, B., and Hollander, Z. (Eds.). (1994). Bud Collins’ modern encyclopedia of tennis (2nd ed.). Detroit, MI: Visible Ink.


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Douglas, D. D. (2005). Venus, Serena, and the Women’s Tennis Association: When and where “race” enters. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22, 256–82. Daniels, D. (2000, Spring). Gazing at the new black woman athlete. Color Lines, 3 (1), 25–26. Delgado, R., and Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory. New York: New York University Press. Delgado, R., and Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University. Denzin, N. K. (1991). Images of postmodern society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Dyson, M. E. (1997). Race rules: Navigating the color line. New York: Vintage. Evans, R. (1997, September 18). Open emotions. Tennis Week, 24 (7), 20–21. Feagin, J. R., and Vera, H. (1995). White racism. New York: Routledge. Fleming, S. (2001). Racial science and South Asian black physicality. In B. Carrington and I. McDonald (Eds.), ‘Race,’ sport, and British society (pp. 105–20). London: Routledge. Fredrickson, G. M. (2002). Racism: A short history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garber, G. (2008, March 20). Unwarranted withdrawals detrimental to the integrity of the game. Retrieved January 5, 2009, from http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/ tennis/news/story?id=3302591. George, N. (1998). Hip hop America. New York: Penguin. Gibson, A. (1958). I always wanted to be somebody. New York: Harper & Row. Goldberg, D. T. (1997). Racial subjects: Writing on race in America. New York: Routledge. Goldman, R. (1992). Reading ads socially. London: Routledge. hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking black. Boston: South End Press. Indian Wells having no luck with Williams sisters. (2009, March 21). Taipei Times, 18. Retrieved April 6, 2009, from www.taipeitimes.com/News/sport/archives/2009/ 03/21/2003439004. Jenkins, S. (1994, May 9). Is tennis dying? The sorry state of tennis. Sports Illustrated, 80 (18), 78–86. Johnson, R. S., and Harrington, A. (1998, June 22). The Jordan effect. Fortune, 124–38. King, J. E. (1997). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and miseducation. In R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror (pp. 128–32). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kirkpatrick, C. (1997, September 18). Whinespotting. Tennis Week, 24 (7), 22–23. LaFeber, W. (1999). Michael Jordan and the new global capitalism. New York: Norton. Levin, S. (1992, April). The spoils of victory. Women’s Sports and Fitness, 62–69. Light, A. (Ed.). (1999). The vibe history of hip hop. New York: Three Rivers Press. Lipsitz, G. (1997). Greatest story ever sold: Marketing and the O.J. Simpson trial. In T. Morrison and C. B. Lacoeur, eds. Birth of a nation’hood: Gaze, script, and spectacle in the O. J. Simpson case (pp. 31–56). New York: Pantheon. Lury, C. (1996). Consumer culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.


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Malik, K. (1996). The meaning of race: Race, history, and culture in Western society. New York: New York University Press. Marable, M. (2000, February 25). We need new and critical study of “race” and ethnicity. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved September 28, 2002, from http:// chronicle.com/article/We-Need-NewCritical-Stuidy/16388/. McClintock, A. (1998). Soft-soaping empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.), Visual culture reader (pp. 304–16). London: Routledge. McDonald, M. G., and Andrews, D. L. (2001). Michael Jordan: Corporate sport and postmodern celebrityhood. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 102–23). London: Routledge. McEnroe, J., and Kaplan, J. (2002). You cannot be serious. New York: G. P. Putnam. Mewshaw, M. (1993). Ladies of the court: Grace and disgrace on the women’s tennis tour. New York: Crown. Morrison, T. and Lacour, C. B. (Eds.). Birth of a nation’hood: Gaze, script, and spectacle in the O. J. Simpson case (pp. 3–29). New York: Random House. Nichols, R. (2001, November). The Supremes. Tennis, 30–35. Off-court distractions. (2001, March 26). CNN Sports Illustrated. Retrieved March 7, 2001, from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/news/2001/03/26/ericsson_open_ap/. Osumare, H. (2001). Beat streets in the global hood: Connective marginalities of the hip hop globe. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 24 (1 and 2), 171–81. Pentz, L. (1997, September 18). Dealing the “race card”—Part II of our investigation. Tennis Week, 24 (7), 26–27, 52. Peyser, M., and Samuels, A. (1998, August 24). Venus and Serena against the world. Newsweek, 44–48. Potter, R. A. (1995). Spectacular vernaculars: Hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York. Price, S. L. (1997, September 15). Venus envy. Sports Illustrated, 87 (11), 32–37. Rare tennis treat: Williams vs. Williams. (2001, March 15). USA Today, 1C. Reeves, J. L., and Campbell, R. (1994). Cracked coverage: Television news, the anticocaine crusade, and the Reagan legacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robson, D. (2008, July 17). Serena won’t play Indian Wells; WTA’s new rule won’t change it. USA Today. Retrieved January 30, 2009, from www.usatoday.com/ sports/tennis/2008-07-16-wtasuspension-rule_N.htm. Roediger, D. R. (2002). Colored white: Transcending the racial past. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosaforte, T. (1997). Tiger Woods: The makings of a champion. New York: St. Martin’s. Schoenfeld, B. (1999, February/March). Serena Williams: Moving beyond the orbit of Venus. Tennis Match, 7 (1), 56–61. Serena advances to final. (2001, March 15). Retrieved August 11, 2001, from http:// espn.go.com/tennis/news/2001/0315/1155784.html. Sisters do not regret skipping Indian Wells. (2002, March 12). Retrieved March 15, 2002, from http://espn.go.com/tennis/news/2002/0312/1350365.html. Smith, D. (2001a, March 19). Agassi slams Sampras; Fans boo Serena’s win because of Venus’ exit. USA Today, 12C.


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Smith, D. (2001b, March 26). Williams decries fans as racist. USA Today, 3C. Smith, D. (2000a, December 22). Deal sealed, Venus endorses fee idea. USA Today, 1C. Smith, D. (2000b, December 22). Venus’ $40M deal breaks new ground. USA Today, 14C. Smith, D. (1998, June 4). WTA, producer make TV, entertainment deal. USA Today, 7C. Spencer, N. E. (2004). Sister act VI: Venus and Serena Williams at Indian Wells: “Sincere fictions” and white racism. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 28 (2), pp. 115–35. Stein, J. (2001, September 3). The power game. Time, 158 (9), 54–63. Vecsey, G. (2002, February). Age of enlightenment. Tennis, 80. Vecsey, G. (1998, August 30). The women have the better plots. New York Times Sports, Y27, Y38. Vergara, P. (2009, March 10). Venus and Serena Williams: Opponents on-court, united off-court. On the Baseline.com. Retrieved July 23, 2009, from www.onthe baseline.com/2009/03/10/venus-and-serena-williams-opponents-on-courtunited-off-court/. Weintraub, A. (2001, February 5). Ad-vantage: The Williams sisters. Business Week, (3718), 71. Wiley, R. (2001, April 5). From R-Dub, with love. Retrieved April 11, 2001, from www.espn.go.com/page2/s/wiley/010405.html. Williams, S., and Paisner, D. (2009). On the line. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Willis, S. (1995). I want the black one: Is there a place for Afro-American culture in commodity culture? In E. Carter, J. Donald, and J. Squires (Eds.), Cultural remix: Theories of politics and the popular (pp. 141–66). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Wimbledon fixed? Venus and Serena Williams in tennis shocker. (2001, March 27). National Enquirer, pp. 24–25, 28. Wolverton, B. (1997, September 29). So far, she’s not the Venus de moola. Business Week, 140.


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3 Ghettocentrism and the Essentialized Black Male Athlete1 David L. Andrews, Ronald L. Mower, and Michael L. Silk

Over the past four decades, the intertextually rendered spectacles of professional sport culture in the United States have become an instructive and impactful window into the practices and politics of commercially inspired popular racial representation. At the vanguard of this trend—albeit manifesting in differing ways—has been the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) and the National Football League’s (NFL) attempts to creatively manage their incontrovertible blackness. These leagues, within both of which black athletes have come to the fore both statistically and symbolically, have sought to either create (NBA) or sustain (NFL) their popular appeal among what remains a predominantly white mainstream American audience: the leagues and their ancillary promotional armatures have seemingly become preoccupied with “making Black men safe for White consumers in the interest of profit” (Hughes 2004, p. 164). Looking to further the understanding of this phenomenon, the present analysis keys on the relationships among sport, space, and the commercial politics of racial representation. In doing so, it contextualizes the (re)invention and policing of blackness within and through the promotional vortex (Whannel 1999; Wernik 1991) of the contemporary NBA and NFL. More specifically, this chapter examines the various ways that notions of the “urban” and the “street” have been used as both highly commercialized, and equally politicized, cultural metaphors framing the manner in which African Americans (and African American males in particular) are represented and understood in contemporary American culture. As such, a further aim of this discussion is to illustrate how the promotional circuses that have come to constitute these sport leagues play a significant role in the “ongoing battle over representations of the black urban experience” (Kelley 1997, p. 8) and thus 69


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contribute to ongoing travails impacting the lived experience of the contemporary American racial formation. Whereas S. Craig Watkins used the notion of the “ghettocentric imagination” to illustrate how some strands of black cinema “mobilize complicated meanings about the lived experiences of postindustrial ghetto life” (2005, p. 197), the NBA and NFL’s representational strategies have proved considerably less nuanced and insightful. Indeed, far from offering progressive depictions of race and racial difference, both leagues have become sites for spectacular confirmation of a default, and we would contend, regressive “ghettocentrism” (Andrews and Silk 2010; Leonard 2006a). By the term ghettocentrism, we are referring to what has become a pervasive promotional practice within the media sport complex. Specifically, the logics of ghettocentrism refer to the aesthetic and spatially grounded fetishizing and essentializing of black sporting bodies for their perceived, and indeed conjoined, athletic ability and urban authenticity: they are unproblematically assumed to be the products, and/or progeny, of the mythologized (equally romanticized as demonized) American ghetto. Empirically explicating the derivations, complexities, and contradictions of this problematic ghettocentric logic—specifically as mobilized within and through the promotional formations of the NBA and NFL— provides the focus of this discussion.

CONTEXTUALIZING GHETTOCENTRISM The ghettocentric representational logics, identified and analyzed within this examination of the NBA’s and NFL’s promotional circuses, derive from the intersection of two interrelated forces, namely, postindustrialism and post-Fordism. These constitutive dimensions of the ascendant late capitalist order (Jameson 1991) have profoundly informed the structure and experience of contemporary American society. However, and of particular relevance for the current discussion, is the postindustrial impact upon the material—and subsequent post-Fordist appropriation and embellishment of the symbolic—dimensions of the contemporary urban landscape. For as Maharaj astutely noted: The paradox is . . . that the same multinational-capitalist economic practices that led to deindustrialization and the immiseration of black urban communities in the post–World War II United States also produced the black basketball star as commodity and an object of desire for mass consumption; that both the “nightmare” of the urban ghetto and the “dream” of being a celebrity professional athlete are manifestations of the economic and cultural workings of late capitalism. (1999, p. 228)


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Hence, it is important to ground this discussion of sporting ghettocentrism within the postindustrial and post-Fordist context, of which it is both a constituted and constitutive element. Postindustrial is a somewhat misleading term, since the prefix post implies the conclusive movement beyond industrial productivity and relations. In actuality, most American cities continue to possess some—oftentimes not inconsiderable—degree of industrial manufacturing interests and employment. Hence, it is perhaps instructive to think in terms of deindustrialization as a constitutive process within the unfolding postindustrial condition. The key point, however, is that since the relatively high levels of productivity and prosperity of the immediate postwar era, the industrial manufacturing base of virtually all cities has dramatically declined, specifically, in terms of employment, manufacturing, and financial indicators. Hence, the levels of mass urban employment guaranteed in the heyday of industrial manufacturing are conclusively a thing of the past. With industries either being rendered obsolete within the new digital economy, becoming less reliant on a mass labor force due to the prevalence of nonhuman manufacturing technologies, moving to more efficient greenfield sites on the metropolitan peripheries, or relocating more cost-effective locations in developing nations, the scale of the urban industrial workforce has drastically diminished. As a result, there is simply no longer a sufficient number of industrial employment opportunities for the now reserve army of the urban working class that provided the labor supply for the industrialization of America in the years between 1850 and 1950. Urban deindustrialization has been decades in the making, during which time it has wrought significant social, economic, and cultural effects on the broader metropolis. Beginning in the 1950s, and rapidly accelerating following the inner-city civil unrest of the late 1960s, many urban Americans migrated to what became increasingly desirable, and thereby rapidly expanding, suburban communities. However, the opportunity to flee the economically, and latterly socially and ecologically, declining inner city for the “crabgrass frontier” (Jackson 1985) of suburbia was by no means readily accessible to all. This was “white flight” (Frey 1979) in the truest sense of the term. The racially iniquitous distribution of federal housing subsidies, legally sanctioned redlining practices, and discriminatory housing covenants all endured well into the 1970s and precluded many African Americans from buying into the suburban American dream (Pietila 2010). Consequently, a large percentage of the urban African American population were resigned to their plight of being confined in patently struggling innercity neighborhoods: those with sufficient levels of economic, social, and/or cultural capital were sometimes able to escape, leaving the most vulnerable to life in the unfolding urban dystopia. These were spaces of deindustrial decline whose degeneration was exacerbated by the replacement of the


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relative stability and affluence of contracted industrial mass employment, with either large-scale unemployment or the low-skilled, low-wage, hourly commitments of postindustrial service sector underemployment. With declining income levels (in real and relative terms) among the urban African American populace came a concomitant shift in the balance between home ownership and renting, marked increases in levels of building abandonment, and a habitual degradation in the general quality of neighborhood housing stock. As the employment, economic, and environmental base of such urban neighborhoods declined, so there was also an associated contraction in city taxes revenues, and, crucially, the public services funded by them (including provision for education, recreation, and public health); a process of retrenchment furthered by the seemingly relentless march to the present condition of roll-with-it neoliberalization, which rendered such neighborhoods ever more challenged (Keil 2009). As Williams and Collins noted: U.S. research has found that poor, segregated African American neighborhoods are also characterized by high mobility, low occupancy rates, high levels of abandoned buildings and grounds, relatively large numbers of commercial and industrial facilities, and inadequate municipal services and amenities, including police and fire protection. (2001, p. 410)

Indeed, policing strategies in such poverty-stricken neighborhoods wherein crime and violence rates have certainly escalated has stigmatized entire local communities by treating them en masse as potential deviants. Such is the only conclusion from the regressive and aggressive police tactics responsible for innovations such as those introduced to 1980s Los Angeles and beyond: “Police helicopters, complex electronic surveillance, even small tanks armed with battering rams became part of this increasingly militarized urban landscape. Housing projects, such as Imperial Courts, were renovated along the lines of minimum-security prisons and equipped with fortified fencing and an LAPD substation” (Kelley 1998, p. 199). Such a militarized approach to policing urban populations and fortifying urban spaces, in concert with the policy rhetoric which justified it, materially and symbolically recreated urban spaces and populations as abject threats to society as a whole (Dumm 1993). Urban industrial America had long been spatially divided along racial lines. In its earlier iterations, African American populations may have been socially separated and relatively economically impoverished; however, they were not as isolated from the rest of the urban populace as they are within the contemporary metropolis. Historically, many urban African American communities were underpinned by meaningful social institutions and networks, which proved important sources of support and identification for local inhabitants. However, the social breakdown resulting from dein-


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dustrialization and the attendant evacuation of vital populations, resources, and institutions from such communities lead to what Wacquant (2007) described as the shift from the communal ghetto to the hyperghetto. That is not to romanticize the earlier communal form which was far from devoid of social and economic challenges. Yet, within the contemporary American hyperghetto, macroeconomic and political policies have evidently combined to create ever more deteriorating, and increasingly isolated, economic, social, and physical environments. Furthermore, the prevailing “hyperghettoization” (Wacquant 2007) within the American city has generated an African American underclass which—to the relief and sense of ontological well-being of those more fortunate urbanites—inhabits a parallel, but to a large extent separate and self-contained, impoverished inner-city world. According to Massey and Denton (1998), this “American Apartheid” is manifest through one-third of the African American population living in spaces of intense—or hyper—segregation: They are unambiguously the nation’s most spatially isolated and geographically secluded people, suffering extreme segregation across multiple dimensions simultaneously. . . . Ironically, within a large, diverse, and highly mobile post-industrial society such as the United States, blacks living in the heart of the ghetto are among the most isolated people on earth. (Massey and Denton 1998, p. 77)

Not unsurprisingly, this social and economic isolation has led to increased poverty, crime, and incarceration rates and decreasing education, employment, and health outcomes for what was an already vulnerable community. As within many impoverished and underserved inner cities, in both developed and developing nations, drug, gang, and both personal- and property-related crime have become rife within America’s hypersegregated urban spaces (Williams and Collins 2001). As Collins identified, criminal behavior is but one response to the challenges of hypersegregation, and it demonstrates that many of those “African American youth living in the belly of the beast of the sole remaining world superpower” (2006, p. 298) are far from passive recipients of the deleterious effects of global macroeconomic policies. Yes, they may be marginalized and disempowered in a broader sense, but such challenging conditions sometimes stimulate creative strategies through which individuals look to overcome, or at the very least forge, some type of sustainable existence within the constraints imposed by their social location. For some, various forms of criminal practice and relations have proved to be ready and pragmatic solutions to the overarching experience of under- or unemployment, financial hardship, social isolation, and, indeed, existential hopelessness. With regard to more sanctioned behaviors, Kelley (1998) discussed a number of expressive cultural practices through


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which some urban African American youth have creatively negotiated the constraints imposed upon them by postindustrial urbanism. These include various forms of music, dance, visual art, and the primary focus of this discussion, sport. As Kelley notes, for some urban African American youth who envision limited opportunities in the deindustrialized workforce, basketball is the catalyst for the utilization of the body as a source of pleasurable creative expression and potential capital accumulation. He continues: I am in no way suggesting that this kind of “play” is emancipatory, revolutionary, or even resistive. Rather, it comprises a range of strategies within capitalism—some quite entrepreneurial in fact—intended to enable working-class youth to avoid dead-end, low-wage labor while devoting their energies to creative and pleasurable pursuits (Kelley 1998, p. 197).

While some sporting entrepreneurs may profit from their incorporation into the basketball-industrial complex (at high school, college, or professional levels), Kelley is right to point out that this system is highly exploitative and both socially and politically damaging in that it implicitly underscores individualistic ideologies or “‘success’ narratives that take racism off the hook by demonstrating that ‘hard work’ in the realm of sports or entertainment is all that one needs to escape the ghetto” (Kelley 1998, p. 197): Leaving those who fail—the overwhelming majority, many of whom will have almost unavoidably neglected their education in favor of “hoop dreams” (Robbins 1999)—to rue the personal/basketball shortcomings that resigned them to their fate, of being evermore entrenched within the hyperghetto. Interestingly, Collins (2006, p. 304) points to the reliance of the “punishment industry” and the commodification of black male bodies as the “raw materials” of the prison-industrial complex: “It is very simple—no prisoners, means no jobs for all the ancillary industries that service this growth industry. Because prisons express little interest in rehabilitating prisoners, they need a steady supply of bodies.” So, the basketball-industrial complex looks to urban America to supply the “raw materials” of basketball bodies looking to become commodified. These are potentially lucrative urban basketball bodies which, while necessarily no more athletically gifted than their suburban counterparts, have oftentimes been socialized into a very different basketball habitus. Thus, it could be argued, that the various armatures of the basketball-industrial complex have a vested interest in maintaining the existence of, and indeed its access to, the standing—and generationally reproducing—army of urban basketball bodies. If postindustrial forces and processes were responsible for the instantiation of the social, economic, and political conditions out of which emerged the spaces and experiences of hyperghettoization, it was post-Fordist shifts in the dominant regime of capital accumulation that led to the concerted


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and mainstream commercialization of urban African American practices, styles, and imagery. Although clearly implicated in broad changes in the scale and scope of industrial manufacturing (Gartman 1998; Allen 1996; Murray 1990), among other things, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism wrought significant changes on the very constitution and understanding of American consumer society. Precipitated by the crisis of Fordist overproduction and the need to stimulate the consumer marketplace, post-Fordism emerged as an antidote to mass-marketing strategies, which aggregated consumers into a narrow range of groupings based on crude social class classifications. The turn to post-Fordist approaches involved eschewing class-based market stratification in favor of a more aesthetically driven lifestyle and identity-based initiatives that could traverse traditional social class divisions and thereby render commodities appealing to a broader and more fluid range of consumer constituencies. Of key importance within the process of exploding the class-cultural monoliths of Fordist mass marketing was a clear commitment to, and engagement with, issues of otherness and difference. In Davidson’s terms, capitalism—specifically in its post-Fordist iteration—has “fallen in love with difference” (Davidson 1992, p. 199). Or, as Gilroy outlined: It may not have been adequately politicized, but with the demise of mass marketing it has certainly become a dominant commercial consideration. Its corporate life has been fueled by the fact that in the era of targeted precision marketing, the appeal of black faces and styles need no longer be restricted to black consumers. These profound changes have stimulated demands for exotica and authentic inside information that have been met enthusiastically by a new contingent of cultural brokers: a hip vanguard in the business of difference (Gilroy 2001, p. 242).

Clearly, post-Fordism is not simply concerned with a more explicit engagement with minority (read: racial/ethnic) market segments; in addition, and of more relevance for this discussion of sporting ghettocentrism, it was the incorporation of minority subjectivities into the discourses and logics of mainstream marketing. This precipitated a “profound cultural revolution” prefigured on, and responsible for, the commercial mobilization and representation of the “languages of the margin” (Hall 1992, p. 34). Ghettocentrist marketing can thus be understood as an exemplar of how the “old Fordist imagery, of a very few exclusive set of identities” is being compounded by post-Fordism’s “new exotica” through which it becomes possible to enact and experience “the pleasures of the transgressive Other” (Hall 1992, p. 31). Representations, embodiments, and performances of blackness are now redolent throughout the cultural economy as signifiers of a form of alterity that adorn commodities with a symbolic value that speaks to seemingly authentic notions of difference (Hall 1992, p. 31).


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The strategic ghettocentrism evident in the marketing and promotion of a litany of products and services (and not simply those possessing a generally established urban orientation), blatantly essentializes, and in doing so pathologizes, the African American populace. African American and black have become adjectives euphemistically, and seemingly indelibly, associated with the inner city (another raced euphemism), unemployment, crime, poverty, welfare dependency, drugs, and, for that matter, basketball (Cole and King 2003; Cole and King 1999; Cole and King 1998; Cole 1996). Black sporting bodies, and particularly (if not exclusively) those of African American males are thus routinely represented within the postFordist cultural economy as signs of inextricably conjoined racial-spatial difference that become mobilized in authenticating and advancing the symbolic value, and hence the exchange value, of particular branded commodities (Hall 1992). Indeed, such is the mass-mediated prevalence of this ghettocentric logic that—despite the presence of celebrated escapees, and more significantly the not inconsequential rise of the African American middle-class and upper-middle-class populations—middle American sensibilities routinely succumb to the assumption that the overwhelming majority of African Americans reside socially and economically in the islands of abject underclass poverty, crime, and despair, blithely referred to as ghettos within the promotional vernacular. However, within late capitalism’s visually propelled culture, any disparity between image and reality becomes largely inconsequential. As Yousman noted: [W]hether or not the images represent the life experience of most Blacks is immaterial. What is most important is not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity. For Whites who grow up imaging the Black world as a world of violence and chaos, the more brutal the imagery, the more true-to-life it seems to be. (2003, pp. 378–79)

Recourse to the raced urban simulacra belies the fact that post-Fordism is no more progressive in its willingness to engage, and indeed champion the experience of the racial other, than earlier phases of capitalist evolution. Whether referring to the mainstream commercial exploitation of specifically “urban” creative forms, expressions, and embodiments, such as music, dance, art, or sport, the post-Fordist corporation is simply motivated by an acknowledgement that within the contemporary moment, “Black equals cool equals revenue” (Hughes 2004, p. 172).

THE GHETTOCENTRIC NBA Kelley rightly identified the fact that “representations of the ghetto as a space of play and pleasure amid violence and deterioration are more than


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simply products of the corporate imagination” (1998, p. 196). Equally, and specifically with regard to basketball, it would be remiss not to underscore the fact that the commercial media has played a significant role in normalizing—to the extent of essentializing—the relationship between race (African American) and space (urban) in the eyes of the viewing and consuming public. Basketball has long been the game of choice for America’s ethnically shifting urban throng (Reiss 1991), and clearly the game was noticeably African Americanized, as that population came to dominate inner-city America in the mid to late decades of the twentieth century (Boyd 2003). However, that is very different from the routine assumption made by the popular media that any black player within the professional or intercollegiate ranks is assumed to be the progeny of the hyperghetto, with all the stereotypical assumptions that arouses. The plain fact that the majority of NBA players do not harken from such surroundings (Leonard 2010) clearly becomes obfuscated under the symbolic weight of basketball’s overdetermining ghettocentrism. Michael Jordan’s ubiquitous, and to some degree league-defining, imaged identity displayed a complex relationship with his own blackness, which was indicative of the prevailing racial ideologies driving the New Right’s ideological hegemony of the 1980s and 1990s (Andrews 2001; Jeffords 1993). However, over the past decade, blackness, or rather carefully managed and marketed expressions of urban blackness, have become an important feature driving the post-Jordan NBA (Lane 2007; Leonard 2006b; Markovitz 2006; Leonard 2004; Tucker 2003). However, within the intertextual NBA universe, it is possible to discern contradictory approaches to the league’s racial problematic. As in other cultural industries, so within the NBA, the commodification of the urban black body in particular has become a defining feature of its commercial strategizing. The league has efficiently responded to a new commercial cultural order by mobilizing the representations of race and racial difference it had previously shunned (Carrington, Andrews, Jackson, and Mazur 2001; Hartmann 2000; Maharaj 1999; Goldman and Papson 1998; Boyd 1997a; Boyd 1997b; Cole and Andrews 1996; Sandell 1995). In doing so, the league was mirroring broader trends within American popular culture associated with the rise of postFordism’s diversified regimes of capital accumulation (Harvey 1989). From the 1970s onward, Hollywood acknowledged the commercial value of incorporating a “ghettocentric imagination” within their output (Leonard 2006a, p. 23). Subsequently, films depicting life in America’s inner cities, particularly Boyz n the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), and Menace II Society (1993) successfully engaged black audiences as they simultaneously capitalized upon white America’s fear/fascination with urban spaces and communities (Denzin 2002). Similarly, from the early 1990s onward, the NBA became subsumed by its own ghettocentric imagination. Today, it is


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virtually impossible to avoid ghettocentric logic across the multiplicity of elements that constitute commercial basketball culture: it has become the game’s default promotional code. Allen Iverson arguably represented the most vivid embodiment of basketball’s then emergent ghettocentric logic in the mid to late 1990s. In branding terms, his association with the imagery and rhetoric of the street added a layer of gritty realism and sporting/cultural authenticity from which the highly spectacularized NBA had become somewhat distanced (Andrews 2006). Iverson entered the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1996, already possessing a public persona that went beyond his exploits on the collegiate basketball court, following two seasons at Georgetown. Iverson had garnered a degree of notoriety while still in high school due to him having served time in jail for his alleged involvement in a interracial bowling alley fight in his hometown of Hampton, Virginia. Despite his subsequent release and the overturning of his conviction, the very fact of being linked with crime and violence, especially when compounded with the media’s preoccupation with circulating the circumstances of his povertystricken single-parent upbringing, resulted in him becoming a metonymic personification of the street (Maharaj 1999). At the hands of a reactionary popular media, ever looking to corroborate pathologizing causal explanations for urban African America deviance (Reeves and Campbell 1994), Iverson was rendered a racially essentialized representative subject, on and through whose imaged identity were channeled the racially grounded fears and fascinations of the broader American populace. He was, at one and the same time, a touchstone for America’s antithetical blackophilic and blackophobic discernments (Yousman 2003). Iverson’s challenging personal history, coupled with his distinctive playing style and aesthetic presentation, marked him as the contemporaneous embodiment of black urban authenticity. This patent differentiation from the Jordan-dominated NBA mainstream was clearly foremost among Reebok’s motivations for signing him to a $40 million contract in 1996 and for dubbing him, and his signature shoe, “The Answer,” even before he had played an NBA game. As David Falk, his then agent (and indeed still Jordan’s), effused at an early marketing management meeting: With him (Iverson), I have a penchant to do it differently. It doesn’t work to do the same stuff that Jordan did in 1984. It would be as if Allen Iverson wore Michael Jordan’s custom-made clothes from 1984. They wouldn’t fit and they’d be out of style (Hirschberg 1996).

Through the accumulative influence of the annual advertising campaigns for “The Answer” Reebok shoes, Iverson projected an imaged identity grounded in the commonly perceived practices and metaphors of contemporary urban African American culture: expressive and defiant individual-


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ism; hip-hop; poverty and hardship; tattoos; crime and punishment; and conspicuous material consumption. Iverson thus became an examplar of the commodification of a strident expression of black masculinity (Boyd 1997b), whose carefully managed and promoted signification of urban authenticity was designed to communicate to both black and white audiences alike a seductive image of ghettocentric affirmation and/or fascination. He was the “king of hip hop ball” whose “style, attitude and overall disposition endeared him to many people weaned on the influence of hip hop itself” (Boyd 2003, p. 157). To bring the discussion more up-to-date, to varying degrees and in varying ways the imaged identities of current NBA notables such as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo Anthony have come to occupy a thirdspace prefigured on a financially inspired and commercially engineered engagement with the discourses of urban blackness. This amounts to a commercially expedient basketball ghettocentrism, realized through the strategic promotional mobilization stereotypical of signifiers of the urban African American experience and associated aesthetics, including sociospatial location; family history and constitution; and preferences for particular cultural practices, forms of attire, music, hair style, and modes of verbal and nonverbal communication. Despite not being the most successful or popular of the current crop of “next next big things” (Ballard 2006), Carmelo Anthony is a figure most illustrative of the aesthetic ghettocentrism underpinning the cultural economy of the contemporary NBA. Anthony is an individual who, like Iverson before him, has been paraded across the sport media for a series of minor indiscretions following his entry into the NBA. These included various traffic violations, marijuana possession charges, and seemingly unwitting involvement in the notorious “Stop Snitchin’” video (Woestendiek 2005). He is also a figure who is closely associated with a specific urban space: that of the poverty-, drug-, and crime-ridden streets of West Baltimore. Indeed, he has even been used as an arbiter of authenticity regarding fictional depictions of his hometown for NBA.com readers: While most who watch The Wire enjoy the comforts of leather couches and surround sound, Carmelo Anthony watches with an insightful eye. He grew up on the same streets that the show depicts. Carmelo knows the plight of the young black men who survive on the cold corners of West Baltimore . . . Carmelo Anthony says, “It’s real. Everything is real about it.” Carmelo’s confirmation about the show’s authenticity is frightening. The Wire’s fourth season focused on middle school children who are sharp and intelligent, but are unable to overcome shattered families: absent fathers, addicted mothers, and grinding poverty. (Ruderman 2008).

Furthermore, Anthony’s fluid yet dynamic playing style fits easily with common assumptions related to the expressive individualism of inner-city


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basketball, as does his choice of corporeal attire and adornment. Such a comprehensive and compelling urban provenance has provided Anthony with a seductive aura of ghetto authenticity, which has proved to be a lucrative form of cultural capital within the commercial marketplace. For instance, in 2003 Nike’s Jordan Brand division chose Anthony as one of its core endorsers and charged him to uphold the cultural prominence, and commercial value, of the Michael Jordan phenomenon. Within a series of commercials, Anthony’s position as one of the key inheritors of the Jordan legacy was subsequently explicated. In his first major commercial for Nike in 2003, Anthony’s identity was confirmed to the American public by way of an embodied transformation from Michael Jordan to “Carmelo Anthony, his student.” As well as positing his due deference to basketball’s living deity, this clever metamorphosis highlights the similarity and differences between Jordan and Anthony. The former in terms of playing style, the latter in terms of personal aesthetics; Anthony’s braided hair, head band, and tattoo marking a distinct contrast with Jordan’s understated style. In this, and numerous other commercials for the Jordan Brand, Anthony was involved in a two-way symbolic exchange between himself and his basketball/brand mentor. Jordan’s cultural presence and import—even in absentia when being referred to by name, as is the case in a series of Nike commercials featuring Anthony and the comedian Tommy Davidson—provided Anthony with a valuable basketball lineage. His unassailable “street” credentials simultaneously acted to, at least partially, urbanize Jordan’s image, thus providing the Jordan Brand with a more contemporary ethos and appeal. The process of urbanizing Jordan’s imaged identity is arguably a response to the ghettocentrist hegemony operating within the promotional circuitry of the NBA; a prevailing sensibility to which even icons such as Jordan must attend if they are to maintain their cultural relevance. To this end, an infectious 2005 Jordan Brand commercial featuring Anthony, fellow NBA player Quentin Richardson, the NFL’s Terrell Owens, and the music of rapper Common returned to the mid-1970s Brooklyn of Jordan’s youth (prior to his family moving to North Carolina). Within a highly stylized visual and musical narrative, the “Be” commercial located Jordan as the product of a clearly cohesive and self-confident black community. In doing so, it advanced Jordan’s urban provenance and relevance: something circumvented within earlier iterations of his commercial identity but clearly deemed a requirement of the contemporary moment. Anthony was also the sole focus of a major Nike campaign in 2005, titled “B More,” which centered on a sixty-second commercial. Filmed on location on Myrtle Avenue, the Baltimore street where he grew up, this sweeping narrative visualized Anthony’s journey from streets with boarded-up


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houses, incessant police sirens, and intrusive helicopter floodlights to the spectacular world of the NBA. It also acknowledged some of those who assisted Anthony on his epic American odyssey, such as neighborhood friends, a role model from the NBA (Bernard King), and college coach (Jim Boeheim). However, the viewer is left in no doubt that Anthony was the primary agent responsible for his successful advancement. This trope of determined individualism was underscored in the extensive website that augmented this campaign. In the opening section of the “B More” website, an anonymous voice announced: Turning obstacles into opportunities, Carmelo Anthony shows it’s not where you’re from but where you’re determined to go. From learning to shoot on a milk crate on Baltimore’s tough Myrtle Avenue to becoming one of the most exciting players in the game. Melo hasn’t forgotten his roots; he’s embraced them. So come behind the scenes of his latest commercial to find out what really drives Melo.

Herein, contemporaneous ghettocentric logic revealed its neo-liberal underbelly, and thereby its debt to the abstracted individualism previously championed and advanced by figures such as Michael Jordan. Moreover, basketball, and specifically the NBA, is positioned as a benevolent institution responsible for enabling potential “social parasites” to transform themselves lionized sporting celebrities (Maharaj 1999, p. 237). While the NBA has profited from the promotion of its teams, and specifically its constitutive celebrity brands (players) as embodiments of “the street cool that moves the merchandise” (Starr and Samuels 1997, p. 28), the league simultaneously continues to actively police what it clearly perceives to be the problems accompanying its incontrovertible blackness. Seemingly prompted by the perceived need to manage the league’s racial countenance, the NBA has introduced an onslaught of high-profile regulations aimed at policing player behavior on and off the court. Through media spectacularization of player indiscretions, these moral panic-inducing disciplinary edicts—such as those concerned with the size of headbands and wristbands and where they can be worn, length of shorts, clothing worn underneath uniforms, compression socks, ripping off of warm-ups, leaving the bench under any circumstances, disagreeing with referees, and players’ possession of firearms—become responsible for stigmatizing and criminalizing the entire NBA player personnel, with the bodies of the leagues young black males coming under particularly intense surveillance (Leonard 2010; Leonard 2006b). Such policies have been aimed at addressing the perceived instability of the league created by media discourses “intimating a link between the influx of younger players, hip-hop, and the lack of discipline” (Leonard 2006b, p. 159). As


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such, they once again illustrate the paradoxical relationship between the NBA and its ghettocentric subjects who continue to act both as a highly profitable source of cultural difference and authenticity and a catalyst for racial anxiety and concern.

THE GHETTOCENTRIC NFL While the NBA has made extensive and conspicuous efforts to vigilantly navigate the line between managing its racial order and employing a ghettocentric promotional logic, the NFL has focused more intently on the former. The sociocultural traditions and institutional structures of the game have acted as an impediment to what is an externally propelled post-Fordist ghettocentrism acting upon the NFL (largely generated through the encroaching influence of increasingly intertextual, to the degree of becoming parasitic, cultural industries). Boyd described basketball as “resolutely Black . . . The Blackness that defines basketball now is as American as apple pie” (2003, p. 175). Conversely, football, despite the abundance of bodies signifying a homologous identity, occupies a quite dissimilar “raced” space in terms of its residual blue-collar, industrial working-class whiteness. While basketball may be rooted in the material realities and symbolic expressions of a postindustrial urban blackness, football has perhaps maintained an attachment to the meanings of a blue-collar industrial whiteness through recourse to its now mythologized white working-class past. Football’s distinctly white social imaginary is routinely reproduced through the popular discourses, specifically when invoking particular spaces (Canton, Ohio; Pittsburgh steel mills; Midwest industrial towns); historic figures (Walter Camp; Knute Rockne; Red Grange); and evocative sensibilities (rugged individualism; European American heteronormative masculinity). At the turn of the twentieth century, football was a sport reserved for the white collegiate male elite, and it was an important proving ground for masculine traits of leadership, resilience, and toughness (Oriard 1993). Since that time, and as the game became democratized through its appropriation by the predominantly white industrial working class, football continued to convey particular meanings rooted in the Protestant ethics of discipline, sacrifice, and hard “work,” through which it became sutured to what Althusser and Balibar (1970) would refer to as the ideological structure in dominance of the white-controlled industrial capitalist project. As such, football has emerged as the rational industrial antithesis to the basketball “played” on the “postindustrial playground” (Kelley 1998). While Kelley noted the default promotional image of “street ball” as being “a world where young black males do nothing but play” (Kelley 1998, p. 196), football’s hierarchical structure, collective coordination, and rationalized


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division of labor suggestively articulated the game to the productivist ethos of blue-collar, white, industrial-era “work.” Thus, football came to represent an important conflation, or rather an erosion, of the liminal spaces between work and play: Within and through football practice, young men learn to sacrifice their bodies for the benefit of the collective, suppress their creative individualism through routinized labor, and submit to the will of authority. Further explicating the historical link between football’s inherent American values and its overdetermined industrial whiteness, Oriard notes coach Cameron Forbes’s early twentieth-century logic that “Football is the expression of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of a dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hopes of permanence” (qtd. in Oates 2009, p. 34). Furthermore, given its enduring white provenance, “Football has always been more resistant than basketball to black style” (Oriard 2007, p. 236). Thus, through its various institutional and discursive formations, and through formal and informal directives, football has aggressively policed its self-apparent racial paradox through the imposition of regulatory measures designed to repress the perceived encroachment of black bodies and culture into this traditionally white cultural space. As Oates suggests, black football players: routinely find themselves denigrated as unworthy successors to a previous age when the game was “pure,” [read White], while on the field, new penalties have been instituted in an attempt to police behavior and expression on the field. And while it is rarely noted in popular commentary, the unworthy, unruly athletes in question are usually Black. (2009, p. 44)

As with the basketball scenario, the actual sociospatial and cultural derivation of African American football players is largely inconsequential, as the complex diversity of raced subjectivity is routinely overlooked. To paraphrase Yousman (2003), the mere image of the black male body is simultaneously sociospatially essentialized and demonized as being authentic representatives of a narrow range of identities and practices associated with the postindustrial urban dystopia. Since the popular representations of blackness have been compellingly articulated to regressive racial stereotypes, the on- and off-field performances of black players are always already mediated through the lens of broader racial discourses. Hence, football’s black counternarratives both embody and legitimate the “White normative vision and privilege” (Hartmann 2007, p. 53) through which the game is governed and understood. Within the racially coded world of the NFL, black athletes have been simultaneously exploited for financial gain and sanctioned—not for fear of actual disruption or violence—for the historically entrenched fear of “Blacks breaking White-imposed law” (Cunningham 2009, p. 50). The


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sanctions and penalties for such transgressions provides a public exhibition of white control, which reassures the American mainstream that its position of authority is not under threat (see Cunningham 2009; Thomas 1996; Wonsek 1992). The NFL is particularly intent on penalizing athletes who make any attempt to stand out and assert some sense of individual style, creativity, or self-expression; the celebratory act (after scoring a touchdown or getting a sack, for example) itself being a distinct threat against the perceived sanctity of the sport’s once dominant white, working-class, industrial values. Subtly enforcing its racially motivated repressions, the NFL has “attempted to control and, indeed, erase such colorful expressions of triumph by asserting that they were unsportsmanlike displays. The league amended its rules in 1984 and 1991 to temper ‘any prolonged, excessive, or premeditated celebration by individual players or groups of players’” (Springwood and King 2000, p. 171). Or, as Cunningham more directly asserts, “because the NFL adopted stiffer rules on uniforms, touchdown celebrations, and taunting, Black athletes have borne the brunt and with little surprise: After all, these rules were specifically intended for Black athletes” (2009, p. 45). While attempting to control the perceptions of black lawlessness and avoid what was commonly seen as the NBA’s “image crisis” of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Cady 1979, p. 15), the NFL nonetheless incentivizes individual performance and markets particular players for their ability to enhance media exposure, popular appeal, and ultimately, revenue (Cunningham 2009). Again, reflecting the post-Fordist predilection to profit from consumer demand for productions of otherness, the NFL has been no stranger to such pursuits, although it has been more calculated and conservative in balancing its profit-driven veneer of multiculturalism against its underlying desires for white normativity (Goldberg 1994). As Fiske suggests: The argument is not what constitutes sportsmanlike conduct, but over who controls its constitution . . . Because the issue is not of behavior but one of control, in different social conditions, the same expressive behavior can be viewed by the power-bloc quite differently. In its TV commercials for the World Football League (which is the NFL’s attempt to spread US football to Europe), the NFL relies largely on images of black expressiveness that it attempts to repress back home. [For European audiences, presumably] the expressive black body signals not a challenge to white control but an American exuberance, vitality, and stylishness which European sport lacks. (Fiske 1993, p. 62)

While this early promotion of black expressiveness reflected a willingness to market the imagery of otherness abroad, the NFL has only more recently, and still reservedly, inculcated such strategies domestically. Within the contemporary American context, the discursive conflation of black athletes with criminals, rappers, and drug dealers (Lane 2007) has helped produce the ghettocentric promotional context through which acts of defiance have


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come to signify seemingly authentic notions of “difference and a site of desire” (Maharaj 1999, p. 235). Stemming from the uneasy relationship of the NBA and NFL with hip-hop culture and popular, albeit essentialized, representations of black men, urban space, and street culture, the promotion of such images further reinforces problematic racial articulations. For example, within the NFL, black players who have committed acts of defiance against league rules or are implicated in incidents involving drugs, guns, or violence are too often, uncritically and dismissively, framed within tropes of hip-hop hedonism. As conservative sport columnist Jason Whitlock alleges: African-American football players caught up in the rebellion and buffoonery of hip hop culture have given NFL owners and coaches a justifiable reason to whiten their rosters. That will be the legacy left by Chad, Larry and Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick and all the other football bojanglers. (qtd. in Cunningham 2009, p. 43)

Within such reactionary diatribes, “hip-hop” has become another raced euphemism for black criminality and deviance, the meanings of which also signify a commercially viable image of a putatively authentic otherness. In this sense, and despite the embedded traditions that construct football as occupying a very different ontological space than basketball, the desire to market black athletic bodies in a post-Fordist consumer culture has resulted in the advent of an essentializing and demonizing ghettocentrism infiltrating the NFL’s complex, and indeed intertextual, commercial circuitry. As an example of the aforementioned creeping ghettocentrism, a recent football segment on Nike’s website called “Countdown to Combat” (assumingly aimed at high-school-aged football players and/or young consumers) depicts a monthly calendar within which each day features an NFL star, Nike product, or remixed hip-hop track intended to “hype you up” for “game day.” In actuality, the site is reflective of what Oates (2009; 2007) would describe as the exhibition of the black body as an object of desire; commodified, fetishized, and able to be consumed through multiple platforms of cultural production. Almost exclusively featuring black football stars and hip-hop artists, the site offers a compendium of black bodies on display: in motion; half dressed; or, featured in audio track remixes with prominent hip-hop artists. Visitors to the site can download wallpapers featuring the half-naked (albeit displaying an armored skin) and provocatively posed bodies of Adrian Peterson, Steven Jackson, or Justin Tuck, dressed in no more than tight spandex shorts which accentuate more than they conceal. Given the fact that they are depicted in a static position, muscles bulging as they stare back at the viewer—as to more fully enable the viewers’ ocular inspection and imagination—the slogan appearing next to the bodies (“Prepare for Combat”) is also quite


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suggestive in terms of sexually objectifying the black male body as “a form of symbolic castration that denies both his masculinity and agency, in an attempt to render the Black male body, once again, controllable by white supremacist patriarchy” (Carrington 2000, p. 142). More specifically with regard to the NFL spectacle, Oates (2007) suggests that the invasiveness and homoerotic subtexts of events like the NFL draft and combine, wherein players are asked to “strip to their shorts and line up” (p. 77), functions both to “dehumanize and to sexualize the Black male body, in effect denying him his humanity” (Carrington 2000, p. 136). As an extension of the NFL’s corporeal obsessions, the inherent eroticism of evaluating the black male body “under the auspices of inspecting goods, as any good consumer might do” (Oates 2007, p. 84), is thereby mobilized through the corporally ghettocentric fetishization reflected in the hypermediated productions of institutions like Nike, the NFL, ESPN, and EA Sports (Oates 2009). Visitors to Nike’s website can also access a predetermined number of free audio downloads that appear for each week’s “game day remix.” The most popular track determined by its number of downloads is performed by Birdman and Lil Wayne, entitled “Always Strapped,” a reference to carrying a firearm at all times. Nike’s version features Adrian Peterson talking over the track: Let’s go. Aint’ no room for hesitation up in here . . . Cause its game time . . . Make your opponent pay the price. It’s time to step up and get it done, son. You go hard or you go home . . . you know your boys gonna put it on the line for you, they got your back, so you better have theirs . . . So what’s it gonna be, man?

Although obviously in reference to handling one’s business on the football field, it is interesting to consider the juxtaposition of Peterson within the song’s context of gun possession, drug references, and flashy materialism. Despite the powerful articulations of black men and gun violence in popular culture, Leonard suggests that “guns merely become a signifier of the danger, the lack of discipline, and purported pathology of black athletes. The problem isn’t guns, but ‘negroes with guns’” (Leonard 2010, p. 257). Stemming from the blackophilic and blackophobic (Yousman 2003) discernments of post-Fordist consumer culture, the self-same fear of black men owning, carrying, or referencing guns is also partly what drives the promotional ghettocentrism of companies like Nike. Thus, the very articulation of NFL athletes with hip-hop artists suggests a desire to mobilize the aesthetics of hip-hop, particularly those that reinforce stereotypical assumptions concerning the black urban experience (Kelley 1997), within the cultural economy of the NFL. In addition to Nike, recent Under Armour commer-


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cials appropriate the iconography of postindustrial decay as anonymous athletic figures train their sculpted bodies using the raw materials (heavy chains, cinder blocks, etc.) left behind in the dilapidated urban landscape of buildings, warehouses, and factories. While avoiding the explicit focus on celebrity athletes like Nike, Under Armour also attempts to capture an urban aesthetic and perceived authenticity through its associations with postindustrial spaces. Although the NBA has been quicker to cash in on an exploitative ghettocentrism, the NFL’s promotional ancillaries have begun to demonstrate a more purposeful association with urban themes and cultural products. Given its deeply sutured ethos of working-class whiteness, however, it is questionable whether the new ghettocentric promotional urbanism will be as pronounced as that of the NBA. In either case, the more intrusive practices of the NFL’s body fetishization reveals the preoccupation and capacity to quantify, commodify, and expose black bodies for the consumptive appetites of a white majority (Oates 2009, 2007). In this sense, it is conceivable that the process of inculcating street authentic themes and hip-hop to perhaps reach a younger demographic also carries the somewhat paradoxical subtext of reinscribing the homoeroticism of the “male gaze,” which Oates (2007) locates within the existent practices and promotions of the NFL product. It may also be that hip-hop’s entrenched sexism and misogyny (Rose 1994; hooks 1992) functions to synergistically reinforce the “panoptic line that must not be crossed if the orthodox masculine—which is to say the patriarchal heterosexual—credentials of competitive sport are to be maintained” (Pronger 1999, p. 374). While the NBA has thoroughly exploited postmodern consumer society’s fascination with the signs and symbols of racial difference (Hall 1992; hooks 1992; Baudrillard 1981) and of ghettocentric promotion more specifically, the NFL is perhaps moving toward a similar conjunctural space, albeit informed by a quite different institutional history. Within this moment, the corporeal signifiers of blackness—popular myths concerning the form, function, and sociospatial derivation of the virulent black (football) body—become a more central, if regressive, promotional strategy. This being despite the NFL’s clinging to the equally regressive vestiges of [industrial working-class] whiteness. In either case, it is difficult to see the NFL spectacle as anything other than a compelling corroborator of an entrenched, and enduringly hierarchical, racial order.

CONCLUSION If the NBA is fully immersed in ghettocentric logics as a primary motor and constituent of its promotional spectacle, then the NFL is clearly following


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suit. Furthermore, it would be remiss not to point to the spread of ghettocentric symbols and sensibilities throughout the broad expanse of the American landscape, and not simply the sporting, music, or entertainment spheres where black bodies most easily reside within popular consciousness (Gray 2005). Indeed, such is the perceived popular resonance and thereby commercial value of aesthetically and spatially essentialized representation of blackness that they can be discerned even in the most incongruous of cultural spaces. It could be argued this post-Fordist engagement with otherness points to the existence of a more diverse and inclusive marketplace, and hence society, the commercially inspired fetishistic appropriation of the black ghetto subjectivity is rooted in, and helps to perpetuate, highly problematic assumptions about race and racial difference. Furthermore, there is an argument to be made that branding strategies utilizing highly stylized representations of urban otherness are post-Fordist appeals to the more diverse markets; the NBA, NFL, Nike et al. seeking to forge better communication with black consumers (Armstrong 2003). However, the overriding impetus behind the ghettocentric turn would appear to be an essentializing of the embodied practices and experiences of black urban male youth as a means of denoting an “authentic Blackness” designed to appeal primarily to white, middle-class consumers (Cole 1996; Sandell 1995). As Maharaj noted, the “coding here of Blackness as pleasure, play, and authenticity effectively fetishizes Black bodies as commodities to serve capital’s expanding consumer needs” (1999, pp. 236–37). The forms of commodified blackness—exemplified by the ghettocentic marketing machinations of the NBA and NFL—are highly problematic since through them, “black bodies function as racialised symbols of cultural difference, without of course challenging the unequal power relationships that structure this consumption” (Carrington 2001, pp. 108–9). In habitually representing NBA and NFL players as the scions of the hyperghetto, they are rendered metonymic personifications of the wild and unruly streets (Maharaj 1999; Clarke 1991), pornographically presented to the American viewing public through the populist medium of local television news (Reeves and Campbell 1994). Through this increasingly pervasive ghettocentrism, the historically grounded racial fears and fascinations of the majority white population become managed and manipulated as much as the specter of blackness within these sport leagues. As McLaughlin noted, “As a source of popular cultural icons, basketball provides some of the key images for blackness in our society. But the images of this black sport are then consumed in this country by a white-majority audience, through media that consciously shape the images for white needs”(McLaughlin 2008, p. 137). The media’s perception of “white needs” with regard to the consumption of images of black bodies plays on—in a manner that effortlessly conflates—


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both the blackophilia (a seductive fascination with racial otherness) and blackophobia (fear and dread of racial otherness) that has always framed the structure and experience of the American racial formation (Yousman 2003; Mercer 1994; Clarke 1991; Rose 1991). Although speaking to the white appropriation of hip-hop, Kelley’s (1997, p. 39) insights can also be related to the consumption of black athletes, specifically when stating that the mainstream incorporation of the conspicuously black, urban form of musical expression that is “gangsta rap . . . attracts listeners for who the ‘ghetto’ is a place of adventure, unbridled violence, erotic fantasy, and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom.” Yousman further politicizes the blackophilia/blackophobia couplet: I argue that White youth adoption of Black cultural forms in the 21st century is also a performance, one that allows Whites to contain their fears and animosities towards Blacks through rituals not of ridicules, as in previous eras, but of adoration. Thus, although the motives behind the performance may initially appear to be different, the act is still a manifestation of White supremacy that is in crisis and disarray, rife with confusion and contradiction. (Yousman 2003, p. 369)

Through the complex media spectacle of the NBA, and increasingly the NFL, black athletic bodies are thus presented, either explicitly or implicitly, as being the necessary progeny of what Macek referred to as the urban “zone of crime and pathology and out-of-control urban populations” (2006, p. 2) simultaneously romanticizing and demonizing the evermore conjoined epithets of black and urban. It is in this sense that ghettocentric logics have rendered both the NBA and NFL, and more importantly, the black bodies who populate them, “simply another resource appropriated by the [corporate capitalist] colonizer” (hooks 1994, p. 150, brackets added) ever willing to accentuate, and thereby perpetuate, racial stigmas in the name of capital accumulation.

NOTE 1. This chapter develops upon themes and issues discussed in Andrews, D. L., and Silk, M. L. (2010). Basketball’s ghettocentric logic. American Behavioral Scientist, 53 (11).

WORKS CITED Allen, J. (1996). From Fordism and post-Fordism. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, and K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An introduction to modern societies (pp. 546– 63). Oxford: Blackwell.


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Althusser, L., and Balibar, E. (1970). Reading capital (B. Brewster, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review. Andrews, D. L. (2006). Disneyization, Debord, and the integrated NBA spectacle. Social Semiotics, 16 (1), 89–102. Andrews, D. L. (Ed.). (2001). Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Andrews, D. L., and Silk, M. L. (2010). Basketball’s ghettocentric logic. American Behavioral Scientist, 53 (11). Armstrong, K. L. (2003). Nike’s communication with black audiences: A sociological analysis of advertising effectiveness via symbolic interactionism. In D. Rowe (Ed.), Critical readings: Sport, culture and the media (pp. 210–28). Berkshire, UK: Open University Press. Ballard, C. (2006, October 23). The lost generation: The players who should be racking up rings and endorsements blew their chances. Sports Illustrated. Baudrillard, J. (1981). For a critique of the political economy of the sign. St. Louis: Telos. Boyd, T. (2003). Young, black, rich and famous: The rise of the NBA, the hip hop invasion and the transformation of American culture. New York: Doubleday. Boyd, T. (1997a). Am I black enough for you? Popular culture from the ’hood and beyond. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. Boyd, T. (1997b). The day the niggaz took over: Basketball, commodity culture, and black masculinity. In A. Baker and T. Boyd (Eds.), Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity (pp. 123–42). Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. Cady, S. (1979, August 11). Basketball’s image crisis. New York Times, 15. Carrington, B. (2001). Postmodern blackness and the celebrity sports star: Ian Wright, “race” and English identity. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 102–23). London: Routledge. Carrington, B. (2000). Double consciousness and the black British athlete. In K. Owusu (Ed.), Black British culture and society (pp. 133–56). London: Routledge. Carrington, B., Andrews, D. L., Jackson, S. J., and Mazur, Z. (2001). The global Jordanscape. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 177–216). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Clarke, S. A. (1991). Fear of a black planet: Race, identity politics, and common sense. Socialist Review, 21 (2), 37–59. Cole, C. L. (1996). American Jordan: P.L.A.Y., consensus, and punishment. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13 (4), 366–97. Cole, C. L., and Andrews, D. L. (1996). “Look—Its NBA showtime!”: Visions of race in the popular imaginary. In N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Cultural studies: A research volume (vol. 1, pp. 141–81). Cole, C. L., and King, S. (2003). The new politics of urban consumption: Hoop Dreams, Clockers, and sneakers. In R. C. Wilcox, D. L. Andrews, R. Pitter, and R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Sporting dystopias: The making and meanings of urban sport cultures (pp. 221–46). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Cole, C. L., and King, S. (1999). Documenting America: Ethnographies of inner-city basketball and logics of capitalism. In R. R. Sands (Ed.), Anthropology, sport, and culture (pp. 147–72). Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.


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Cole, C. L., and King, S. (1998). Representing black masculinity and urban possibilities: Racism, realism, and hoop dreams. In G. Rail (Ed.), Sport and postmodern times (pp. 49–86). New York: State University of New York Press. Collins, P. H. (2006). New commodities, new consumers: Selling blackness in a global marketplace. Ethnicities, 6 (3), 297–317. Cunningham, P. L. (2009). “Please don’t fine me again!!!!!”: Black athletic defiance in the NBA and NFL. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33 (1), 39–58. Davidson, M. (1992). The consumerist manifesto: Advertising in postmodern times. London: Comedia. Denzin, N. K. (2002). Reading race: Hollywood and the cinema of racial violence. London: Sage. Dumm, T. L. (1993). The new enclosures: Racism in the normalized community. In R. Gooding-Williams (Ed.), Reading Rodney King: Reading urban uprising (pp. 178–95). New York: Routledge. Fiske, J. (1993). Power plays, power works. London: Verso. Frey, W. H. (1979). Central city white flight: Racial and nonracial causes. American Sociological Review, 44 (3), 425–48. Gartman, D. (1998). Postmodernism: Or, the cultural logic of post-Fordism. Sociological Quarterly, 39 (1), 119–37. Gilroy, P. (2001). Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goldberg, D. T. (1994). Introduction: Multicultural conditions. In D. T. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism: A critical reader (pp. 1–41). Oxford: Blackwell. Goldman, R., and Papson, S. (1998). Nike culture. London: Sage. Gray, H. S. (2005). Cultural moves: African Americans and the politics of representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hall, S. (1992). What is this “black” in black popular culture? In G. Dent (Ed.), Black popular culture (pp. 21–33). Seattle: Bay Press. Hartmann, D. (2007). Rush Limbaugh, Donovan McNabb, and “a little social concern”: Reflections on the problems of whiteness in contemporary American sport. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30 (1), 45–60. Hartmann, D. (2000). Rethinking the relationships between sport and race in American culture: Golden ghettos and contested terrain. Sociology of Sport Journal, 17 (3), 229–53. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell. Hirschberg, L. (1996, November 17). The big man can deal. New York Times. hooks, b. (1994). Spending culture: Marketing the black underclass. In Outlaw culture: Resisting representations (pp. 145–53). New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Hughes, G. (2004). Managing black guys: Representation, corporate culture, and the NBA. Sociology of Sport Journal, 21 (2), 163–84. Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.


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Jeffords, S. (1993). Hard bodies: Hollywood masculinity in the Reagan era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Keil, R. (2009). The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization. City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13 (2), 230–45. Kelley, R. D. G. (1998). Playing for keeps: Pleasure and profit on the postindustrial playground. In W. Lubiano (Ed.), The house that race built (pp. 195–231). New York: Vintage Books. Kelley, R. D. G. (1997). Yo’ mama’s disfunktional!: Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston: Beacon Press. Lane, J. (2007). Under the boards: The cultural revolution in basketball. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Leonard, D. J. (2010). Jumping the gun: Sporting cultures and the criminalization of black masculinity. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 34 (2), 252–62. Leonard, D. J. (2006a). Screens fade to black: Contemporary African American cinema. Westport, CT: Praeger. Leonard, D. J. (2006b). The real color of money: Controlling black bodies in the NBA. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30 (2), 158–79. Leonard, D. J. (2004). The next M. J. or the next O. J.? Kobe Bryant, race, and the absurdity of colorblind rhetoric. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 28 (3), 284–313. Macek, S. (2006). Urban nightmares: The media, the right, and the moral panic over the city. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maharaj, G. (1999). Talking trash: Late capitalism, black (re)productivity, and professional basketball. In R. Martin and T. Miller (Eds.), SportCult (vol. 16, pp. 227–40). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Markovitz, J. (2006). Anatomy of a spectacle: Race, gender, and memory in the Kobe Bryant rape case. Sociology of Sport Journal, 23 (4), 396–418. Massey, D., and Denton, N. (1998). American apatheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McLaughlin, T. (2008). Give and go: Basketball as a cultural practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mercer, K. (1994). Welcome to the jungle: New positions in black cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Murray, R. (1990). Fordism and post-Fordism. In S. Hall and M. Jacques (Eds.), New times: The changing face of politics in the 1990s (pp. 38–53). London: Verso. Oates, T. P. (2007). The erotic gaze in the NFL draft. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 4(1), 74–90. Oates, T. P. (2009). New media and the repackaging of NFL fandom. Sociology of Sport Journal, 26 (1), 31–49. Oriard, M. (2007). Brand NFL: Making and selling America’s favorite sport. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Oriard, M. (1993). Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pietila, A. (2010). Not in my neighborhood: How bigotry shaped a great American city. Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee. Pronger, B. (1999). Outta my endzone: Sport and the territorial anus. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 23 (4), 373–89.


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Reeves, J. L., and Campbell, R. (1994). Cracked coverage: Television news, the anticocaine crusade, and the Reagan legacy. Durham: Duke University Press. Riess, S. A. (1991). City games: The evolution of American urban society and the rise of sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Robbins, B. (1999). Head fake: Mentorship and mobility in Hoop Dreams. In R. Martin and T. Miller (Eds.), SportCult (vol. 16, pp. 243–52). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Rose, T. (1991). “Fear of a black planet”: Rap music and black cultural politics in the 1990s. Journal of Negro Education, 60 (3), 276–90. Ruderman, J. (2008). Carmelo keeps a close eye on The Wire: The HBO hit series depicts a world that the Nuggets forward is all too familiar with. Retrieved September 1, 2010 from http://www.nba.com/nuggets/news/anthony_wire_feature_ 012008.html. Samuels, A., and Starr, M. (1997, December 15). Hoop Nightmare. Newsweek. Sandell, J. (1995). Out of the ghetto and into the marketplace: Hoop Dreams and the commodification of marginality. Socialist Review, 25 (2), 57–82. Springwood, C. F., and King, C. R. (2000). Race, power, and representation in contemporary American sport. In P. Kivisto and G. Rundblad (Eds.), Multiculturalism in the United States: Current issues, contemporary voices (pp. 161–74). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Thomas, R. (1996). Black faces still rare in the press box. In R. Lapchick (Ed.), Sport in society: Equal opportunity or business as usual? (pp. 212–33). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tucker, L. (2003). Blackballed: Basketball and representations of the black male athlete. American Behavioral Scientist, 47 (3), 306–28. Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. London: Polity Press. Watkins, S. C. (2005). Hip hop matters: Politics, pop culture, and the struggle for the soul of a movement. Boston: Beacon Press. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. London: Sage. Whannel, G. (1999). Sport stars, narrativization and masculinities. Leisure Studies, 18 (3). Williams, D. R., and Collins, C. (2001). Racial residential segregation: A fundamental cause of racial disparities in health. Public Health Reports, 116 (September–October), 404–16. Woestendiek, J. (2005, September 23). In ad, Anthony puts a better foot forward. Baltimore Sun, from http://articles.baltimoresun.com/keyword/bernard-king. Wonsek, P. L. (1992). College basketball on television: A study of racism in the media. Media, Culture, and Society, 14 (3), 449–61. Yousman, B. (2003). Blackophilia and blackophobia: White youth, the consumption of rap music, and white supremacy. Communication Theory, 13 (4), 366–91.


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4 Why Can’t Kobe Pass (the Ball)? Race and the NBA in an Age of Neoliberalism Anoop Mirpuri

“The soul is the prison of the body.” —Michel Foucault “My hope for Kobe is that he remembers that what is written within his heart is by far more important than what is written on his skin.” —Donald A. Bentley

On February 9, 2006, two-and-a-half years following Kobe Bryant’s indictment on sexual assault charges, Nike aired its first television advertisement featuring Bryant.1 Appearing just two weeks after his widely discussed eighty-one-point performance against the Toronto Raptors (the secondhighest individual scoring total in NBA history), the commercial features Bryant working out alone in the gym, with a voiceover in which Bryant self-consciously describes and prescribes his public persona: “Love me or hate me, it’s one or the other. Always has been. Hate my game, my swagger. Hate my fadeaway, my hunger. Hate that I’m a veteran. A champion. Hate that. Hate it with all your heart. And hate that I’m loved, for the exact same reasons.” The commercial marked a crucial turning point in Bryant’s professional career. It was largely regarded by the sports media as his reentry onto the lucrative stage of public endorsements, signaling the market’s ability to recuperate his profitability that had been badly damaged since his indictment: a victory for Bryant, Nike, and the NBA (Bresnahan 2006; Sandomir 2006). In praising the genuineness of the commercial, Bryant himself described his voiceover as an honest assessment of his position in

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the public eye, a “truthful” representation rather than one that attempts to “polish [his] image” (Associated Press 2006). Regardless of the commercial’s veracity, however, the particular narrative which it constructs—the public’s simultaneous antipathy and adoration of Bryant—allows Nike to draw upon his vexed history as a public figure in order to market its global brand. It is as much Bryant’s problematic character already ingrained in the popular imagination—Kobe the (alleged) rapist, the ball hog, the loner—that is being narrativized and marketed, as it is Kobe the extraordinary baller. Even four years later, following Bryant’s first MVP season in 2007–2008 and his fourth NBA championship and first NBA finals MVP award in 2009, his position as greatest player of his generation is never more than a step ahead of constant speculation over the extent to which Bryant has changed on and off the court. This commentary was fueled by his 2007 public lashing of the Los Angeles Lakers front office and subsequent trade demands and the ever-present memory on blogs and online chats of Bryant as a “criminal” and “rapist,” just as much as by his astonishing play. For Nike, as for the NBA’s media-commercial complex, Bryant’s embattled public representation becomes the condition upon which the refashioning of his function as global-market commodity can take place.2 Of course, this marketing tactic is certainly not new and has been done in the past with other oft-maligned black NBA stars, such as Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson. Yet it is precisely this recurrence which is at issue. Why is it that Nike seems to have been compelled to revert to a narrative strategy that simultaneously evokes, exploits, and apologizes for the public’s hatred of Bryant? Is it enough to explain this away by arguing that Nike was trying to recoup its losses (as a result of their mistimed investment in Bryant) by putting out a well-timed advertisement that would appeal to its consumer audience’s sentiments? Or must we look rather at the general discursive conditions that shape and regulate the representation of the contemporary black athlete? If so, we are forced also to ask more difficult questions about the relations among sport culture, changes in commodity capitalism, and the history of racial formation in the United States. If Bryant’s case can serve as a particularly rich instance, how has his figure been constructed in the public imagination so that he can come to be regarded as simultaneously loved and hated? What is the relationship of the figure of Bryant (and the black athlete more generally) to the contemporary politics of race and commodity consumption? And what might be the material value of this narrative construction of Bryant—not simply to Nike or the NBA but to the changing political and economic configurations characterized by neoliberalism and globalizing capital?3 In what follows, I address these questions by examining the narrative construction of Kobe Bryant as a public figure throughout his professional


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career and its role in the broader political and economic landscape. In this construction, Bryant’s figure has come to serve as a cultural symbol that has been shaped by, and contributed to, the terms by which “race” is read and deployed in popular discourse. I argue that this specific regulation of the discourse of race, in turn, becomes crucial to the way in which neoliberal capitalism organizes consumers, producers, raw materials, and cultural representations in maintaining and legitimating the racial stratifications through which it flourishes (Ferguson 2004, pp. 12–15; Lowe 1996, pp. 13–15; Brown 1995, pp. 58–61). This essay will focus on “black pathology” as the central racial narrative in which media constructions of Kobe Bryant have participated.4 In the Bryant discourse, black pathology becomes a general theme that serves to articulate several more specific sociological narratives which have historically comprised it throughout the twentieth century and have been continually produced, regulated, or sanctioned by the state: the black male rapist, the pathology of the “black family,” and the equation of blackness with criminality.5 While these narratives have worked to perform multiple ideological tasks, their general utility consists in the way they produce “racial knowledge” for popular consumption. This knowledge, in defiance of the seemingly endless calls to move “beyond” race, reifies racial difference in the popular cultural imagination. In doing so, sociocultural descriptions of blackness function to explain and rationalize material inequities as appropriate indices of difference, enabling capital to better circulate through the exploitation of racial stratification. As social theorist Etienne Balibar argues, unlike many forms of ethnographic description, it is the peculiar function of sociological theories about racial difference to emerge in the narratives of mass culture. These narratives tend to deploy “real-life” experience or “factual evidence” of intransigent differences that work to rationalize the very theory that made the narratives possible (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 19). According to Balibar, this “racist complex” works as such precisely because there exists a generalized “will to know”—that is, an urgent need to explain and somehow naturalize the otherwise distressing realities of racial inequality and violent forms of racist exclusion that saturate liberal democratic social life. These popularized narratives help fulfill this function by providing the interpretive grids with which we engage and act upon questions of race and difference. From a broader perspective, with this analysis I attempt to demonstrate how the NBA emerges as a crucial site in which narrative power wielded by a mass cultural apparatus is both concealed and exercised in relation to the demands of racial capitalism. While I explore the complex of signification embedded within the NBA and Kobe Bryant specifically, I also offer a critique of how race structures the terms in which cultural narratives are produced and circulated. The production of racial difference within


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the ideological realm provides us with the conceptual tools with which we engage the realities and effects of racism at the material level, as it gets indexed in economic inequalities, the differential valuation of human bodies, and premature death.6 Or as Stuart Hall argues, “racism, so active at the [economic] level . . . will have or contract elaborate relations at other instances—in the political, cultural and ideological levels” (1980, p. 338). Hall’s point is to encourage historically specific attempts at understanding how racism operates differently, among various levels of a social formation, in direct relation to the shifting configurations of capitalism.7 My broader intention, then, is to show how a critical reading of the media discourse surrounding the NBA can reveal how these mass-mediated narratives produce systems of meaning that are always articulated with the material requirements of capitalist production within a racially stratified social formation. Accordingly, the racialized commodification of Bryant’s body not only contains an economic utility but also serves a disciplinary function by which the threat of racial integration and black social mobility can be simultaneously evoked and neutralized. As a deindustrializing labor force has had to adjust to major global economic restructuring in the post–civil rights era, the slow movement toward integration of the service labor sector and the retrenchment of civil rights gains has been ideologically managed through the explosive growth in the visibility and profitability of blackness in the music and sport sectors of the culture industry (Gray 2005; Kellner 2003). It is through these mass-mediated publics, such as an NBA dominated by African Americans, that ethnic pluralism, racial equality, and labor integration can be validated as the fulfillment of America’s universalist project, at the same time as symbolic figures of racial difference are constructed within narratives that serve to maintain racial borders. In this way, media coverage of the NBA both indexes and enables the neglect of actually existing realities facing not just black people alone, but the working and workless poor in particular, such as residential segregation and urban poverty, high levels of unemployment, educational apartheid, and mass incarceration.

LIBERAL UNIVERSALISM, COLOR BLINDNESS, AND THE PERSISTENCE OF HISTORY On the first day of preliminary hearings in the sexual assault case against Bryant, the lead prosecutors—District Attorney Mark Hulbert and Assistant DA Gregg Crittenden of Eagle, Colorado—each received a T-shirt from a business called Hangmantees.com.8 One of the T-shirts declares, “I am not a rapist; I’m just a cheater,” surrounding the number “8,” which Bryant formerly donned for the LA Lakers. The other T-shirt parodies a promotional


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theme for MasterCard, itemizing the imagined prices Bryant might have paid for his trip to Colorado at the time of the alleged incident as compared with the privileged value of his gendered mobility (“Not bringing your wife to Colorado with you: priceless”). Each of the T-shirts depicts a stick figure hanging from a line—an obvious reference to the grade-school game Hangman—the allusion to which is ostensibly corroborated by the printing of Bryant’s name spaced by placeholders for its missing vowels (“K_B_ BRY_NT”). It was later revealed that the sheriff’s department in Eagle County had attempted to order seventy-eight of these T-shirts for its deputies and that eventually Hulbert had his T-shirt destroyed while Crittenden maintained possession of his at least until Bryant’s counsel raised the issue in a court filing months later, calling the T-shirts “racist” and “invocative of Klan lynching” of African Americans.9 Hulbert apologized with the disclaimer that “the shirts may be inappropriate, but they are certainly not racist,” while Assistant DA Dana Easter asserted, “There’s nothing showing Mr. Bryant being hanged. There is nothing about a lynching” (Pankratz and Lipsher 2003, p. B04). The disingenuous character of these statements by the DA’s office defies historical sensibilities. Of course, the meanings of the T-shirts and their possession cannot be neatly contained by denials of racism. At the same time, the effacement of the hanging man’s signification as evidence of racism is easily enacted by the public evocation of the specter of the “race card.” As David Leonard and others have argued, the accusation that someone has “played the race card” at once works to delegitimate any mention of race as a factor in jurisprudence, and in so doing, pathologizes African Americans for their purported inability to be “neutral” and “un-biased” before the court of law. In this view, race consciousness is the antithesis of objectivity, while any mention of race becomes the real example of “racism” (Leonard 2004, pp. 290–92; Crenshaw and Peller 1993, p. 66). It is as if the accusation that the T-shirts evoke a long history of white extralegal violence against blacks— in response to their presumed sexual violence against white women—was merely a cynical legal tactic that had nothing to do with the case itself. And yet the very fact that Bryant was indicted on rape charges enabled a popular narrativization that drew upon a long historical thread in American cultural and scientific discourse, which sees black men as hypersexual brutes, instinctively desirous of, and thus rapists of, white women (Ragan et al. 1996; Morrison 1992). While black feminist writers such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Angela Davis have exposed the mythology surrounding the figure of the black male rapist and the political utility of the myth in the historical justification of lynching, it is this same mythology that serves as the condition of possibility for the representational schema of these T-shirts—a mythology whose consistent deployment throughout the history of postemancipation United States has been rooted in the legitimation of racial segregation and


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the preservation of white privilege (Wiegman 1995; Davis 1981, pp. 183–90; Gossett 1963, p. 166). If the Hangman T-shirts activate the historical-scientific narrative of the black male rapist, enabling its insertion into the juridical process as the common sense of the prosecution, then here we confront the limits of the hegemonic position that understands race as an “irrational” impediment to an otherwise neutral legal process. This position is consonant with neoconservative doctrine that sees the progressive achievement of racial equality to be the product of a “color-blind” society, one which denounces so-called preferential treatment based on racial identification or ascription (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 117). This view assumes that the problem with granting prosecution and defendant a fair and objective trial is the very existence of race as a visually discernible category, one that is easily “read” through the primary indicator of skin color. Once we cease to “see” race, the story goes, we can easily “get beyond” race, securing justice and equality under the law. However, as Nikhil Singh suggests: The imperative to be color-blind only makes sense if we assume that to perceive color automatically leads to hierarchies of value. In the United States, only one socially significant tradition is built on this assumption: white supremacy. Under the universal, color-blind regime, in other words, we are forced back on an unstated belief in the order of white over black. (2004, p. 40)

As Singh and numerous historians and legal scholars have shown, “color blindness” as a discursive practice is not simply untenable, but in fact works to reinscribe the historical force of white privilege in the guise of an objectively “anti-racist” stance (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Peller 1995). Indeed, race is not simply a matter of optics or phenotype. Its persistence as an identifiable category is no less dependent upon signs such as class, cultural affiliations, national belonging, ethnicity, language, labor, and geography.10 The contests surrounding the social significance of race and the viability of “color blindness” as a method of combating racism potently reveal that today there remains a radical fissure between the liberal universalist ideal of abstract equality necessary for equal access to goods, services, labor, residential markets, and protection under the law and the divisions that constitute the lived reality of race. Nevertheless, the assumption that undergirds the logic of “color blindness” (formal equality regardless of race) remains that persons who identify with historically racialized groups are able to individually transcend the material effects of racialization in order to pass as abstract citizens. So, here we can ask, can Kobe pass? Rather, a more precise way of putting it would be: Why is it that Kobe can’t pass? For now I want to put aside the usual references of this question so as to think about its broader implications. I want to think about the conditions that compel us to ask this


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question in the first place, and whether or not we are always talking about basketball when we ask it. One way to begin such an investigation would be to examine how the Hangman T-shirts (and not just their possession by the sheriff’s department) work as part of a network of racializing representations. Indeed, the “hangman” makes it clear that the discourse surrounding the Bryant legal case signals the irruption of a deep-seated social anxiety governing racial divisions and classifications. Balibar has referred to this anxiety as the “phantasm of prophylaxis,” or the “need to purify the social body” by policing the borders of racial categories to prevent the unwelcome infiltration of that which cannot be guaranteed as belonging to one’s own (Balibar and Wellerstein 1991, p. 17). In the case of Bryant, the public maintenance of this border logic becomes apparent in the “hangman” web advertisements. The logo of the hanging man signifies predominantly, enlarged in a comic-strip-style dialogue box, as if to dispel any doubts regarding its expressive function. While its flirtation with a childhood game allows for a “nonracist” reading, the hanging man as logo juxtaposed with the symbol of Bryant’s own iconic status, the number “8,” suggests a curious reinscription of a Jim Crow South onto a mass-mediated post–civil rights public. This graphic juxtaposition points to the ways in which racial borders—and the privilege that accompanies the bodily abstraction of white masculinity—continue to be vigilantly monitored, only now through the commodification and hypervisibility of black bodies rather than through the mob terror of lynching and the enforcement of racial hierarchy via segregation (Wiegman 1995, pp. 49–50; Warner 1993, pp. 239–42).11 The other T-shirt’s MasterCard imitation thematizes an apparent dissonance between Bryant’s race and class statuses, revealing the mobilization of populist resentment over his class-privileged mobility. The allusion to the alleged rape is linguistically (if not semiotically) absent, replaced by the reference to Bryant’s decision to “not bring” his wife to Colorado. In other words, from the moment Bryant moves from the domestic realm to public space, there is no need to reconstruct the events, or to even name the charge—it can already be guessed in advance (Sielke 2002, p. 2). Bryant’s very presence in public space signifies threat. Indeed, here the charge of rape evidently matters less than the fact that he could not help but transgress the institution of marriage and have sex with a white woman. As a result, the accuser becomes merely functional, her claim transformed into a justification to indict Bryant as an adulterer and sexual deviant. The violent punishment envisioned for Bryant is thus seen as the result of an inevitable course of events, the basis of which is the disjunction between Bryant’s blackness and his privileged class position—the former revealing the untenable character of the latter. This construction recycles the key element of the black male rapist narrative. By evoking the dangerous specter of interracial sex, the T-shirt becomes a rhetorical effort to police class status


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according to race. A disjuncture is constructed between Bryant’s blackness and his privileged class position, signifying his inability to assimilate to the normative standards of American culture. And so his transgressions are figured as finally revealing an inherent defect that had always laid hidden within him, a blackness that now seeps through every image of him displayed on our television screens.12 If Bryant’s figure has in part represented a social transcendence of race/class divides (à la Michael Jordan), in the signification presented by the Hangman T-shirts, Bryant’s apparent pretension to the social mobility that class privilege entails can finally be exposed as a bad imitation—a failed pass?—of cosmopolitan whiteness.

REALITY, REPRESENTATION, AND THE “NONFICTIONAL” PASSING NARRATIVE Critical commentary on narratives of racial passing as an American cultural phenomenon have tended to emphasize passing as a willful act, an assertion of agency, using terms such as desire and motivation when describing fictional characters who pass from black to white to “gain access to social and economic opportunities” (Ginsberg 1996, p. 3). Thus passing is often seen as a subversive challenge to tightly circumscribed racial identity categories that preserve class privilege and to the unstable visual logic upon which racial classification is based (Wald 2000, pp. 5–7; Ginsberg 1996, pp. 3–4).13 Most of this criticism, however, has neglected to recognize the pervasiveness of “nonfictional” passing narratives existing in popular culture, the construction of which as “reality” obscures their fabricated and representational qualities. In these narratives, the “real-life” passer is understood as a subject who has made a willful decision to pass. The subject is made to exist as an unmediated, empirical entity—a “reality” that exists outside of its representation and consumption by the viewer. At the same time, this pass only exists as such at the moment the subject comes to function, through her/his representation, as an object of knowledge and consumption for a viewing audience.14 In other words, this form of “passing” is embedded in the process of consumption rather than of production; it is initiated not by the passing subject but by the reader/consumer. Indeed, the pass emerges in the very rupture in the reader’s conception of the coherency of racial, sexual, class, and gender identity. We might ask, then, how does a racialized and commodified icon such as Kobe Bryant identify with the terms by which his body is marketed and narrativized for consumption? Moreover, can we read the marketing of popular icons through narrative as serving a social disciplinary task that teaches consumers racially coded reading practices? As we have seen with the Hangman construction, passing can be read as a popular trope that


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actually produces Bryant as an object of knowledge by narrativizing his acts of racial and sexual transgression. This can be seen most acutely in media narratives that tend to emphasize Bryant’s upper-class status and upbringing, his supposed inability to be a team player (his refusal to pass the basketball), and his sexuality (Boyd 2003; Samuels 2003; Rosen 2002a and 2002b). As we will see below, these narratives work to construct and maintain the boundaries of racial categories by attempting to “make sense” of Bryant’s identity, which is understood to defy the social fabrications which constitute race (i.e., he doesn’t seem black but is certainly not white). Thus, rather than understand passing as a transgressive act of “possibility” that emerges from the (unstable) authority of the color line (Wald 2000, p. 5), we can read the narrativization of Bryant’s transgressions as thoroughly saturated with symbolic political and social meaning. Bryant’s enclosure in the passing narrative enacts the authority and polices the borders of racial meanings for consumers of popular culture. This discursive production of Bryant as an object of knowledge allows a reading of the passing narrative as a disciplinary process in which Bryant’s mass-mediated subjection occurs through what Michel Foucault calls a “political investment of the body” (1995, p. 28).15 I read these as narratives of transgression because Bryant’s race and class status have almost always been presented as extraordinary and difficult to classify—or as Todd Boyd describes it, Kobe had long functioned as the NBA’s “de facto White man” (2003, p. 161). He has been constantly presented as teetering on socially defined lines, and yet race and class have nevertheless been narrated as the determining factors of his behavior, and thus, who he really is. These narratives activate a network of stereotypes, determined by what Balibar calls the ethos of “post-racism,” or the “psychological assessment of intellectual aptitudes and dispositions to ‘normal’ social life” by “striking a balance between hereditary and environmental factors” (1991, p. 26). That is, in accordance with today’s dominant multiculturalist understanding of race as a social construct (rather than a biologically determined category), such narratives deploy a “culturalist” stance that explains Bryant’s actions in terms of his environment, an intellectual tactic that Balibar refers to as a “racism without races” (1991, p. 21).16 For at the same time, this dynamic culturalism relies on a biologistic conception of how Bryant negotiates these supposedly intractable cultural differences, locating him on a scale of deviance from a socially constituted normalcy. In doing so, these narratives remain focused on Bryant’s hypercommodified body as the receptacle of an organic identity, one that must be defined and classified. Bryant’s identity, while understood as the product of social forces, is elaborated as a biologically inflected category in its imbrication with the physical and behavioristic actions performed by his body. It is within this tightly rule-bound discourse that Bryant’s interiority—his “soul”—becomes


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the instrument of a “technology of power over the body.” This “soul”—an product of these narratives, rather than their foundation—“give[s] rise to a possible corpus of knowledge [which] extends and reinforces the effects of this power” over the body (Foucault 1995, p. 29). In other words, I am not arguing that Bryant himself is somehow imprisoned within a discourse that regulates his movement or actions. Rather, I argue that the public manufacture of Bryant’s “soul” is the instrument by which his hypercommodified body can be discursively classified, regulated, and transformed into a productive subject of racial capitalism. Indeed, Bryant’s economic utility in the service of the NBA and its network of corporate interests as a revenuegenerating basketball icon presupposes and facilitates a political utility: his figure’s function in the discursive policing of racial borders.17

CULTURE, CHROMOSOMES, AND THE PLAYGROUND AS COLONY Long before Bryant’s indictment in July of 2003, he began to assume a prolific role in media discourse as a selfish, spoiled, strong-headed “boy” attempting to pose among the men of the NBA, having begun his professional career at the age of eighteen. This construction was initially at the center of debates about whether Bryant was tough enough to be in the NBA, confronting all that accompanies fame and wealth as well as the intense competition he would face on the court from players who were older and stronger (Boyd 2003, pp. 160–63). As one of the very first in the decadelong wave of athletes entering the NBA directly from high school, Bryant’s youth was always a key aspect of his representation by the sports media.18 However, youth and inexperience framed discussions surrounding Bryant much differently than it has with players such as Kevin Garnett or LeBron James, for instance, who have been seen as streetwise enough to make it, possessing a kind of urban wisdom that allows them to understand how to compete in a rough environment despite their youth.19 On the other hand, Bryant’s sheltered existence in the suburbs, the fact that he spent his boyhood growing up in Italy, and his unfamiliarity with the hustling ethic of the streets were all seen as significant factors in determining whether he would succeed and relate to other players in a league consistently represented as comprised of “thugs.” From the very beginning, in other words, class was a key interpretive concept through which the public came to understand Bryant’s relation to blackness. What has made this construction so appealing to the public is its concession to a kind of simple binary that sets Bryant against figures like Allen Iverson and Rasheed Wallace, who have been largely portrayed as unruly rebels. Based on his reputation as being mild-mannered and “intelligent,”


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at the time one could hardly imagine Bryant getting into legal trouble. The very fact that he seemed to have transcended race, i.e., shed the stigma of blackness, was reason enough to believe that he was oddly different from his colleagues. Indeed, Bryant has repeatedly confounded spectators because, as Todd Boyd puts it: His class status defies the perceived ghetto stereotype of most NBA players. Kobe is an upper-middle-class Black guy who grew up between Italy and the suburbs. He is not from the ’hood, and his actions seem to indicate that he probably has never been there either, not even on a tour. . . . Kobe Bryant has often functioned as the league’s de facto White man. (2003, p. 161)

This binary conception of black/white to which Boyd alludes—and to which he seems to unwittingly perpetuate—historically structures entire discussions about race and basketball. In a classic example first published in Esquire in 1975, “The Black and White Truth about Basketball,” Jeff Greenfield writes: It is a question of style. For there is a clear difference between “black” and “white” styles of play that is as clear as the difference between 155th Street at Eight Avenue and Crystal City, Missouri. Most simply (remembering we are talking about culture, not chromosomes), “black” basketball is the use of superb athletic skill to adapt to the limits of space imposed by the game. “White” ball is the pulverization of that space by sheer intensity. (1999, p. 374)

Greenfield uses space as a descriptor to connote a culturally specific style based on social realities, such as residential segregation, and the compactness and material constraints of “black” urban life against a kind of frontier, expansionist mentality of suburban and rural “white” life. This metaphor becomes extremely important here, particularly in relation to its eschewal of biological determinism (“culture, not chromosomes”). For if Greenfield’s statement can be taken as an expression of the hegemonic outlook on race and cultural style in the United States (i.e., environment determines cultural identify and behavior), what happens when this formulaic construct is defied by a figure like Bryant? That is, how is an “upper middle-class Black guy” such as Bryant understood in relation to a politically acceptable “race as culturally determined” interpretive schema? At first glance this binary has paradoxical implications for representations of Bryant’s game, since, as Tom Scocca foregrounds in his critique of racial stereotypes in the NBA, “Even if we can’t agree what black means, we can agree that hoops is the black man’s game, the way jazz is the black man’s music . . . improvised, constantly refined and elaborated” (Scocca 2001). If, as Greenfield writes, it is a “question of style,” Bryant’s style of play, as close to Michael Jordan’s as any player around, is seen as the epitome of


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improvisational genius, or black “playground ball,” which is characterized as what one plays on the urban concrete, learning to compete one-onone, improvising with pure athletic skill, without the “benefit” of being coached to learn team-oriented tactics (Scocca 2001). If Bryant’s style is so culturally defined by street life and yet Bryant “is not from the ’hood, and his actions seem to indicate that he probably has never been there either,” then the question remains: just how did he learn to play ball like that? It is for this reason that Bryant’s style has, more than any player today, led to discussions of how he became who he is. In the absence of a common sense “environmental” reading, descriptions of his game have become laden with the biological language of race. Indeed, it is at the point when there is an impulse to contain an entire racialized group within a social class regardless of economic status that biological notions of race, whether in the guise of heredity, genetics, or “culture,” become the intellectual instruments that dominant narratives tend to deploy in order to rationalize such a construction of social reality. Much of the discourse surrounding Bryant and his style of play emerged when Phil Jackson took the head coaching job with the Lakers in 1999 and instituted the “triangle” offense. The triangle is an idiosyncratic offensive game plan that had previously worked to perfection in a tense relation with Michael Jordan’s assertive athleticism with the Chicago Bulls and to which Jordan once famously referred as the “white man’s offense” (Jackson and Rosen 2001, pp. 103–35). In short, the offense is based on an orchestration of spontaneous adjustments to defensive rotations rather than set plays or screen-and-rolls, which isolate one or two players with the ball. Consequently, the offense emphasizes penetration of the defense through passing, as opposed to individual forays to the hoop, in order to exploit the defense’s weak points. It has been called, fondly by coaches and “role-players,” and derisively by superstars (such as Jordan), an “equalopportunity offense” that, when executed, will free any player on the court for a high-percentage shot with a minimum need for players’ athletic skills. Theoretically, a player such as Jordan or Bryant work well in the offense because they pose a threat to the defense. By drawing the attention of multiple defenders, Jordan and Bryant disrupt the opponent’s game plan in such a way that they are not required to make an individual attack of the basket (Scocca 2001). The story behind Jordan’s description of the “white man’s offense” is by now well known. Jordan had already been dubbed the greatest basketball player in the world, yet the Bulls repeatedly fell short of winning the NBA title. It was after Jackson became head coach of the Bulls in 1989, and was able to persuade Jordan of the value of a “team basketball” system, that Jordan was then able to lead his team to six championships during the 1990s.20 This oft-cited narrative represents the “white man’s offense”


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as an expression of the “cerebral” aspects of basketball against the unruliness and physicality of playground improvisation: hence the pervasiveness of the narrative that imagines the white coach colonizing the playground, disciplining the “native” to assimilate his game within a “team system.” Demonstrating the extent to which this narrative is ingrained in coaching circles, John Edgar Wideman describes his own experience with the “blackplayground-uncivilized” articulation: When I was coming up, if a coach yelled “playground move” at you it meant there was something wrong with it, which also meant in a funny way that there was something wrong with the playground, and since the playground was a black world, there was something wrong with you, a black player out there doing something your way rather than their way. (Scocca 2001)

Wideman here reveals the assumption that undergirds the colonialist narrative: that the “playground” has come to serve as much for a description of the style of the streets as it has a metonym for “black.” In its reliance on race as a stable signifier, the popular narrative deployment of “the playground” loses its force as an indicator of the ghettoized socioeconomic conditions of urban space in the postindustrial United States. It is this easy slippage between the culturally defined space of the streets and the behavioral quotient of race that is in question precisely because it suggests that the qualities that define playground ball somehow transcend environment and reside at the level of a common inheritance of blackness. The practical problem from a marketing perspective, we are told, is that what is seen as the “white” style of play can nullify the “playground ball” theatrics that have enabled players like Bryant to market the league through television to a mass-consumer audience. In any case, the triangle worked with the Lakers about as well as it did with the Bulls, with the Lakers winning three NBA titles between 2000 and 2002. Winning, however, has never stopped the speculation about Bryant’s presumed inability to operate within the triangle, and thus winning has often been seen as occurring in spite of Bryant as much as because of his extraordinary play.21 While today this understanding of Bryant’s game is challenged by a variety of commentators and promoters who have made it a point of giving Bryant his due, this understanding still animates and shapes every single discussion about Bryant and the Lakers—a team whose winning is viewed as dependent on Bryant’s ability to “trust his teammates.” Even as Bryant’s popularity/profitability have led many to revise their conceptions on Bryant, the recent infusion of “white” European and Latin American players into the NBA has only given more force to the distinction between white ball and black ball as an overriding interpretive grid for NBA commentators and fans. For his own part Bryant’s figure has been consistently caught up in this commonly


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recognized NBA paradox as Scocca characterizes it: “It comes down to this: playing basketball is a black thing, but winning at basketball is a white thing” (Scocca 2001). For Bryant to pass as “de facto White man” in the triangle offense, and “be a winner,” he would have to let himself be coached and coaxed into passing the ball as opposed to using his “playground” skills to physically enforce his will on the opponent. In other words, NBA media discourse has readily constructed Bryant’s supposed inability to pass (the ball) and translates it as his inability to pass (as white). Of course, this narrative only makes sense within the confines of a discourse that views Bryant’s “race” as indeterminate and confounding. A boundary is conjured in this referential slippage in order to narratively construct Bryant’s apparent visible intention to pass and the subsequent revelation of his inability to do so. Former basketball-coach-turned-writer Charley Rosen has characterized this inability on Bryant’s part, significantly, as “an incurable disease” (2002a). Rosen initially describes the symptoms of this disease in basketball terms—his consistent abandonment of the triangle—subsequently slipping into a psychobiological commentary on Bryant’s “fiercely competitive nature,” which constitutes him as terminally self-serving, socially alienated, and “uncoachable.” In a continuation piece, Rosen discloses the “real explanation.” The article is entitled, “Like Father, Like Kobe,” in which it is said that Bryant’s “blessings, as well as his travails, have two root causes—genetics and environment” (2002b). He has an abundance of physical talent but cannot figure out how to use it the correct way, which would necessitate fending off his “chronic selfishness” and passing the ball (2002b). According to Rosen’s hypothesis, Bryant partially inherits his “incurable disease” from his father, a former NBA player, which then gets shaped through the peculiar way he was raised—growing up in Italy, always around the game of basketball, but out of touch with African American culture—leading to “the biggest problem . . . that Kobe was a loner.” Thus Rosen is able to diagnose that “the demands of Kobe’s self are constantly battling the demands of his soul” (2002b). Bryant’s “soul” is distinguished from his body and yet seen as the determinant of his behavior, which can itself be traced to a specific amalgam of genetics and a culturally specific upbringing. Since Rosen himself hails the offense as “equal-opportunity” and as “a means of systematizing the ‘right’ way to play” (Jackson and Rosen 2001, p. 16), passing (the ball), for Bryant, would render him not only closer to being a normative subject but also more constitutionally fit to function within the triangle. Unfortunately, according to Rosen, Bryant’s condition is “incurable.” What bars him from passing is his “soul,” a complex of nature/nurture that renders him an estranged loner, alienated from his own culture, defiantly straddling the color line.


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SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE LEGAL SUBJECTION OF BRYANT After Bryant’s indictment in July 2003, there emerges a discursive shift in which the diagnoses of the cultural roots of Bryant’s game become fused with an attempt at explaining the causes of the behavior resulting in his rape charge. In October 2003, Newsweek frames its own investigative effort as a look “behind the image.” This Newsweek cover story is significant in that it formalizes for a mainstream consumer audience the premise that had previously been established in order to explain the “real” Bryant to sports fans. The piece unwittingly draws on a formulation that Richard Wright once deployed to explain the effects of capitalism, urban industrialism, and institutionalized racism on rebellious black youth in his essay, “How Bigger Was Born.” Commenting on his novel Native Son (1940), Wright explained the social roots of his protagonist Bigger Thomas, a young black man who murders the daughter of his white employer. According to Wright, there were the two dominant factors in the psychology of the black delinquent: “First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had become estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through the newspapers, magazines, radios, movies” (1993, p. 439). It’s important to know that Wright viewed his own literary work in this period as deeply indebted to the sociological analyses of black urban culture being developed at the University of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century—which, even in its liberal-progressive understanding of race, left a deep imprint on the emerging discourse of black pathology. Newsweek adapts this formula in order to represent a complex of social and cultural factors that coalesce in Bryant’s “Troubled Road to a Rape Charge,” presenting his indictment as a telos through which a coherently determined history can be excavated.22 The importance of making this connection between Wright’s hypothesis and Newsweek’s representation of Bryant is to demonstrate how “racial knowledge” comes to appropriate the assumptions of a liberal antiracism grounded in the sociological tradition—race as a social construction—while continuing to deploy an essentialist racial ideology as a way of explaining (and naturalizing) a static and pathological vision of “black culture.” It is this very slippage that fills the gap between a liberal welfarist approach to black inequality and a neoconservative policy of “benign neglect”—the argumentative space that laid the groundwork for the post–civil rights debate over race. Both approaches take the sociological construction of “black pathology” as given. The former views it as a historical aberration that can be ameliorated through discipline and cultural assimilation, whereas the latter views it as natural and intransigent, while any


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attempts to remediate a black inequality grounded in pathology are viewed as exacerbating the original problems. In order to understand the relationship between popular narrative and sociology as a form of “racial knowledge,” we can turn to the work of Roderick Ferguson, who examines how Wright drew upon the Chicago School sociologists in constructing the character of Bigger Thomas. Ferguson argues that the articulation of racial knowledge with narrative fiction unwittingly works to essentialize race while perpetuating the idea of a black “sexual pathology” (1999, pp. 247–48). Following James Baldwin’s famous critique of Wright, Ferguson argues that narrative representations of African American men that draw upon sociological discourses on race render “racial knowledge” as “objective fact, legitimating the discourse of the black male rapist—a discourse that activate[s] the racial violence and materialist practices of segregation” (p. 252). Below I show how this Newsweek piece narrativizes sociological discourse about black pathology by relying on a liberal culturalist view of race, one that nevertheless stumbles against its own bioracial essentialism. Unwilling to register the profound contradictions in its own representation of blackness, actual disparities in income, housing, conviction rates, and prison sentences between whites and blacks become naturalized. In accordance with neoliberal approaches to social policy, the blame for these disparities is either transferred from the state to the pathologized subjects in the language of “individual responsibility” or else redirected at the state itself for destructively intervening in the “natural laws” of the market through social services, welfare provision, or the enactment of race-conscious policies (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, pp. 22–23). The Newsweek article is structured around testimony by individuals reportedly close to Bryant, enabling it to displace the artificiality of the article’s constitution of Bryant’s “social development” onto his “family and friends.” Newsweek thus explains its intervention as a neutral, factual report on an extant discourse wherein Bryant’s family and friends have been supposedly “deconstructing the player’s life with even more ferocity than the media are” (Samuels 2003, p. 53). This form of rhetorical masking of its own fabrication replicates juridical discourse by presenting “witnesses” and third-party judgments as providing evidence for Bryant’s case, signaling the modern overlapping configuration of criminal justice and mass culture. In this sense, this article should not be taken as merely a transparent representation of the autonomous process of judicial proceedings. Rather, the article, like all cultural discourse about the law, assumes an identifiable materiality within the law itself, interacting with the juridical process and mediating public opinion that shapes policy, trials, convictions, and sentencing.23 Like other media coverage surrounding the Bryant case, Newsweek and the network of narratives upon which it draws constitute central components of the “extrajuridical” elements of the penal operation, con-


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structing Bryant as a knowable legal subject (Foucault 1995, p. 21). These extrajuridical judgments are directly involved in constituting the interiority of Bryant that is being judged by a consuming public, rather than simply the alleged crime itself. Yet the rhetorical tactic of disavowal enables the article to assume the semblance of empirical analysis. For example, the piece opens by infantilizing Bryant—commenting on his ignorance of and his lack of initiation into heteronormative American courtship rituals— through an interview with an old girlfriend who retrospectively accuses Bryant of being “selfish” and clueless. This perspective of Bryant as immature, sexually uninformed, self-consumed, and thus not able to “get busy in the dark” with girls as a teenager quickly becomes the basis for invoking the already well-worn descriptions of him as “socially stunted,” “aloof,” and “sheltered from social development” (Samuels 2003, p. 51). Newsweek explains these determining qualities of Bryant’s subjectivity in relation to three factors: 1) the cultural dynamics of the “classic black family”; 2) his alienation from African American culture as a result of growing up in Italy and attending high school in a suburb of Philadelphia; and 3) his “laser-like focus on becoming the best basketball player in the world,” constantly consuming mass-mediated images of the NBA and harboring dreams of becoming a commodity icon, like Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson (Samuels 2003, p. 51). Curiously enough, it is not until after these factors are clearly delineated that the piece chooses to assert that “race was also a key ingredient in this family brew”—as if the article means to say that “race” here refers to something entirely different from the “classic black family” or Bryant’s supposed alienation from African American culture (2003, p. 53). That is to say, race, in the phrase noted above (the only time the word is used) functions as an empty signifier, an “ingredient” understood as relevant to the situation but which bears no real relation to the reality of what is being described. In other words, it seems to imply that race exists outside the social. Nevertheless, the article’s explanation of the function of race in the Bryant saga is a simple restatement of a factor already enumerated: the “classic black family.” Is this merely an example of journalistic sloppiness? Perhaps. Regardless of its intent or elisions, Newsweek presents a schema in which race exists as an abstract concept available in order to explain Bryant’s behavior, and yet it is treated as somehow distinct from Bryant’s “culture.” “Race” determines the structure and functioning of the black family, which is viewed as equally a “cultural” problem. The distinction the article strives to make between the “racial” and the “cultural” serves to conflate race with biology (as such, something that can be easily defined and clearly knowable) as something distinct from the “cultural,” which in turn becomes associated with the murkiness of the social environment. One would expect that part of the “cultural” here consists in the significance the article invests in Bryant’s “doting mother who fixed him the same


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breakfast every morning,” packed his bags when he went on the road with the Lakers, and generally treated him like “royalty” (Samuels 2003, pp. 51–53). This investment, of course, uncritically participates in the enduring sociological discourse concerning the supposed pathology of the black family. Key elements of this discourse find its canonical formalization in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). This policy document attempted to diagnose the cultural pathology of African Americans as located in familial forms that deviate from the heteropatriarchal norm of the nuclear family—a problem that sociology must confront in attempting to render African Americans fit for post–civil rights citizenship. While Newsweek does more than simply replicate the theory of black matriarchy that Moynihan formalized, it saddles Bryant’s family (particularly his mother) with the responsibility for cultivating the tendencies within him that lead to criminality and violent sexuality.24 We are meant to assume that the “cultural” dynamic of Bryant’s family life is responsible for his pathologized development. If this was the result of an “ingredient” endemic to black family life, Bryant’s family is presented as unable to control something for which they are indeed somehow responsible. In validating its truth claims, Newsweek cites African American cultural critic Kevin Powell, in his reference to Bryant as the “classic story that happens in black families” (2003, p. 53). The familiar explanation is disclosed of how black men in the United States are overly protected and coddled by their mothers and communities, a problem that in Bryant’s case emotionally stunts him. One might ask, how can Newsweek explain Bryant’s subjectivity and his eventual indictment by characterizing him as alienated from “his own people,” existing without any apparent connection to African American social life, and thus incapable of understanding and relating to black culture, while at the same time narrating his “troubled road” as emergent from a “classic” black family life? It is worth considering the implications of this analysis, exemplary of liberal racial discourse, which inadvertently reverts to a bioracial essentialism that defines what it is to be black in order to make a seemingly “nonracial” argument. Here the environmental and the biological explanations can coexist without apology. In this narrative of transgression, Newsweek constructs Bryant as ultimately determined by the constraints of his “soul.” However, it is a “soul” that floats freely, emerging in his cultural environment, through his skin color, and in his body—an essential blackness signifying on multiple levels and which ultimately fails in its attempt to defy its own delimited classification. Bryant’s rape charge is thus doubly explained: not only by drawing on the sociological narrative of black pathology but also by his own inability to remain racially compartmentalized by dominant discursive standards—by his failure to act his own race. Unable to perform in accordance with prevailing racial ideology, Bryant’s blackness emerges inevitably and violently. He is


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represented as attempting to transcend the ideological requisites of race and class, and yet his inability to fit into any certain category reveals both his imitativeness as well as the intractability of race as a social signifier. To be clear, I do not mean to argue that Newsweek’s narrative is representative of how a popular audience reads Bryant. Rather, the article should be taken seriously precisely because it participates within a long-standing generic form of representing blackness in the American popular imagination. For this reason, it is symptomatic of the discursive conditions regulating how a racially stratified social formation engages the very questions about race and class that it engenders. Neither do I mean to argue that Newsweek depicts Bryant as “guilty as charged.” Instead, I would argue that judgments on Bryant’s culpability are far less important than the simple opportunity to ruminate on his blackness, which renders him always capable of raping white women unless vigilantly monitored and disciplined. Bryant becomes a figure of a “type” that transgresses social boundaries, the representation of which reifies—and enables the surveillance of—those same boundaries. Newsweek’s positioning of Bryant’s indictment as a coherent narrative telos in fact not only leaves the question of the verdict open but also incidental. In fact, Newsweek’s discursive production of Bryant’s interiority can just as likely function as his exoneration as it can his criminalization; the descriptions of the cultural milieu in which his behavior was formed can be read as a defense that might absolve him from guilt. Indeed, Bryant’s imbrication with the criminal justice system, just as well as the discursive production of his exoneration—which includes discrediting the accuser’s claim regardless of its validity—should be seen as vital to the material interests of the NBA and its entire corporate complex. One only needs to recognize Bryant’s central role in marketing the game to a mass consumer audience and his positive function as a repository of racial ideology in order to accept this claim. In other words, if we take a broader view than the one which simply registers the recent decline in NBA television ratings and merchandise sales as measures of success, we should not be fooled by the concern of NBA executives and commentators over the infiltration of hip-hop, “thug,” and “ghetto” culture into the game (what many have seen as the cause of the NBA’s decreased popularity among white audiences). Rather, it is precisely the commodification of the black body, its association with criminality, and its ability to conjure images of violence, danger, and threat (and the alarming concern over this) that keeps business running as usual.

READING RACE IN THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER It is critical to emphasize the extent to which these processes of popular narration become necessarily entangled with the entire political economy


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of the NBA. These narratives become available for mass consumption while also functioning as advertisements for the complex of commodities that make up the NBA’s mass cultural apparatus. They exist by and for the NBA as a particular locus of transnational corporate interests (Nike, McDonald’s, Disney, News Corporation, AOL Time-Warner, Coca-Cola) that depend upon techniques of marketing through narrative as a way to conflate practices of reading with practices of consumption. That is to say, it is through these techniques that Bryant’s body serves an important economic purpose while at the same time educating mass cultural consumers on how to read race. These narratives are thus intimately bound up with the accumulation and reproduction of capital, manufacturing the profitable iconicity of racialized bodies that contradict the putative abstraction of the capitalist public sphere, demonstrating how the logic of capitalist expansion must continue to racially differentiate in order to reproduce itself and the social order from which it feeds. In the crucible formed by the contradictions between the persistent racializing tendencies of transnational capital and the postsegregationist enforcement of a “color-blind” marketplace, Kobe Bryant’s confrontation with the law, no less other NBA figures “on trial” for social transgressions, should not be considered a crisis for the NBA, for the public figure as role model, or as test of the system’s (im)partiality in relation to wealthy legal subjects, as many would have us believe. Rather, the NBA’s disavowed investment in the narrativization of black criminality compels us to recognize the hierarchical racial structure of the NBA today, a sport that generates massive amounts of capital through an extensive network of economic nodes, buttressing the business models of multinational corporations such as Nike and Disney,25 a sport in which all but one of thirty teams have white majority owners, while nearly three-fourths of the players are black. Once we examine this situation it becomes clear that, unlike the meritocratic stories modern sport likes to tell about itself, the NBA and its corporate media complex often function to reenact the legitimation narratives that rationalize the racial and class inequality that is all too plainly visible to us every day. It is much more than that, however. Critically reading the discursive production of the figure of Bryant also requires us to examine the ways in which capitalism operates through the mechanism of race in postindustrial society. For this discourse continues to authorize the legitimacy of race as an arbiter of social meaning, while at the same time naturalizing racial stratification via class as a stage of development that can eventually be overcome through a progressive neoliberalism. Seen in this light, the call to move “beyond race” seems more insidious than merely hollow. Bryant’s blackness, like that of his colleagues in the sports culture apparatus, both ideologically legitimates the ostensible equity immanent in contractual market relations while at the same time providing America’s prevailing


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regime of white supremacy with a freakish sideshow on which it can heap its hatred and antipathy. In the current climate of resurgent nationalisms, deepening inequalities, and mass-mediated violence and dehumanizations, when the whipping boy stops behaving—an occurrence of which we are assured in advance—the violent imaginary takes over in what becomes a reproduction of race-class antagonism in spectacle form. Many people did not need the November 2004 player-spectator brawl at a Pistons-Pacers game in Auburn Hills, Michigan, to illustrate this point so vividly (Rhoden 2004, p. 8.1). Nonetheless, a general confrontation with the complexity of these dynamics is unlikely without the recognition that NBA players are not simply the privileged millionaires they are largely perceived to be, but rather integral components of a social formation that requires race, and depends upon racism, in order to secure the interests of transnational capital.

NOTES I’d like to acknowledge those who contributed in various ways to this essay, via discussions, comments on drafts, and general encouragement: Amy Bass, Kate Cummings, Keith Feldman, Gillian Harkins, David Leonard, Georgia Roberts, Nikhil Singh, and Alys Weinbaum. I’d also like to thank GO-MAP at the University of Washington for support during the initial stages of my writing. 1. Bryant negotiated and signed a long-term, multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Nike in the months immediately preceding his indictment. After the indictment, Bryant lost endorsement deals with McDonald’s and Nutella, while he remained under contract with Nike without starring in any print or television advertisements. 2. The key example circulating at the time of the debut of the Nike commercial was the voluminous discourse surrounding Bryant’s eighty-one-point performance. The debate was largely one over whether Bryant was too selfish and scored at the expense of the team’s well-being and ability to win or whether Bryant has proven he is the best player in the game and his team cannot win without him scoring as much as he can. This debate reached as far as the New York Times op-ed pages on February 18, 2006, with dueling editorials written by Hall-of-Famers Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It should be noted that this is merely the continuation of a debate that has been constant throughout Bryant’s career, and to which I will return later in the essay. 3. I rely on a conception of neoliberalism as both an economic and political configuration ascendant in the last two decades of the twentieth century, yet more pronounced since the early 1990s. This configuration can be broadly characterized as championing the ideal of free-market capitalism, a libertarian rhetoric of small government and free trade, privatization of public institutions and property, decreased spending on social services, dismantling of welfare provisions, a general shift in narratives of state legitimation from that of providing for the population’s welfare to that of maintaining the efficiency and health of the economy, and the


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assertion of the ideal of color blindness and formal equality in jurisprudence. See Brown 2003; Duggan 2003; Harvey 2005; Gilmore 2006. 4. Wahneema Lubiano describes the circulation of the narrative of black pathology as part of the way in which “the state manifests its power, especially when it does not call attention to its presence” (1996, p. 64). 5. The sociological narrative of the pathology of the black family was officially canonized as part of a liberal “uplift” discourse in 1965 by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (U.S. Dept. of Labor 1965). 6. According to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, racism is “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2006, p. 28). 7. Or, as Etienne Balibar suggests, in order to defend against naturalizing racism as a kind of inevitable human psychological impulse, we should think in terms of different racisms as “ever active formations” rather than a “single invariant racism” (1991, p. 40). 8. The first preliminary hearing was October 9, 2003. Criminal charges were eventually dropped on September 1, 2004, before the case went to trial. The parties reached a financial settlement to a civil suit in Colorado state court on March 2, 2005. 9. Bryant’s counsel petitioned the court to drop the charges against Bryant due to numerous oversights in the criminal investigation. Moreover, they argued that the prosecution’s possession of the shirts revealed racial bias in the case. 10. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, race is an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. . . . Although the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process” (1994, p. 55). 11. Segregation in the United States was officially legalized by the rule of “hypodescent,” or the “one drop of blood” rule, on May 18, 1896, with the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. See Gotanda 1995, pp. 258–59; Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 53–55. 12. It is hardly a coincidence that the three other figures lampooned by Hangmantees were Michael Jackson, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. This conjunction of “hanging men” suggests an ominous convergence between racial violence in the American imaginary, the abject sexualization of Arab and African American men, the equation of blackness with criminality, and the ideological rationalizations supporting U.S. military occupation abroad. The suggestion of the punitive violence of lynching exacted upon these four figures together carries with it the discursive sediment of Jim Crow apartheid, the materiality of the prison as a “race making” institution, and the persistence of racism as “the basic mechanism of power” in political life (Foucault 2003, p. 254). Also see Wacquant 2002 and Singh 2006. 13. This general identification of passing with subjectivity in part has to do with the cultural forms usually read, primarily novels and films, which implicitly or explicitly contain passing as a narrative theme. In these texts, the initial decision to pass tends to be contained within the subjectivity of the character in question. Of


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course, even in these texts, a fundamental aspect of passing is that it assumes the capacity of a reading public to interpret the passer according to norms and thus validate or expose the pass by rendering the passer as an object of knowledge (Robinson 1994). That is, passing as a socially defined act requires that the public “reads” the passer regardless of the passer’s intention or will. Thus, while registering the passer’s status as simultaneously subject and object, passing narratives and their critics have expanded the interrogative territory of racial and sexual identity by complicating the way these identities function within discursive fields of power and visibility. 14. This is most easily discerned in the case of Michael Jackson, who, as an object of public consumption, was often described as attempting to pass for white, yet narratively determined to fail in his apparent passing act through the persistent public exposure of his blackness. 15. It should be noted that, in a quite different register, legal scholar Cheryl Harris also suggests that passing be understood as a coercive process: “The economic coercion of white supremacy on self-definition nullifies any suggestion that passing is a logical exercise of liberty or self-identity. The decision to pass as white was not a choice, if by that word one means voluntariness or lack of compulsion” (1995, p. 277). 16. On the question of the biological significance of race, see Appiah 1986; Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 53–76; and Weinbaum 2004, pp. 227–46. 17. Foucault writes: “The political investment of the body is bound up in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination” (1995, p. 26). 18. The NBA has since implemented an age minimum for professional players at nineteen, meaning players need to be at least one year out of high school before they can be drafted into the league. 19. As Amy Bass has suggested to me, public opinion seemed divided between two poles on whether or not Bryant belonged in the NBA, both of which saw him as different from other NBA stars: either he was seen as intelligent enough, being bilingual, to not need to go to college; or, the fact that he was from an upper-middleclass family, unlike Garnett and James for instance, meant that he had no financial constraints that would necessitate his bypassing college to enter the NBA for the need of a paycheck. 20. One can just as easily argue that Jordan’s basketball prowess informed the Bulls’ use of the triangle, turned Jackson into a winner, and made the triangle famous as much as the triangle compelled Jordan to harness his own game and taught him how to go about winning. 21. Well-respected sportswriter and basketball expert, Charley Rosen, writes: “If the Lakers do indeed flounder in 2002–03, it will be because the brilliance of Kobe Bryant’s game has been dimmed by an incurable disease” (2002a). 22. The Newsweek cover displays a close-up photograph of Bryant with the caption: “The Kobe Bryant You Don’t Know. Behind the Image, His Troubled Road to a Rape Charge.” 23. During the preliminary hearings of Bryant’s criminal trial, the Colorado Supreme Court heard First Amendment arguments regarding the right of major news organizations to publish sealed information pertaining to the case that had


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been accidentally released by the court. In turn, during the proceedings there were numerous battles over gag orders issued by the judge that argue over the domain of public information and whether or not the Bryant trial would be televised. The legal decisions emerging from these arguments were anticipated as crucial to the outcome of this trial and others as a precedent. 24. In this respect, we might interrogate the gendered logic that enables Charley Rosen to claim that Bryant inherits tendencies from his father that generally lead to adulation. 25. The Walt Disney Co. owns ESPN, Inc., a sports entertainment and media company that currently has a major television contract with the NBA. ESPN also plays a crucial role in promoting the league, its players, and merchandise to a mass consumer audience. Nike officially made its commercial stamp on the sporting world through its promotion of Michael Jordan beginning in the mid 1980s. Since then, Nike has not only built a veritable athletic commodity empire, holding many basketball stars to lucrative sponsorship contracts, but has also been embroiled in controversy surrounding their oppressive labor practices in East and Southeast Asia (Kellner 2003, pp. 78–83).

WORKS CITED Appiah, K. A. (1986). The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race. In H. L. Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (Eds.), “Race,” writing and difference (pp. 21–37). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Associated Press. (2006, February 9). After 2½ years, Kobe’s first Nike ad airs. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11245087/. Balibar, E., and Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities (C. Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. Bentley, D. A. (22 May 2004). Letter to the Editor. Los Angeles Times, C3. Boyd, T. (2003). Young, black, rich and famous: The rise of the NBA, the hip-hop invasion, and the transformation of American culture. New York: Doubleday. Bresnahan, M. (2006, January 24). With scoring splurge, Bryant is rebounding. Los Angeles Times, A1. Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory & Event, 7.1, 1–19. Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., and Thomas, K. (1995). Introduction. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. xiii–xxxii). New York: The New Press. Crenshaw, K., and Peller, G. (1993). Reel time/Real justice. In R. Gooding-Williams (Ed.), Reading Rodney King, reading urban uprising (pp. 56–70). New York: Routledge. Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race & class. New York: Vintage Books. Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality?: Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.


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Ferguson, R. A. (1999). The Parvenu Baldwin and the other side of redemption: Modernity, race, sexuality, and the Cold War. In D. A. McBride (Ed.), James Baldwin now (pp. 233–64). New York: New York University Press. Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (2003). “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. (David Macey, Trans.). New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Gilmore, R. W. (2006). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ginsberg, E. K. (1996). The politics of passing. In E. K. Ginsberg (Ed.), Passing and the fictions of identity (pp. 1–18). Durham: Duke University Press. Gossett, T. F. (1963). Race: The history of an idea in America. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Gotanda, N. (1995). A critique of “Our Constitution is color-blind.” In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 257–75). New York: The New Press. Gray, H. S. (2005). Cultural moves: African Americans and the politics of representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenfield, J. (1999). The black and white truth about basketball. In G. D. Caponi (Ed.), Signifyin(g), sanctifyin’, & slam dunking: A reader in African American expressive culture (pp. 373–78). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hall, S. (1980). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. Sociological theories: Race and colonialism. Paris: UNESCO. Harris, C. (1995). Whiteness as property. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 276–91). New York: The New Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, P., and Rosen, C. (2001). More than a game. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kellner, D. (2003). Media spectacle. New York: Routledge. Leonard, D. J. (2004). The next M. J. or the next O. J.? Kobe Bryant, race, and the absurdity of colorblind rhetoric. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 28 (3), 284–313. Lowe, L. (1996). Immigrant acts: On Asian American cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Lubiano, W. (1996). Like being mugged by a metaphor: Multiculturalism and state narratives. In A. F. Gordon and C. Newfield (Eds.), Mapping multiculturalism (pp. 64–75). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morrison, T. (Ed.). (1992). Race-ing justice, en-gendering power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the construction of social reality. New York: Pantheon. Omi, M., and Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge. Pankratz, H., and Lipsher, S. (2003, 21 December). Lawyers battle over t-shirts, media leaks. Denver Post, B04. Peller, G. (1995). Race-consciousness. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas (Eds.), Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 127–58). New York: The New Press.


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Ragan, S. L., Bystrom, D. G., Kaid, L. L., and Beck, C. (Eds.). (1996). The lynching of language: Gender, politics, and power in the Hill-Thomas hearings. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Rhoden, W. C. (2004, November 21). There are no innocents in a meltdown by Artest, his mates and their hecklers. New York Times, 8.1. Robinson, A. (1994). It takes one to know one: Passing and communities of common interest. Critical Inquiry, 20.4, 715–36. Rosen, C. (2002a, November 1). Trouble in paradise. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from http://espn.go.com/page2/s/rosen/021101.html. Rosen, C. (2002b, November 4). Like father, like Kobe. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from http://espn.go.com/page2/s/rosen/021104.html. Samuels, A. (2003, October). Kobe off the court. Newsweek, 51–60. Sandomir, R. (2006, January 27). Like him or not, Bryant the brand is scoring, too. New York Times, D3. Scocca, T. (2001). Blackballed. Transition 90. Sielke, S. (2002). Reading rape: The rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture, 1790–1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Singh, N. P. (2006). The afterlife of fascism. South Atlantic Quarterly, 105.1, 71–93. Singh, N. P. (2004). Black is a country: Race and the unfinished struggle for democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. United States Department of Labor. Office of Policy Planning and Research. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print Office. Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the “race question” in the United States. New Left Review, 13, 41–60. Wald, G. (2000). Crossing the line: Racial passing in twentieth century U.S. literature and culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Warner, M. (1993). The mass public and the mass subject. In B. Robbins (Ed.), The phantom public sphere (pp. 234–56). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weinbaum, A. E. (2004). Wayward reproductions: Genealogies of race and nation in transatlantic modern thought. Durham: Duke University Press. Wiegman, R. (1995). American anatomies: Theorizing race and gender. Durham: Duke University Press. Wright, R. (1993). Native son. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.


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5 One Nation under a Hoop: Race, Meritocracy, and Messiahs in the NBA Lisa Guerrero

A BRIEF (AND SELECTIVE) VOCABULARY LESSON American (adj.) Of or relating to the United States. (n.) A citizen of the United States. Dream (n.) 1. A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring during sleep. 2. A daydream; reverie. 3. A wild fancy or hope. 4. An ambition; aspiration. 5. One that is exceptionally gratifying, excellent, or beautiful.1 American Dream (n.) 1. A quaint and enduring, though largely imaginary, notion that America offers just reward for those willing to work for it. 2. A ruthless chimera used to maintain civil obedience and material productivity. 3. A cruel joke.2

FIRST, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR As LeBron James entered his fifth year in the NBA in 2008, the “cult of LeBron James” showed no signs of slowing down. In five short years, James had gone from a wish to a promise to a veritable dream fulfilled for NBA fans and marketers worldwide. But as Shakespeare wrote, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” even in the NBA. For LeBron James, several events in the first half of 2008 would make the truth of this adage come alive. First, in April 2008, James achieved another “first” in an already impressive list of firsts and other superlative achievements in his young career. In theory, it was an interesting cultural milestone, as LeBron became the first 121


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black man to ever appear on the cover of Vogue.3 In reality it was a signifying debacle; he appeared with a hulking, raging visage, grabbing onto the lithe, smiling, and white figure of supermodel Gisele Bündchen, á la King Kong clutching Fay Wray. The cover photo, as well as the entire spread that the image represented, was taken by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, who, in subsequent interviews when asked about the photo, denied any ill intent or cultural/historical influence or reference. Meanwhile, fans, cultural pundits, sports writers, bloggers, and academics worked overtime debating the allusion (and illusion) and effects of the historical cover. The most damning “evidence” for those who were arguing for the racist implications of the picture came in the form of a World War I propaganda poster entitled “Defeat This Mad Brute—Enlist,” which depicted a large, black, frothing ape rampaging with a white woman collapsed in his arms. When critics placed the two images side by side the comparisons were almost impossible to dismiss, from the position of LeBron’s body and the expression on LeBron’s face to the fashion and color of Gisele’s dress. Even Gisele’s pose, with her body slightly falling into James’s grasp, is reminiscent of the early twentieth-century war poster. Considering the long history in the United States of black men being depicted as apelike and animalistic, not to mention violent and a threat to white women in service to everything from selling household products to electing presidents to creating support for war strategies and unfair, dehumanizing laws, the criticism for the twenty-first century Vogue cover came as no surprise. And considering the equally long history in the United States of (white) Americans denying the significance of race to the fabric of the nation “by any means necessary”— the latest means being the rampant reliance on color-blind racism—the vehement countercritiques came as no surprise either. Many of those who considered a racial reading of the image as “hysterical” blamed the reading, and those supporting such a reading, for being the real racists. In arguing against a racialized reading of the cover most lay commentators, especially those within the blogosphere, decried the so-called obviousness of racism by saying that it was not until the comparison was made with the propaganda poster by those crying “racism” that the idea of James as a kind of “King Kong” even entered their minds. Even James himself, according to his publicist, saw nothing startling about the cover, and was actually pleased with the picture that he felt accurately captured his “game-playing intensity.” So, what then, did people think of the image if they didn’t think it had any racist undertones, or overtones for that matter? The juxtaposition of the two bodies was clearly deliberate. There was an obvious desire to demonstrate stark contrast. If that had not been the goal the cover would have featured LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal, or alternatively, Gisele and Heidi Klum. Are we to read nothing into the conscious choice of a large


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black man in a faux-aggressive near-embrace with a willowy white woman? A fantastical pairing whose imagined audacity has continued to shape America’s ideological fear and political bigotry for over a hundred years, leaving countless black men lynched, incarcerated, or otherwise disenfranchised, we are now to assume means nothing at all? The spread of which the cover was a part was a layout devoted to “the secrets of the best bodies” and featured athletes paired with models. All the athletes were men. All the models were women. And while the athletes were of varied races, all of the models were white, which stood as a curious choice given the current glut of models of color, especially those of mixed race. However subtle, the choice of an all-white cast of female models succeeded in again reifying the elevated status of white womanhood in the arena of idealized notions of beauty, an ideology that further loaded the cover image with historical burden. And though not all of the athletes were white, James was the only black athlete.4 As the issue’s cover model, James was meant to be marked as remarkable, even among all the exceptionalism the spread purported to highlight. What was the singularity of James that the photos hoped to capture? It is true that James is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, superstars in the NBA today. Of course, so is Kobe Bryant, but Vogue didn’t choose him. (Perhaps they knew that the shadow of another white woman from Colorado would ruin the frame.) Or Tim Duncan. Or Dwyane Wade. Or Kevin Garnett. Or Yao Ming. No, the cover sought to capitalize on the particular reading that has been placed onto the image of LeBron James since the moment he entered the popular consciousness, that of an unstoppable, unprecedented force. Of a second coming. (Of Jordan, not Jesus . . . of course, his career is still young).

“UNITED WE RISE” Then, later in the year, as the summer of 2008 drew to a close, LeBron James saw himself lead “The Redeem Team” into the Bejing Olympics with the singular goal of returning glory to the flagging mantle of USA men’s basketball. With a team featuring the likes of Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Dwight Howard, Carmelo Anthony, and James himself, and coached by the patron saint of Duke basketball, Mike Krzyzewski, “The Redeem Team” sought not only to restore the dominance of USA men’s basketball in international competition but also to reshape the image of American basketball players from prima donnas and thugs to patriots and gentlemen. Their official slogan, “United We Rise,” reflected this new attitude. But in May 2008, the road to redemption got just a little rockier when Kobe Bryant and James, separately, became vocal about the crisis in Darfur and China’s role in it. First, Bryant recorded a PSA about the


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crisis for the nonprofit movement “Aid Still Required.” Following the ad Bryant stated he would speak out about the crisis in Bejing. James, too, after suffering a great deal of flack for not signing a letter earlier in the year written by his then-teammate, Ira Newble, denouncing China’s role in the genocide taking place in Darfur, promised to speak out at the Olympics and hoped that the “NBA Olympians [would] band together with a plan on how to address the situation” (Smith 2008). He articulated his impassioned commitment this way: At the end of the day we’re talking about human rights . . . And people should understand that human rights and people’s lives are in jeopardy. We’re not talking about contracts here. We’re not talking about the money. We’re talking about people’s lives being lost and that means a lot more to me than some money or a contract. (2008)

In the end, however, after arriving to Bejing, both Bryant and James appeared to back down—way down—from their previous statements. First, Bryant stated: “Nothing’s changed. It’s just time to play basketball . . . I’m not a government official or politician. I’ll let them do that” (Wetzel 2008, p. 2). After being reminded that he hadn’t been a politician when he first spoke out, he responded, “That’s different than coming out here and speaking about it on a daily basis . . . If the politicians want to get paid to shoot jump shots, then they can come and do that” (Wetzel 2008, p. 2). James maintained this apolitical line when he said: “Basic human rights should always be protected . . . One thing you can’t do is confuse sports and politics. . . . I think the political guys are going to do what they need to do, that’s their job . . . We are here to concentrate on a gold medal. Sports and politics just don’t match” (Wetzel 2008, p. 1). In a few short months, Bryant and James quickly shed their activist personas and returned to those personas that people, including both fans and corporate America, were more comfortable with: black basketball players who played basketball, and who didn’t try to break out of their procrustean bed by actually paying attention to the world, standing up for something, and “speaking so well” in the name of something other than the team, basketball shoes, or sports drinks. Sports and politics just don’t match. Indeed. At least they don’t if a black athlete in America doesn’t want his invitation to the American Dream revoked. Because even though “at the end of the day we’re talking about human rights,” for black athletes in the NBA we’re also talking about the rights “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in a country that has historically looked on their inclusion as provisional. Both the “Kong James” photo, as some have come to refer to it, and the “Bejing Backdown,” (as I have come to refer to it), vividly mark the dilemma that sits at the center of this essay: Why are today’s black NBA players forced to negotiate the fickle ideological pressure that demands that


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they sell an illusion of a constructed black “realness” as long as they don’t “buy into it” themselves . . . even as the rest of America, and the world, does? They also demonstrate just how far, and how quickly, one young man from Akron, Ohio, has ascended to the heart of the tempest that is race and sports in America in the twenty-first century, a tempest that has made the path toward American racial redemption uncertain. Increasingly, that road to redemption has come to more closely resemble the road to perdition . . . on and off the court. At this point, can there be any turning back? For any of us?

THE COLOR OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, OR “OPRAH KNOWS BEST” Flashback: Three years earlier. During an interview in September 2005, Oprah Winfrey posed a series of questions to her guest, NBA superstar LeBron James, that, far from creating the friendly, downhome atmosphere usually afforded celebrity guest stars on her show, constructed him as a scolded child to her much-wiser authority. James, the twenty-year-old phenom, youngest NBA rookie of the year, ever, and the hundred million dollar man, was a vision of preppy chic, sporting a baby blue v-neck sweater over a tailored and pressed white cotton dress shirt, paired with navy blue trousers and a pair of Nikes from his eponymous line and multicarat diamond studs in either ear. However, his generally conservative visage was unable to provide any safe haven from the distortive and stereotypical assumptions of his “playa” ways that lay at the heart of nearly all of Winfrey’s questions, including: “Do you think it’s all too much too soon?” and “Do you, or do you think you will ever regret not going to college?” Winfrey’s questions, and her subsequent and only mildly hidden dissatisfaction with his answers are representative of a larger ideological problem in the American mainstream regarding NBA players and their perceived dubious relationship to the American Dream. James cordially entertained Oprah’s questions, trying earnestly, though mainly unsuccessfully, to convince her, and assumedly the mass American population that makes connections to her, that he was an individual, not a type, and that he recognized the feat and phenomenon of his fame but that the largesse of his accomplishments did not automatically preclude the possibility of being a responsible, productive, and conscientious member of society. When he readily answered “No” to Oprah’s question about college and whether or not he would regret not going, she all but mocked his response by turning immediately to his mother in the audience and asking the same question, ostensibly looking for the “right” answer. When his mother supported LeBron’s ability to measure for himself his own limits


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and potential, and more specifically, his decision to not attend college, Winfrey quickly returned her attention to LeBron without comment, and moved to her next question, succeeding in this one moment of explicit disinterest and dismissiveness in reifying the popular notions of being “unfit” that surround two greatly vilified groups, black athletes and single mothers, in the American imagination. It also exposed just how completely the latent assumptions regarding the mind/body split of black men in America, especially black athletes, had infiltrated the consciousness of the national public; it is accepted that LeBron possesses a physical, athletic mastery that makes him a successful basketball player, while it is virtually mocked that he could possess the intelligence to make him a smart and responsible man. It occurred to me as I sat horrified watching the exchange between LeBron and Oprah that if Oprah had been interviewing Paris Hilton, the twentysomething heiress/icon whose multimillions she has not earned wholly on her own; who has made a professional career out of simply “being seen,” and public displays of affection with her attractive celebrity boyfriend-dujour, including a highly popular and profitable sex tape; and who, to anyone’s knowledge, has never attended college, Oprah would never think to ask her the same questions as she was posing, or rather, aiming, at James, even though they would seemingly be equally fitting. And though I recognize that the analogy is not exactly one to one, my point is obvious: Why does Oprah, and America generally, assume that NBA players as a whole, especially the newest generation, and, it is assumed, unlike other “normal” people, are irresponsible citizens who need to be reminded, seemingly at every turn, both of the sacredness of the meritocratic American Dream and of the “apparent” ways in which they are flouting the rules of achievement and sullying the meaning of success in America? Having done nothing except hone his exceptional athletic ability and translate that to a successful professional career, both on the court and in the global market, LeBron James has instantaneously been inducted into the pantheon of American transgression due to his race, his gender, and his version of the American Dream while simultaneously emerging as the NBA’s next messiah, due again, ironically, to his race, his gender, and his version of the American Dream. He promises to be “the next Jordan” in both talent and marketability, delivering the league unto a marketing promised land that has not been visited since Michael Jordan’s second retirement from the Chicago Bulls at the end of the 1997–1998 season. Sports Illustrated dubbed him “The Chosen One” while he was still in high school, a messianic designation that proved telling when, in 2003, he was taken first in the first round of the NBA draft by the Cleveland Cavaliers, quickly ascending to the throne, honorifically anointed in his number 23 jersey, to become known as “King James.” But after only three years in the league, three years in which the image of the NBA quickly turned to that


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of a “gangsta’s paradise,” that title has proved to be paradoxical and as much a burden as it ever was a blessing. This chapter examines the ways in which the newer generations of African American NBA players have been constructed in the popular imagination as transgressors of the “American Dream,” as well as the problematics of the messianic impulse in the league, with the fans, and with corporate America. Focusing on the singular rise of LeBron James, including the manner in which he is being interpolated in various arenas of the American public sphere, I am interested in examining the manner in which various rhetorical frames of the “American Dream” get used to construct these black male bodies as somehow outside of its reaches because of the materiality, hypervisibility, and performativity of their version of American success. It is this relationship between vilification and veneration that I interrogate, tracing how it creates a paradoxical identity formation that is forced to negotiate ideologies of American exceptionalism, racial containment, and global market economies.

THESE BOOTSTRAPS WERE MADE FOR WALKING: SELLING B[L]ACK THE AMERICAN DREAM America’s belief in meritocracy and the sacred notion of “bootstraps” ideology are uniquely served by the arena of sports at all levels, and the largely naïve, often delusional, assumptions around the “purity” of competition that accompany the fanatical popularity of sporting events in our country. Athletic competition in the United States is perceived, mainly inaccurately, as one of the few places where “the best man” truly does win regardless of race, class, and, thanks to Title IX, gender; rarely is it taken into consideration the effects that institutional racism, sexism, and classism have on individuals’ abilities to even participate in the athletic arena to begin with. Additionally, as with many public institutions and events, America has a selective and short cultural memory regarding the place of sporting heroes once they reach their “heroic” stature. Though it was unquestionably trendy to want to “Be Like Mike” in the 1990s, that kind of hero worship of a black athlete by both fans and Wall Street was really a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. No one had ever sold product and American Dream ideology by saying that they wanted to “Be Like Jackie,” or Satchel Paige, or Wilma Rudolph, or Jack Johnson, or John Carlos and Tommie Smith. It wasn’t until the original number 23 stepped on the professional hardwood and put a stranglehold on the American popular imagination that a black athlete could be conceived, in both ideological and market terms, as a living embodiment of the American Dream fantasy. Of course M. J. was not the first black athlete to be popular with American audiences; the list of black athletes who, as both predecessors and peers, garnered fame and fortune for


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largely unparalleled athletic prowess in football, baseball, track and field, boxing, and, of course, basketball, is endless. But outside of their respective playing fields, none of those athletes stood in proximity to our collective notions of what it meant to symbolize the American Dream. For most of them, including O. J. Simpson, (pre white Bronco), Magic Johnson, Carl Lewis, and Sugar Ray Leonard, the politics of respectability allowed them to sell us candy bars, cars, cereal, and beer, but not values and lifestyles; it allowed them to move “on up” to the suburbs, just as long as they didn’t move in next door; and it also allowed them to become celebrities while still stopping short of becoming symbols of the sacred American catechism of work ethic and self-reliance. They were good athletes. They were respectable African Americans. But they were certainly not role models for the American Dream. For others, including Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith, though their athleticism could not be denied, their transgressions could not be forgiven. These black athletes became legend for challenging American smugness, ignorance, hatred, and hubris and paid with their ideological exile from the nation’s fantasy of the American Dream.5 But in 1984, Michael Jordan took his place on the Chicago Bulls and ushered in a new era of black athlete who laid purposeful claim to the rhetoric and ideology of the American Dream, and to whom, for a very brief moment (emphasis on very brief), the American public was all too happy to hand over the mantle of “Keepers of the Dream.” Jordan would become an unexpected but powerful touchstone in the market of American values and exceptionalism, which is, as C. L. Cole states, “evidenced by his excessive commodification.” Cole continues, noting, “His [Jordan’s] innumerable commodified forms are fueled by popular sentiments of excellence, authenticity, sincerity, generosity, and responsibility and a rhetoric that intertwines community, nation, tradition, development, and good times” (2001, p. 72). He wasn’t just living the American Dream, for the American public he was the American Dream, and they were willing to spend millions of dollars on sports drinks, batteries, hot dogs, and basketball shoes to keep the dream alive. Before Jordan’s arrival in 1984, the NBA was mildly popular, though it paled in comparison to the popular clamor for the more “all-American” sports of baseball and football, and was nowhere near the manic, market powerhouse it was to become in the 1990s with Jordan’s help. What was the difference? Certainly there had been talented NBA players prior to the arrival of Michael Jordan, and many of them, if not most, were African American. Bill Russell, Dr. J., Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wilt Chamberlain were all masters of the basketball craft. They were respected for their talent and found a modest claim to celebrity, but they were not discussed in the messianic terms that Jordan would command in the American public sphere and bequeath to the generation of players that would follow him.


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As Mary G. McDonald explains in her essay “Safe Sex Symbol? Michael Jordan and the Politics of Representation,” this lapse in popularity before 1984 (Jordan’s initiation year in the NBA when he won Rookie of the Year, made his first visit to the playoffs, and signed a deal with Nike), was due, in part, to a largely white audience’s inability to connect to a largely black league: “Indeed, during the 1970s and early 1980s attendance and commercial support had waned in the NBA because the largely white audience with targeted financial clout grew less interested as African American athletes took over the league’s numerical majority” (2001, p. 156). In part, this stalled popularity was also due to the difference in historical periods. The social climate during the 1960s through the early 1980s, marked mainly by the prevalent tug-of-war over civil rights, social programs, and race politics, greatly dictated the limits placed on American consumers’ imaginations as to what, and from whom, they were interested in buying their American lifestyles. Up until that point, NBA players were simply athletes, not yet style mavens, cultural pundits, or ideological icons. They were considered meritorious within the realm of professional sports (though still less so than those athletes in football and baseball). A skyhook was nice, but it wasn’t replacing the traditional notions of success in America like becoming a doctor or a lawyer or the president; those were professions and positions by which “true” American meritocracy could, and would, be measured. But beginning in the latter part of the eighties and into the nineties, the nation would be dominated both socially and politically by the growing acknowledgement of the place of the United States in a rapidly shifting global community, including the explosive significance of global corporatization. As Norman K. Denzin has said, “the global awareness of the NBA intersected directly with the globalization of corporate America in the nineties” (2001, p. 6). It would be in this radically different American, and worldwide, climate that Michael Jordan would single-handedly change the look of meritocracy and the definition of the American Dream for a more than obliging American public who was beginning to be convinced of the socially constructed link between commodity and American success.

BREAKING THE MOLD: SELLING JORDAN The lore of Jordan’s rise and domination is, by now, well-known by most people worldwide, and is, in fact, a virtual “how-to” for up-and-coming American athletes, especially African American athletes, who are hoping to translate athletic talent into a command of the media and market machines of professional sports. He arrived in the NBA having already gained some renown for hitting the game-winning shot for North Carolina as a freshman to win the 1982 NCAA title. After his dominance of the NBA, the


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global market, and people’s imaginations were established, the image of that NCAA championship shot, as well as various other sundry images and stories, like M. J. being cut from his varsity basketball team when he was a sophomore, became crucial components in creating Jordan mythology and linking it to American ideology. This terrain of Michael Jordan as athlete, as black man, and as global market talisman has been well covered by scholars and economists, sports analysts and media honchos, and cultural pundits and public relations conglomerates, and my discussion of him here is not an attempt to uncover something “new” about the M. J. era (see Andrews 2001; Cole 2001; Halberstam 1999; Gates 1998; LaFeber 1999; Boyd 1997; Dyson 1993). Rather, I want to identify two of the most compelling points made by some of these thinkers regarding Jordan the man and Jordan the brand to use in aggregate as a critical means of examining the place of the “American Dream” in today’s NBA as well as the significance of the second coming in the figure of LeBron James. The first is one of the central aspects of M. J.’s success that recurs endlessly in scholarly analyses of him as a cultural phenomenon and that also has significant relevance in thinking about the marked transformation in audience response to today’s NBA superstars; it is the role played by ideologies of racial transcendence in the creation of Michael Jordan as both a perfect pitchman and an American Dream icon. The perceived ability to transcend one’s race is both rare and problematic, but in the case of Michael Jordan, it is also worth billions of dollars worldwide. Most black athletes, especially NBA players, are connected intrinsically to popular understandings and attitudes regarding race. Regardless of how a player is translated in the public sphere, either as a nice guy, like former San Antonio Spur David Robinson, or a prima donna, like Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant, or a thug, like Boston Celtic Rasheed Wallace, or Los Angeles Lakers’ infamous Ron Artest, those characterizations always stand in relation to their blackness as either a consequence of it or an exception to it. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, was able to attain an image beyond blackness through a constant marketing regiment that relocated Jordan’s “imagined” character and self/sign within his extraordinary skill and undeniable charisma. As C. L. Cole explains it, “The rhetoric of transcendence is tied to notions of exceptionalism that appear to distance Jordan from the semiotic field that locates and positions other African American men/players” (2001, p. 91). Cole goes further by saying: Indeed, it was during the 1980s, in the midst of America’s panic around urban crime, drugs, violence, and heightened racism that Michael Jordan came of age as American Jordan. I use the term American Jordan to refer to Jordan’s position as a “representative character” of America’s political culture and as an affective figure in the national symbolic. As a figure in the national symbolic, American Jordan reproduces national fantasy—by which I mean the nation’s imagined


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origins, organization, and character . . . American Jordan is both a product of and exists at the intersection of political life and affect, the site at which national fantasy is generated and affirmed. (2001, p. 71)

Cole’s reading of Jordan as “American Jordan” captures the essence of the notion of racial transcendence through the removal of a racial signification and the adoption of a universalizing “national” character—not only does Jordan cease to be black through this transcendent lens but also he is also elevated to the stature of über-American. The brilliant simplicity of Gatorade’s “Be Like Mike” campaign is, perhaps, the best example of the effectiveness of the racially transcendent quality of Jordan and his image. Immediately, the intimate identification of Jordan as “Mike” creates an everyman quality to the marketing. Mike’s your friend; he’s your buddy; he’s just like you . . . only better because he defies common athletic expectations, both of physicality and of character (he even defies gravity), he’s rich and successful, and he’s a role model. At the same time that he is presented as the “common man,” a characteristic typically limited to whiteness, in his simple perseverance for achievement and success he is also shown to be an superlative example; it’s not just that everyone, regardless of race, age, or gender, can dream about being that exceptional, it is that they should dream about being that exceptional. The lyrics to the commercial jingle begin “Sometimes I dream . . . that he is me . . . you’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be.” Interestingly, these jingle lyrics expressly elicit notions of striving that are connected to similar notions contrived around the ideology of the American Dream. They imagine Michael Jordan as a touchstone of aspiration, success, and individualism; in other words, a touchstone of America itself. This “American” equation is neatly completed with the fact that it is being used to advance market capitalism with the promotion of something as banal as a sports drink. All this considered, of critical significance is the fact that nowhere within the message is it suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that race, either as an affirmation or a deterrent, has anything to do with Jordan’s position. Within the narrative thrust of the campaign Jordan is rendered raceless, though problematically that racelessness cannot escape being scripted onto a black male body; ultimately, this problematic aspect of Jordan’s “racelessness” means that his transcendence and momentary disruption of the “black male as transgressor” equation relies almost completely on the ideological negation of blackness, especially black manhood. This leads to the second important aspect of critical analyses around Jordan in which I am interested: the use of notions of threat and containment of the black male body that Jordan’s racial transcendence served to maintain. As David Andrews has observed about Jordan, “he is an agent of racial displacement. Jordan’s valorized, racially neutered image displaces


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racial codes onto other black bodies . . . whom the popular media seems intent on criminalizing” (2001a, p. 128). This signification of Jordan perpetuated the “him/them” dichotomy that pitted “respectability” (read: white) that he was seen as embodying against “threat” (read: black) that the popular imagination understood, and still understands, to be embodied in the monolith of black masculinity, including urban black youth and “flamboyant/cocky/imposing/enigmatic/ angry” black basketball celebrities, reifying America’s belief that the preservation of American Dream values depended on the containment of that threat through the elevation of a transcendent respectability. Or as Michael Hoeschman has remarked, “. . . Jordan does not just transcend race in the United States, rather, he transforms race for white viewers, providing a desired alignment for white folks with a black personality who does not appear to pose a threat” (Hoeschman 2001, p. 273). So that, not only did Jordan turn into “a sign of himself” (Andrews) through what Andrews terms “aggressive branding,” but he also became a perceived social and cultural justification for the continued indictment of all other types of blackness who could not, or would not, break through their racialization to shake off the mark of transgression. These other types of blackness included the villainized black urban masses who, during Jordan’s era of the eighties and the early nineties, were disproportionately falling victim to the Reagan-Bush blitzkrieg on education, social programs, and civil rights policies, as well as African American celebrities in music, movies, and sports, including Eddie Murphy and N.W.A., who were committed to accentuating blackness in the ways they were marketed and sold. Jordan’s racial transcendence (like that of his television counterpart, Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show) may not have provided any actual safeguard against real-world social transgressions linked to racial identities and politics, but it certainly contributed to keeping safe the color-blind racist assumptions and ideologies that created and upheld the institutionalized containment, and outright repression in many cases, of the black body, especially the black male body, in America. As Andrews points out, “the subsequent globalization of Jordan’s celebrityhood has contributed to the emergence of a televisually based transnational racial order, prefigured on the production and circulation of universalizing, non-threatening—and thereby highly marketable—representations of black ethnic otherness” (2001c, p. xvi). It seemed to be assumed that if black Americans really could (or would) just “be like Mike” then we would be able to “all just get along.” But wishing couldn’t make it so, though it could sell a lot of Gatorade. Ultimately, Jordan and his unrivaled power of signification and selling could not keep the American racial nation safe from itself indefinitely; the world had changed dramatically during his fifteen-year sports career, and


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with it changed the model of American racial representation. His final departure from the Chicago Bulls at the end of the 1998 season seemed to signal a seemingly irreparable rupture between the league and the fans with the arrival of a bastion of younger players whose style and barely contained sense of entitlement ushered in a shift in spirit that put America’s popular imagination on notice that the American Dream was alive and well . . . and ironic as hell.

“HOW YA LIKE ME NOW?”: MARKETING THE NBA INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Thus 1999 was a watershed moment in the growing paradoxical nature of twenty-first century professional sports with the market void left by Jordan being filled with “primetime players” ready for their close-ups and knowledgeable in the ways of self-promotion, celebrity, and the performancehungry, and often fickle, fans. Today, professional athletes, none more so than NBA heroes, enjoy a public deification that reveals just how well millions of aspirants within the American public have constructed for themselves and their ideological well-being, the classic “rags to riches” story of American hard work and opportunity through the images and careers of sports superstars, while at the same time relying on the racial demarcations of sport celebrities, especially those of the African American–dominated NBA, to maintain social and ideological order through stereotypical assumptions and moral designations. One of the largest reasons for the increasing paradox and irony within the NBA has to do with the league’s strategy, beginning in the 1990s, to grow the NBA’s popularity by purposefully linking it to hip-hop culture in hopes of bringing the same fans of rap and hip-hop, especially white suburban youth with disposable incomes, to basketball, as well as give the NBA the same kind of urban, hip authenticity that was making the alterity of hip-hop an unprecedented global marketing power. This stood in vivid contradistinction to the league’s earlier strategy during the 1980s to promote a “kinder, gentler” NBA with the constructed celebrity of “model” black athletes whose, in C. L. Cole’s terms, “racially neutered” identity created a racial comfort zone for a primarily white audience. As Mary McDonald notes: During the 1980s the NBA initiated new promotional campaigns attempting to court white and middle-class audiences. According to C. L. Cole and Harry Denny (1994), the NBA constructed and marketed a culturally “acceptable” public face of black masculinity by highlighting glamorous athletic personalities such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson. New promotional narratives marked and


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marketed the players with classic American ideologies of patriotism, rugged individualism, and racial equality . . . the entertaining character of the NBA functioned to suppress racist suggestions of threat or deviance. (Jackson 1994)

But during the 1990s, with the dominant rise of rap and hip-hop, American audiences, especially white audiences, were looking for spaces of “racial voyeurism,” a means of experiencing “the other” without having to acknowledge one’s social relationship to “the other.” This new market trend made the NBA’s hip-hop marketing strategy, in a word, work. It catapulted the NBA into the global commodity stratosphere. Its success provided the place for urban, hip-hop culture to infiltrate all aspects of the league, from the adoption of the extra-baggy shorts donned by the players to the hiring of hip-hop stars to create NBA and playoff theme songs to the ultimate marriage of basketball and hip-hop: hip-hop stars like Usher and Jay-Z becoming part owners of NBA teams by the dawn of the millennium. But as the century wound down, so too did the league’s and the fans’ tolerance and desire for the hip-hop-informed performance and attitude that had been engendered by their own commercial creation. African American players began to be looked upon as “pimps and thugs” who were sullying the pristine nature of fundamental athletic competition. They were vilified for allowing “street” wisdom and emotion to bleed into the arena of professional sports, an arena constructed as hallowed and decorous and deserving of a certain kind of “proper” respect. One need look no further than the explosive clamor over the 2004 fight that broke out between Ron Artest and Ben Wallace during an Indiana/Detroit match-up to expose the popular fear harbored by fans and NBA leaders of unleashing just such a “street rage” within the supposed “safe haven” of a professional sports arena, in this case, the Palace at Auburn Hills. In its aftermath, the fight was referred to by many names, including, “Malice at the Palace,” “Palace Brawl,” “Motown Melee,” “Throwdown at Motown,” and “Basket Brawl,” all of which captured the sense of social panic and the character of uncontrolled aggression with which the NBA has become dubiously identified in the minds of the American public and its pundits as its connection to hip-hop and the urban has grown stronger; it is an identification located in popular culture that, on the one hand is merely a reflective manifestation of the long-held notions of transgression that have been associated with blackness in American society, while on the other it exposes the problematic tension in the United States between mediating blackness and marketing it. During the November 19, 2004, game, then, Indiana Pacer Ron Artest became the center of attention during a clash that erupted between him and several of his teammates, their opponents, the Detroit Pistons, and Detroit fans, resulting in the longest nondrug- or nonbetting-related suspension in NBA history for Artest as well as threatening proof of the


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perceived devolution of the propriety of athletic competition. But even before this media-scrutinized event, NBA players had started to be characterized as interlopers into the theater of the American Dream because the “bootstraps” they pulled up were high-tops and because they navigated the American road to success in do-rags and tattoos to the soundtrack of Tupac. The effect, as noted by David Leonard in “The Real Color of Money: Controlling Black Bodies in the NBA,” is that “the simultaneous commodification and demonization of hip-hop and its black male signifiers within the NBA” has made visible “the complex and contradictory place of aesthetics, cultural values, and bodies that are constructed both fashionable (desirable and cool) and suspect (dangerous)” (2006, p. 162). Interestingly, the white players in the NBA, as a group, remained outside of this culture of vilification, despite the general adoption by many of them, including Jason Williams, Chris Anderson, Bob Sura, and Mike Miller, of the hip-hop character through attire, tattoos, and attitude, an instance that Eric Watts and Mark Orbe would call “spectacular consumption,” wherein “the spectacle is fully realized when the enhanced appearance of the image becomes more significant than the social world it previously represented” (as quoted in Yousman 2003, p. 378). The absence of white players, even those who performed the same hip-hop personas, from the blanket of criticism made it clear that it was the presumed blackness of the NBA that was under fire, as well as the urban trends within the league that recalled its intrinsic connection to this “blackness” of character. The ironic conflation of the NBA and hip-hop culture in the eyes of much of the American audience serves as a less-than-obvious reiteration of the centuries-old social (il)logic of the black male body as the locus of transgression as well as an expedient sidestepping of blatantly racist invocations. It is a moment that exemplifies Norman Denzin’s argument that, “The black other occupies a complex site, a place where fears, desires, and repressed dreams are lodged. The black body is a site of spectacle, its blackness, as Herman Gray (1995, p. 165) argues, a potential measure of evil, and menace” (2001, p. 7). Subsequently, the league conveniently forgot that, not only had they masterminded the market affiliation between hip-hop and the NBA but they had also profited handsomely from that connection in the popular imagination, when in 2005 they instituted a ban on hip-hop attire as “a provision inside their collective bargaining agreement with the player’s union” (Jackson 2006, p. 130), thus ushering in yet another age in the marketing of the NBA that returned racial signification to a more palatable place for American audiences. Or as Denzin has said, “Race would be back in its proper place, repressed and so visible that it become[s] invisible” (2001, p. 11); and the league seems to have placed this new era squarely on the shoulders of LeBron James, whose marketability strikes a lucrative balance between an urban authenticity and a neoliberal respectability.


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ALL HAIL KING JAMES LeBron James doesn’t just represent the marketing futures of the NBA, as well as Nike and Coca-Cola, but he also represents the redemption of the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise and the city of Cleveland itself, as only a modern-day, basket-making Moses can. “Type his name into a Google search and you get 52,200 hits,” says Ryan White, sportswriter for The Oregonian. “Check him out on eBay, where there are 1,040 items including a brand new James high school throwback jersey. A brand new throwback. ‘You are bidding on a Labron [sic] James basketball!’ another auctioneer declares. People who can’t even spell his name are profiting. The rest are propheting. Money or hyperbole. He’s been engulfed in both” (White 2003, p. C01). The weight of this role as messiah is being carried by an African American man who, at eighteen years old, his age when he entered the NBA, could not legally drink and who simultaneously became eligible to vote and to be drafted by the military as he was being drafted into the NBA. But these things, like Jordan’s being cut from his varsity team, serve as ideal raw material on which to build the James lore, which after only a brief nine-year period, spanning his high school career and the infancy of his NBA career, has already been writ large; it is the beginning of a legend that relies not only on James’s future achievements but also on America’s ability to see both themselves and their ideologies of success and hard work as represented in those achievements. It is a precarious performance that is required of James. As novelist Paul Beatty has written in regard to the paradoxical space of black men in America, “this messiah gig is a bitch” (1996, p. 1). James’s ineluctable connection to the American Dream is as transparent at the beginning of his career as it would eventually become for Michael Jordan at the height and end of his career. Before he even stepped onto the professional hardwood, LeBron’s phenomenon was being explained by journalists like this: “The reason for all the fuss lies not just in his on-court athleticism and a talent for passing a ball that has drawn comparisons with Magic Johnson, but in the way he embodies the American Dream” (Hart 2003, p. 16). Though, even as the populace seems ready and willing to bestow the mantle of “keeper of the dream” onto young LeBron, they do not do so without trepidation, a trepidation borne out of a socialized distrust of the rest of the young, black generation of NBA players for whom they “always, already” harbor an ideological fear. As Mike Lopresti put it, “He will not only have to play like a man, but act like a man. It will require judgment, perspective, prudence, and moderation” (2003, p. 1) (emphasis mine). This statement, though supposedly referring to James’s youth, also demonstrates the contentious relationship that has always existed between blackness and manhood in the nation’s eye; in the United States manhood


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is not a foregone conclusion if you are black; it requires a very regimented and particular performance, outlined to some degree by Lopresti. Lopresti’s comments also expose the racialized paradox of the American Dream. Whereas the American public readily translates varied displays of excess from white celebrities as normalized terms of the American Dream, and further proof of their representation of the dream, the translation of that same excess as performed by black celebrities, especially black male celebrities, is one of disrespect and abuse, eliciting calls for moderation and serving as further proof of their denigration of the dream. Following this sensibility, the American populace is also not conferring the vestiges of the American Dream on James without implicit, oftentimes explicit, expectations that his rise and preservation of an American rubric of hard work, respectability, and success will thwart the perceived racial and ideological transgression of the rest of the young, black generation of NBA players. In this way, his place, as an agent of containment, is very similar to Michael Jordan, but in other key ways, his place clearly is not.

THE ICON VS. THE PHENOM The differences between the M. J. phenomenon and the LeBron machine not only concretize the American public’s love/hate relationship with the NBA and its superstars but it also foregrounds the mutability of the image of the American Dream, especially as it appears in service to popular and racial imaginaries as well as global market commodities. The first of two main differences between the meritocratic messiahs is that the creation of the Jordan icon evolved step by step while the LeBron package seems to have come onto the scene almost fully formed. As a junior in high school he was already a Sports Illustrated cover story. As a senior in high school his games were on ESPN2, his home games were on pay-per-view, and he drove a Hummer (the fact of which also gave him his first publicized controversy . . . as a high school senior). He had a publicist before he was even drafted, and, having yet to pick up a basketball as an NBA professional, he had three major sporting goods corporations, Adidas, Reebok, and Nike, vying for the potential to capitalize on his outrageous star power—the outrageous star power of a high school senior. Once he was taken in the first round of the 2003 draft he had a $90 million contract from Nike, plus a $10 million signing bonus, and a four-year, $16.8 million contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers, making him worth almost $120 million before even playing in the NBA. “He is a free-floating dollar sign,” as David Leonard said to me in conversation about the LeBron frenzy. “It will only get better with time for him,” said Schuyler Baehman, assistant managing editor of The Sports Business Daily. “LeBron is as close to a can’t-miss property as you can find”


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(Bruscas 2004, p. D1) (emphasis mine). Or as basketball writer Dan Wetzel stated on CBSSportsline.com, “LeBron James is a walking lottery ticket waiting to be cashed” (as quoted in Pluto and Windhorst 2007, p. 52.). Just for those keeping score at home, in 1997, after almost thirteen years in the league, Jordan’s “total income was estimated to be in excess of $70 million dollars” (Denzin 2001, p. 4). That’s $50 million dollars less for a thirteen-year proven track record. However, what is more significant than the money (though, let’s be honest, the money is pretty significant) is the direction the American Dream has taken in the “fable” of each man. America’s notion of Jordan was one that traced the American Dream through his accomplishments, his character, and his success; it allowed his exceptionalism to transcend race and make him a universal signifier of American success. Alternatively, the nation’s notion of LeBron is one that has already reached its destination through the hype, anticipation, and expectation; it requires that his exceptionalism be representative of both a nation and a race, and could wind up making him a signifier of American excess. “Anything less than the ‘next Michael Jordan’ will be considered a disappointment” (Abrams 2003, p. C1). Even James himself is intent on becoming “in his words, ‘a global brand’” (Ballard 2006, p. 49); the implication is that it is an inevitability, not a possibility, as it had been with Jordan. “‘I think even Michael Jordan got a chance to become Michael Jordan,’ said Danny Ainge. ‘This guy hasn’t had that opportunity, but with those $90 million shoe contracts, I think there is a lot of intrigue and excitement’” (Abrams 2003, p. C1) (emphasis mine). This intrigue and excitement is because it has already been decided that LeBron is a hero and that facticity of his “heroness” is what’s being sold, materially and ideologically. As Paul Swangard, professor and managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, explains: “It’s all about lifestyle marketing now. I’m not sure these kids who follow LeBron are all going to go out and buy Hummers tomorrow, or all go out to buy his expensive shoes at the Foot Locker. But it is certainly something they aspire to, and these kids tend to look up to those type of heroes” (Bruscas 2004, p. D1) (emphasis mine). Thus America’s desire for, not only heroes, but “those type of heroes” that construct a translated, consumable blackness to assuage contemporary racial anxieties, already makes LeBron James, in varied and problematic ways, a fait accompli—a dream, not deferred, but already dreamt. And whereas Jordan was imagined outside of blackness in his messianic pose, James is significantly positioned firmly within a sign field of blackness. Just as the fact of James’s “hero-ness” is being constructed and employed in certain ways within the public sphere and global market, so too is “the fact of his blackness,” which operates in what Michael Eric Dyson calls the “contradictory impulses of the contemporary culture of consumption, where the black athletic body is deified, reified, and rearticulated within the


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narrow meanings of capital and commodity” (2001, p. 267). Unlike Jordan who didn’t really market “blackness,” except in the implicit and highly contentious connections made between basketball and blackness and who was marketed beyond blackness, always selling the “raceless” fantasy of meritocracy and excellence, LeBron is marketed differently; he is marketed through blackness, albeit a blackness that is largely performative. With LeBron, blackness isn’t erased; in fact, part of his marketing power relies on his ability to play to America’s (especially white America’s) expectations of their “familiarity” with blackness. His highly popular series of Nike commercials with the “LeBrons” is a good example of the way in which blackness is used as a signifier in the marketing of James as respectable, authentic, and racially “other,” though not racially threatening. In the series, James plays all four characters in the fictitious “LeBron” family, including Pops, the older LeBron brother who is suave in a retro, Billy Dee Williams kind of way, LeBron himself who is always dressed in his NBA uniform, and little LeBron junior who is constantly outside of the family exchanges because he always has his headphones on. All of the commercials in the series center around the family talking about some aspect of basketball, be it Pops’s glory days or LeBron’s new sneaker, and recall popularized versions of “the black family” as entertaining from Good Times to Family Matters and from The Cosby Show to Everybody Hates Chris. Each “episode” of the Nike series shows the LeBrons in a characteristically “black” behavior from signifying stories, or “baldheaded lies” as they’re called, at the dinner table to macking in the mirror to dancing to Rick James’s “Superfreak,” including the requisite performance of the robot by the older LeBron brother. Like most of Nike’s campaigns, the “LeBrons” series focuses little time on the product of shoes and centers more clearly on the product of LeBron himself. The series shows that not only is LeBron a hardwood maestro but also he’s funny, entertaining, and can dance well; the unstated implication being “just like all black people.” He remains “safe” because he exists in an immovable racialized space created by the public and the market culture that manages racial panics by locating blackness in confined performative geographies like athletics and entertainment; in other words, in a world of blackness that is understandable because it is the one that exists in the national imagination. David Andrews has argued that “American culture simply does not tolerate individuals who are, to put it plainly, too black” (2001, p. 127). But it is also true that the American public needs individuals who are “really”6 black in order to give meaning to white identity as well as to provide evidence of a color-blind post–civil rights America. It is just that those who are “really” black in the minds of (white) America are linked less to the reality of blackness than they are to the reality of whiteness, by which I mean to say that whiteness only exists as something real in the face of blackness and that particular blackness need


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not be real itself, and in fact, rarely is, at least in a substantive way; blackness must simply be constructed in a certain way to legitimate ideologies that maintain American racial logics, allowing for moral designations to be made and understood on the basis of race alone. Consequently, LeBron as a dancing, performing caricature of blackness, as he is in the Nike commercials featuring the “LeBrons,” is acceptable (though clearly not “real,” even as it is very clearly marked as black), and in many ways, necessary to his market power because it locates his black, male body, and by association, the black, male body, in a naturalized space that is reconcilable to the American public’s imaginary. But it is in the combination of the act of his “hero-ness” and the “fact of his blackness” that is found the postmodern, American Dream brilliance that has been created out of a young basketball player from Akron, Ohio. In 2006, at age twenty-one, LeBron made his debut in the NBA playoffs, leading the Cavaliers there for the first time in eight years. For NBA fans and people in the know about professional sports, James’s entry into the champion’s proving ground is merely a matter of “slam-a-fest” destiny. His exceptionalism, both real and constructed, ordained his American journey toward success and legend in the eyes of an American public devout to the promise of the monument that is the American Dream. For David Stern, the league, the Cavaliers franchise, Nike and Coca-Cola, James’s arrival to the playoffs is but the logical next step they had hoped for in a blueprint that combines James’s skill with the ideology of meritocracy, the allure of success, the “safety” of a manageable black body, and the insatiability of the global market for fetishized objects of “cool” aspiration toward the goal of, not just making money, but of the much more lucrative project of creating popular consciousness. Behold! The model minority for a new millennium! James is raw on the court and respectable on the street, creating a racial positioning that (white) American audiences are only too eager to consume. LeBron may be worth $120 million, but the ideological whole that he represents is worth much more than the sum of its parts. Much more. One need only see the Nike campaign that was launched during the 2006 playoffs to realize just how much more. Alternating between a montage of the industrialized urban blight and heart of Cleveland, Ohio, and its citizens, all LeBron devotees, and a montage of LeBron playing against various opponents and making extraordinary shots, the driving message of the commercial spot is “We are all witnesses,” an idea that flashes periodically throughout the scenes on storefront signs, on marquees, on fan signs, on T-shirts, and, finally, on a silent black-andwhite Nike billboard, just in case you missed the floating, ethereal intimation of the other signs. It is not backed by a lively hip-hop score or a catchy pop theme; instead the music is a commanding drumline beat; it is majestic and demands both attention and respect—it isn’t just hype, it is holy. Being


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witness calls to mind seeing the “truth” as it unfolds through our own eyes; bearing witness calls to mind a spiritual responsibility to bring forth the “truth” and share it with others so that they too may be witness, creating an ever-growing group of witnesses to testify to the experience of such an unparalleled phenomenon. By turns genius and audacious, Nike makes it clear that we are being turned into, if we haven’t already become, apostles, spreading the gospel of LeBron, and by association, his Nikes. It seems like an overly sacred campaign for a commodity as profane as athletic shoes; it also seems a bit apocryphal when you consider that the focus was on a player only three years into his professional career. Whatever it seemed, it is indicative of the messianic fervor of exceptionalism that has been injected into the property, sign, body, and career of LeBron James. He is the American Dream. He is the Holy Grail . . . and if he isn’t, we may all be lost.

DREAMING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM So, in the end, to whom does the American Dream belong, both materially and rhetorically? Does it belong to those who believe? To those who believe it is real and so continue to strive, even in the face of mounting evidence that it is a farce? Is it the believers, including children and immigrants, who make the dream endure? Or does it belong to those who themselves don’t believe in the “Dream” but believe in the dreamers of the “Dream,” and see in them the path to money and power? It is the nonbelievers, including politicians and CEOs, who invest the dream with power. On many levels the question is an ideological, if not philosophical, one, but in the world of twenty-first-century American popular culture, the American Dream, in all of its paradoxical glory, is currently in the hands of the NBA and the myriad people who hold a stake in the league, including players, owners, corporations, and fans. The NBA and its constituents are marketing (and manipulating) the dream better than almost anybody in the pop culture game today, with the notable exception of American Idol. But unlike American Idol that offers up American Dream mythology in an inoffensive, saccharine way, where the public has its say, the “best” person wins, and we’re all carried away by a “never give up” power pop ballad sung by our teary-eyed idol,7 the cult of the NBA since the 1990s seems to conspicuously play in the murky ironies of American Dream myth and has not only sold basketball, shoes, sports drinks, and the like but has also laid bare, whether conscious or not, the complicated ways in which race stands at the center of how our nation imagines, creates, and fabricates ideologies of opportunity, meritocracy, democracy, and freedom. As a way of illustrating what I mean, and as a way of moving toward a conclusion, I want to end by considering the connections between several of the corporate campaigns of


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four NBA superstars and the media lynchings of three of the most recognizable criminalized black bodies in the last twenty years.

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: MEDIA[TED] BLACK MASCULINITY The four NBA stars on whose campaigns I am focusing are Michael Jordan, Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson, and LeBron James. Under consideration are the aforementioned Jordan and James campaigns, “Be Like Mike” for Gatorade, and “Witness” for Nike, respectively, as well as the Latrell Sprewell campaign, “I Am the American Dream” for And1 shoes and Allen Iverson’s print ads for Reebok’s “I Am What I Am” campaign. Having already discussed the first two campaigns in a degree of detail, I want to briefly introduce the Sprewell and Iverson campaigns. The first, Latrell Sprewell for And1 shoes, is a television spot that aired only briefly in 1998. Comprised of black-and-white images of Sprewell that purposefully create a sense of the threat of difference, and of blackness, including images of Sprewell undergoing the intricate and time-consuming process of having cornrows put into his hair and set to Jimi Hendrix’s famously disquieting version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with Latrell doing a voiceover that states, “Some people see me as an American nightmare, but I am the American Dream,” the commercial unabashedly threw down an ideological gauntlet, especially as it came on the heels of Sprewell’s highly publicized choking incident with his then Golden State coach, P. J. Carlesimo. It disrupted the quaintness of American Dream mythology by presenting a raw look at what it actually takes to dream “the dream” if you are black in America—you must be strong, unapologetic, and prepared for the challenge, even if you are an NBA superstar, especially if you are an NBA superstar. The commercial spot stood as if to say, “America, you thought you had imagined me out of existence, except to the degree that I starred in your hidden, and not-sohidden, fears, but now I’m here to realize your greatest fear: making my claim to the American Dream, and leaving my mark on it so that others like me may follow. Now imagine that.” In one spectacularly composed two-minute spot for, purportedly, basketball shoes, Sprewell and And1 disassembled the sacred visage of the American Dream and remade it in his image. More recently, in 2002, Allen Iverson, after signing a lifetime contract with Reebok just one year earlier, appeared in Reebok’s series of “I Am What I Am” advertisements. In his print ad, Iverson is on the left side of a double-page layout. He is dressed in all white, including his cocked cap and do-rag, cutting a kind of penitent posture with his hands pressed together as in prayer. The image makes an ironic evocation of Iverson as an angel.


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But the focus is quickly drawn to the right facing page where an illustrated image of a flame-haloed devil stands, it is assumed, as the supposed notion of what is contained beneath Iverson’s façade when he claims “I am what I am.” Again, as in the earlier discussion about Nike’s “Witness” campaign, this ad uses religious imagery and metaphor and plays with the relationship between the sacred and the profane, cashing in on the proven power of linking black NBA superstars to rhetorics of spiritual good and evil—a commodified version of the real-world moral designations projected onto the black body in everyday America. These two campaigns, along with “Be Like Mike” and “Witness,” as well as the discrete signs of Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James, are constitutive of a larger American culture of social and ideological displacement regarding race. Each campaign and respective celebrity signifier are selling distinct ideologies regarding American Dream ideals, authenticity, and black male identity; Jordan’s and Gatorade’s assimilationist fantasy of meritocracy is seemingly far removed from the rebel individualist’s challenge to the terms of American Dream success of both Sprewell and And1, and Iverson and Reebok, and both appear starkly distanced from James’s and Nike’s messianic ode to American exceptionalism. At the same time, all four campaigns rely on the same strategies of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have identified as “racial formation,” “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed” (1994, p. 55). The process of racial formation is comprised of historically located “racial projects,” of which these campaigns and their stars are primary examples. Omi and Winant define a racial project as “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (1994, p. 56). The ideologies and signs of these campaigns as racial projects work to displace larger social terrors for the American public where racial insecurities are central, including crime, terrorism, racism, immigration, and globalization, by reorganizing the “fear of the other” into a commodity that can be owned, an ethnic otherness that can be mediated, and an American imaginary that can be reified. These campaigns, and the ideological and market signs that have been created out of black NBA superstars to support these campaigns, have been formulated on a palimpsest of black manhood in America, constantly attempting to refigure black masculinity in equal terms but forever having to negotiate the residual stereotypes and fears that have historically limited black manhood in America. As racial projects they work in conjunction with other media-saturated, though outwardly contrary, racial projects to maintain a static conception of the place of black masculinity in the national imagination. Three examples of racial projects that appear contrary to the ideological work being produced through the NBA, its stars, and its


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constituents, though are actually complexly interrelated to them in the process of racial formation, are the separate drives in the past twenty years to hypercriminalize and hyperracialize the bodies and signs of Willie Horton, O. J. Simpson, and Stan “Tookie” Williams. Even without Nike’s encouragement, we have all been witnesses to the exaggerated constructions of racial paranoia that became represented by the images of these three men, all of which seemed to legislate the thrust toward racial containment in America. They did not sell us shoes or sports drinks, rather they bartered in democratic ideology, and like Jordan, Sprewell, Iverson, and James, they sustained the illusion of American racial logic; one elected a president (Horton); one exploited the fantasy of racial neutrality in the American justice system (Simpson); and one exposed the hypocrisy of America’s belief in the deterrent potential of the death penalty (Williams). They were the American Nightmare, not just because they represented the threat of blackness, but because everything about them, especially the images created around them, displayed the contradictions of American ideals. But as long as we still wanted to “be like Mike,” those nightmares and contradictions could be held at bay, at least theoretically, by America’s capacity to filter “race” through the mediated figures of “good” black pop culture icons; “good” because they serve America’s imagined notions of fairness, hard work, respectability, and success, or, as in cases of Sprewell and Iverson, “good” because the idea of threat is a commodified, performative one, in fact, it is one that sells; and, perhaps more importantly, it is one that is ostensibly manageable, either by the team, the league, the companies, or the market. The irony of the connection between Willie Horton, O. J. Simpson, and Tookie Williams, and Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Allen Iverson, and Latrell Sprewell, along with most of the black NBA superstars of today is that, as easily as the first three, so many countless criminalized black male bodies in the United States are denied social and moral redemption because of their race, their presumed inherent transgression, and the need of the American public to reify much of its racist (il)logic. So too are the last four elevated to redeem us, to maintain our sense of ourselves as a nation that is righteous, equal, and free, and to allow us to continue dreaming the American Dream, not by voting, protesting, or pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but by buying sneakers and sports drinks and by believing that we can “be like Mike.” So in the end, Tookie may have died for our sins, but “Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, LeBron speaks for you.”8 I am a witness.

NOTES 1. The American Heritage Dictionary (Third Edition). New York: Dell Publishing, 1994.


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2. Author’s personal definitions. Not formally endorsed by any recognized dictionary, though endorsed by close friends and colleagues of like mind. 3. This was for the U.S. edition of Vogue. The only other two men to appear on the cover of Vogue were Richard Gere and George Clooney, who, coincidentally, also appeared on the cover with Gisele Bündchen. 4. Decathlete Bryan Clay, who is featured in the accompanying layout, “Perfect Ten,” is half African American and half Japanese. And, having been raised in Hawaii by his Japanese mother, most media outlets, including the NBC Olympic website, identify him as Hawaiian. 5. This unforgivable nature seems to have been reconsidered in the past decade with many of these athletes enjoying a nostalgically constructed recuperation as pioneers and revolutionaries within both public and political spheres. One of the most recent recuperation projects of this kind is the erection of a monument honoring John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the campus of their alma mater, San Jose State University. 6. My use of the term really here should not be taken as connoting “realness” but rather as connoting the distance that an individual’s blackness is understood as removed from whiteness. 7. It must be stated that despite the sticky-sweet presentation of American Idol that stands in contrast to the more aggressive presentation of the NBA, which is my focus, Idol does rely on a complex matrix of representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality that make it an extremely interesting pop culture object deserving of critical analysis. 8. My apologies and respect to Ralph Ellison for my modification to his words.

WORKS CITED Abrams, A. (2003, July 13). King James phenom joins league crowned with Mikelike expectations. Florida Times Union, C1. Andrews, D. L. (2001a). The fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s blackness: Excavating a floating racial signifier. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 107–52). Albany: SUNY Press. Andrews, D. L. (2001b). Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America. Albany: SUNY Press. Andrews, D. L. (2001c). Michael Jordan matters. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. xiii–xx). SUNY Press, 2001. Ballard, C. (2006, April 24). Lebron, Act II. Sports Illustrated, 46–55. Beatty, P. (1996). The white boy shuffle. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Boyd, T. (1997). Am I black enough for you?: Popular culture from the ’hood and beyond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bruscas, A. (2004, January 13). NBA’s hottest new draw; 19-year old sensation LeBron James propels merchandising to an astounding level. Seattle Post Intelligencer, D1. Cole, C. L. (2001). Nike’s America/America’s Michael Jordan. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 65–103). SUNY Press.


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Denzin, Norman K. (2001). Representing Michael. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 3–13). Albany: SUNY Press. Dyson, M. E. (2001). Be like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the pedagogy of desire. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 259–68). Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Dyson, M. E. (1993, January). Be like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the pedagogy of desire. Cultural Studies, 64–72. Gates, H. L. (1998, June 1). Annals of marketing: Net worth. New Yorker, 48–61. Gray, H. (1995). Watching race: Television and the struggle for blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstam, D. (1999). Playing for keeps: Michael Jordan and the world he made. New York: Random House, 1999. Hart, S. (2003, October 26). Hype at new heights: LeBron James has signed a deal with Nike worth $100m—before playing a professional game. Sunday Telegraph, 16. Hoechsmann, M. (2001). Just do it: What Michael Jordan has to teach us. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 269–76). Albany: SUNY Press. Jackson, R. (2006, March). Decoded. Vibe, 124–30. LaFeber, W. (1999). Michael Jordan and the new global capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton. Leonard, D. J. (2006). The real color of money: Controlling black bodies in the NBA. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30 (2), 158–79. Lopresti, M. (2003, February 3). What LeBron James needs is a good example. Gannett News Service, 1. McDonald, M. G. (2001). Safe sex symbol? Michael Jordan and the politics of representation. In D. L. Andrews (Ed.), Michael Jordan, inc.: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America (pp. 153–174). Albany: SUNY Press. Omi, M., and Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Pluto, T., and Windhorst, B. (2007). The franchise: LeBron James and the remaking of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Cleveland: Gray & Company, Publishers. Smith, S. (2008, May 16). LeBron speaking out on Darfur. Retrieved September 1, 2010 from http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3398947. Sullivan, R. (2008, April). Dream Team. Vogue, 292–311. Wetzel, D. (2008, August 7). Will Kobe, LeBron pass on Darfur? Yahoo! Sports. Retrieved August 18, 2008, from http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/basket ball/news?slug=dw-darfur080708&prov=yhoo&type=lgns. White, R. (2003, May 23). Cash in hand, now James must earn it. The Oregonian, C01. Yousman, B. (2003). Blackophilia and blackophobia: White youth, the consumption of rap music, and white supremacy. Communication Theory, 13 (4), 366–91.


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6 Much Adu about Nothing? Freddy Adu and Neoliberal Racism in New Millennium America Kyle W. Kusz

Six years after his family immigrated to the United States from Tema, Ghana, Freddy Adu made American sporting history. In 2004, at the age of fourteen, he became the youngest male to play in an American professional sporting event when he debuted for D.C. United (Associated Press 2003). Broadcast to a national television audience, the opening game of the 2004 Major League Soccer (MLS) campaign had been hyped for weeks by the league, ABC, and ESPN as Freddy Adu’s debut. As Adu was cast as “the savior of American soccer” in the media, MLS instantly turned him into its public face (LaCanfora 2007). The league’s commodification of Adu paid dividends. Road attendance figures for D.C. United increased by 40 percent, while television ratings increased by 50 percent when D.C. United featured in ESPN’s MLS match of the week (Mahoney 2004). D.C. United jerseys and T-shirts adorned with “ADU 9” appeared all across the United States. During his rookie season, MLS telecasts were even interrupted by Sierra Mist commercials featuring Adu facing off in a juggling duel with soccer great, Pelé. Aware of his immense global marketing potential, Nike quickly signed the fourteen-year-old phenom to an endorsement deal for $1 million—a bargain if Adu lives up to his purported world-class footballing potential. Through the coordinated efforts of MLS, Nike, Pepsi, and the American/ global sports media complex, Adu’s moment of turning pro was transformed into “Freddy-mania,” a commodified media spectacle celebrating what BBCSPORT.com called Adu’s “modern American dream” story (BBCSPORT.com 2004). Freddy-mania was produced across disparate American media platforms such as ESPN’s Sportscenter and Pardon the Interruption, 60 Minutes, The Late Show with David Letterman, and MTV’s TRL (Total Request Live), not to mention additional media outlets across the globe. Adu’s 147


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emergent sporting celebrity and commodification is peculiar considering the American sporting establishment’s historical disdain for soccer. Yet, on one level, Freddy-mania arises from, and is a productive force in, recent efforts to cultivate a potentially lucrative soccer market in the United States. So, even the most rudimentary understanding of Freddy-mania requires situating Adu’s sporting celebrity in the context of the recent efforts of global sport media behemoths like Nike, Adidas, Disney, and News Corporation to transform the United States into a soccer marketing gold mine. But, to understand how the dark-black-skinned, Ghanaian-born, Americanized teenager Adu was rather easily and regularly commodified as a distinctly American sporting celebrity, I argue Freddy-mania must be situated in the racial context of new millennium America. More specifically, critical attention must be given to the particular ways in which Adu was racialized through the media and promotional culture, recognizing this racialization as an instrument and effect of what Henry Giroux (2004) calls “neoliberal racism.” Only after situating the spectacle of Freddy-mania within the context of neoliberal racism can one recognize how it functions as a form of popular pedagogy through which the ideas and logics of the neoliberal racial imaginary get naturalized as racial common sense. Because Freddy-mania, at first glance, appears to offer a seemingly hopeful, optimistic, and inspiring racial narrative celebrating a smiling, affable, and hardworking Adu (and his mother) as contemporary embodiments of the American Dream, it is difficult to notice the retrogressive racial politics that invisibly organize this commercialized media spectacle. So, my analysis will reveal the selective and strategic ways in which Adu’s blackness (coded both as recent African immigrant and as postracial American) is made to matter (and not matter) through Freddy-mania so that neoliberal (white) America appears as an open, inclusive, and color-blind society fully supportive of people of color (provided they invest in neoliberal values, practices, and relations). Yet, my analysis will also uncover how Adu’s African/postracial/recent immigrant American blackness is only afforded a precarious, limited, and conditional place within the imagined American community—that is, to the extent that his unique form of blackness enables neoliberal (white) America to produce profits and recognize itself as beyond race and open to all individuals with a will to make their American Dream a reality.

NEOLIBERAL RACISM Giroux (2004) argues that in new millennium America the socioeconomic philosophy of neoliberalism has been articulated with conservative understandings of race and racism to produce a new form of racism he calls “neo-


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liberal racism.” For Giroux, neoliberalism is defined primarily “through the privileging of market relations, deregulation, privatization, and consumerism. Central to neoliberalism is the assumption that profit-making be construed as the essence of democracy and consuming as the most cherished act of citizenship” (2004, p. 61). Neoliberalism calls for a narrowed role for the State centered on the establishment and maintenance of social and economic conditions that enable corporations and entrepreneurial individuals to maximize their money-making potential. In particular, the State’s main functions in the neoliberal imaginary are to maintain social order and racial control, cultivate consumption among its citizens, and reduce or eliminate social welfare programs for America’s most vulnerable populations. Neoliberal racism, for Giroux, is most often constituted in and through a language of racial color blindness that evades explicit race talk in public. Proponents of neoliberal racism evade race talk because they imagine racial discrimination and inequalities as things of the past (supposedly rectified by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s). Neoliberal racism aggressively asserts the insignificance of race in contemporary America while simultaneously attempting to eradicate from public discourse any conceptualization of race at odds with an individualist embrace of formal legal rights. Giroux goes on to say, “neoliberal racism provides the ideological and legal framework for asserting that since American society is now a meritocracy, government should be race neutral, affirmative action programs dismantled, civil rights laws discarded, and the welfare state eliminated” (2004, p. 68). Neoliberal racism also dismisses any notion of institutionalized white racism against people of color. Any evidence of institutionalized racism is dismissed as an isolated incident, the result of the racial prejudices of a few racist white individuals. For proponents of neoliberal racism, it is a person’s consciousness of race—one’s noticing, perceiving, and thinking about American social life through racial categories—that is the race problem in post–civil rights America. Purveyors of neoliberal racism often erroneously assert that if people only truly stopped seeing “race” or making it matter, then racial prejudice, discrimination, and inequalities would cease to exist. Giroux’s (2004) work also emphasizes that neoliberal racism requires cultural work in order for its logics and ideologies to be established as racial common sense in new millennium America. For Giroux, media culture must be understood as a key site through which the ideas and values of neoliberal racism are generated and made popular. One of the most prominent ways the logics of neoliberal racism are popularized is through the production of affectively appealing “feel-good” stories of American individuals of various racial and ethnic backgrounds whose success is explained “simply” as the product of their extraordinary talents, will, hard work, and good choices. These narratives of neoliberal racism feature the evasion of race talk and displacement, if not erasure, of the influence of racism and


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racial structure on social life. Even as the explicit mentioning of race is evaded in these narratives to promote the idea of a postracial America, race is paradoxically always on display as these heroic neoliberal figures strategically come from various racial and ethnic groups and their successes ironically “prove” that race no longer matters in the neoliberal moment. Or, as Hasinoff (2008) describes it in her analysis of the reality TV modeling contest program, America’s Next Top Model, this neoliberal rhetoric of race “denies the political importance of race while superficially embracing racial difference” (p. 328). Such stories of neoliberal exceptionalism are prevalent in 2000s America. As these stories purportedly promote the main ideological elements of neoliberal racism—self-reliance, hyperindividualism, competition, hard work, racial meritocracy, and racial color blindness—they implicitly serve the racial interests of neoliberal (white) America as they mystify the influence of structural racism and white privilege on the life opportunities of all Americans and promote the fiction that we live in a postracial moment. Contemporary America gets rendered visible as a color-blind meritocracy where racial obstacles no longer limit (or invisibly privilege) any American individual to achieve the American Dream. Any notion of systemic racial privilege or disadvantage conveniently disappears as success is trumpeted as the product of the will of the individual (whose race no longer matters). In the rest of this chapter, I illuminate how the two chief narratives constitutive of the media spectacle of Freddy-mania are crafted from the logics of the neoliberal racial imaginary. These narratives jointly constitute the media’s dominant framing of Adu’s immigration experience and set the conditions for Freddy-mania not only to turn a profit for neoliberal (white) America but also to establish a public common sense about Freddy Adu (and his mother Emelia) that enables neoliberal (white) America to imagine itself as color-blind and racially progressive for their embrace of hard-working black people who are deemed worthy of the rewards they have earned because they are black American subjects who appreciate the opportunities (neoliberal) America has generously provided for them.

FREDDY ADU AS NEOLIBERAL AMERICAN DREAM CITIZEN At the most intense time of Freddy-mania—the moment of Adu turning pro—the most prominent narrative constitutive of his public identity was his repeated articulation as a symbol of a new and different version of the American Dream. For example, in a BBC online story, Adu is represented as the “epitome of the modern American dream” (BBCSPORT.com 2004).


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On another website, Adu is said to be “shaping up to be soccer’s version of the American dream” (African American Registry 2010). Sporting narratives announcing a new American athletic talent as the embodiment of the American dream are hardly new in American media culture. But, within the post–civil rights context, when this next great American athlete is black this sporting narrative functions “not only to elucidate the fulfillment of the American Dream but also America’s imagined racial progress” (Leonard 2004, p. 288). Yet, within this context where this conventional sporting narrative is repeatedly told, how do we make sense of the media’s portrayal of Adu’s story as somehow “modern” and “different”? Similar to the way in which Tiger Woods’s commodified media spectacle generated at the moment of his turning pro enabled post–civil rights (white) America to imagine itself as a racially progressive multicultural and postracial family (a racialized spectacle that augmented normative whiteness) (Cole and Andrews 2001), Freddy-mania offers a story of race that neoliberal (white) America gets to tell itself as it superficially embraces and trades on Freddy Adu’s unique sporting talents and immigration story. In particular, through Freddy-mania, neoliberal (white) America gets to imagine itself as a racially progressive, multicultural nation that welcomes immigrants of color into the American citizenry/family (Melamed 2006). Yet, this discursive embrace of Adu is only conditional and dependent on the sanitization of the racial aspects of his family’s immigration story and the reification of the paternalism of neoliberal American normative whiteness. To understand how this conditional embrace of Adu in and through Freddy-mania requires the racial sanitization of his immigration story, we must first outline a bit about African immigration to the United States since 1965. African immigration to the United States has quadrupled in the past two decades due to a complex set of factors: the rise of more restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe during the 1970s; the 1965 U.S. immigration law abolishing immigration quotas set aside for Western Europeans and Canadians; the 1980 Refugee Act; and the more recent Diversity Visa program, which in 1995 allocated 20,200 visas for Africans (Gordon 1998). Yet, this rise in African immigration has only received limited public attention. The New York Times cover story in 2007 given to The Fugees youth soccer team of rural Georgia made up of African refugees is a rare exception (St. John 2007). Yet, the bidding war that ensued between Hollywood film production companies over the rights to turn The Fugees’ story into a motion picture suggests not only the presumed profitability of this story but also that hopeful, optimistic, and inspiring stories of African immigration (centered on African immigrant youths, as opposed to African immigrant adults) enable a particular story of new millennium America—one that activates the ideas, logics, and interests of the neoliberal (white) racial imagination—to be told.


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But unlike the story of The Fugees, which includes details of war, genocide, family separation, and struggle here in the United States, or for that matter Amadou Diallo’s tragic murder by forty-one shots from New York City policemen, Adu’s youthful immigration experience is rendered visible in a clean, uncontroversial, and racially sanitized way. Even before officially becoming naturalized as an American citizen, Adu was frequently portrayed as simply “American.” So, given the long American history where black people have had difficulty being articulated with the category of “American” (which is too often implicitly articulated/imagined as a white category), and the contemporary moment when the immigration of people of color to the United States is a volatile domestic issue, how do we make sense of the ease to which Adu is articulated as “American”? To understand Adu’s rather easy articulation as an embodiment of the American Dream, one must critically examine the specific details through which the immigration experience of Freddy and his family are narrated in and through Freddy-mania. Countless media stories represented Adu’s immigration experience to the United States as simply the lucky product of his family winning a U.S. Diversity Visa lottery in Ghana, without giving further details. Some stories supplement this detail with a story casting Adu’s mother, Emelia, as an Horatio Alger-esque American immigrant figure who sacrificially worked long hours and multiple jobs to provide for her family (Steinberg 1989). Notably absent from any of the media discourse on Freddy Adu are any details of Emelia’s early experiences in the United States which, if they were anything like the common experiences of many recent African immigrants, were likely defined by struggles to find work and provide for her family, to acclimate to her new cultural surroundings, and to overcome feelings of isolation and separation from her close-knit family in Ghana (Historical Society of Pennsylvania 2001). At the same time, Freddy’s early experiences living in the United States are portrayed as uncomplicatedly positive. His extraordinary soccer talents and warm personality are represented as enabling him to quickly become popular with peers and one parent, Arnold Tarzy, who becomes a “close family friend/advisor” to the Adus. Tarzy is represented as the one who first signs up Freddy to play travel team soccer in Maryland. These opportunities—generated from Freddy’s natural talents, warm personality, and supportive white Americans like Tarzy—in turn led to Inter Milan’s extraordinary $750,000 offer to sign Freddy at the age of ten after he starred in a tournament in Italy while playing for Tarzy’s traveling team (Baddoo 2003). Through this selective detailing of Adu’s family’s experience of immigrating to the United States, the discursive logics and strategies constitutive of the neoliberal racial imaginary become apparent. First and foremost, Adu’s story evades any discussion of the relevance of race and racism to his ex-


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perience. Next, Adu is discursively fashioned into a neoliberal (phenotypically black/postracial/African immigrant/yet not disruptive of normative whiteness) American subject through the selective tailoring of his family’s immigration tale to generically fit the narrative structure of the Horatio Alger mythology of the American Dream. This use of the Alger immigration mythology to narrate the Adus’ immigration experience is the sign that the Adus’ blackness—coded as it is as hard-working, grateful, America-loving, assimilationist, disciplined, and docile—has racial value to neoliberal normative whiteness. Through this selective and racially sanitizing immigration narrative any complexities, difficulties, and ambivalences that Adu may have endured due to race or racism are displaced. At the same time, the America Freddy and his mother encounter in this narrative is one marked by the generosity of white patriarchal figures and agencies embodied first in Tarzy and later by U.S. Soccer and MLS, which get positioned as white paternal presences willing to benevolently provide the American Dream to Freddy alongside—and always only if they have the consent of—his mother, Emelia. But as will become apparent later (as I discuss below), neoliberal (white) America’s embrace of young Freddy precariously rests on his unwavering demonstration of commitment to hard work, humility, deference to white (male) authority, unquestioned love of America, and development into the United States’ first international soccer superstar. In Freddy-mania, Freddy’s commitment to these values is frequently demonstrated through his own voice where he repeatedly professes his love of America and the unlimited opportunities it provides while affirming his desire to work hard, make good choices, and do everything within his power to become America’s first international soccer superstar. Neoliberal (white) America’s celebration and commodification of Adu through this sanitized American Dream narrative enables it to imagine itself in the new millennium as a color-blind and postracial meritocracy where Adu’s athletic accomplishments and wealth are imagined as the product of the multitude of opportunities available to black individuals now that America is no longer burdened by racial prejudices and inequalities of opportunity based on race. This neoliberal interpretation of the success of black individuals is popular today despite data showing that racial polarization, segregation, and disparities in employment, wealth, housing, educational achievement, incarceration rates, etc., are greater today than in 1970 (Brown et al. 2003; Cole and Andrews 2001; Hacker 2003; Leonard 2004; Lipsitz 1998). The “modern” or “different” aspect of Adu’s representation as iconic embodiment of the American Dream lies in the ability of Adu’s postracial blackness and recent immigration from Ghana to the United States to seemingly legitimate the idea that in new millennium America, let alone post– civil rights America, race is no longer a barrier for black individuals who


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are willing to work hard and to invest themselves in the “right” values of neoliberal (white) culture (i.e., hard work, hyperindividualism, faith in the free market, entrepreneurialism, self-transformation and self-optimization, and evasion of racial thinking), as opposed to the values of dependency and victimhood often ascribed to urban African American underclasses or the values of racialism associated with African American advocates, activists, and critics. Although never explicitly named, Adu’s African immigrant status, his immigration story, and his subsequent fame and fortune in this neoliberal American “land of plenty” enable neoliberal (white) America to implicitly castigate African Americans born in the United States who cite continued institutionalized racism and inequalities (in education, employment, housing, voting, etc.) in post–civil rights America for their present misfortunes or “personal” failures. Even further, by narrating Adu’s immigration story as an uniquely American one, America can even be lauded as providing better opportunities for a black person living anywhere in the world today, as some assert Adu would likely not be as wealthy nor famous as he is today if he had not been lucky enough to come to the United States. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the political stakes involved in this neoliberal (white) American Dream–rendering of Adu is the U.S. State Department’s own participation in the construction and marketing of this racially sanitized version of Adu’s immigration story as evidence of the plethora of opportunities available to new immigrants of color who emigrate to the United States through its Diversity Visa program (United States Department of State 2005). Indeed, Adu’s story of immigrating to the United States is repeatedly celebrated not only by the State Department but also by liberal proponents of the U.S.’s Diversity Visa program as the shining exemplar of the value immigrants of color can provide to the nation (Dinan 2004; Farrelly 2006). Of course, this racial sanitization of Adu’s American Dream immigration story also sets the ground enabling him to be commodified whether to sell Nike products, Pepsi soft drinks, MLS tickets, or U.S. Soccer merchandise to American consumers willing to invest themselves in the ideas of race, racism, America, and immigration to which he is made to symbolize.

THE BLACK FAMILIAL POLITICS OF NEOLIBERAL RACISM Another story line repeatedly featured in Freddy-mania features Freddy’s mother, Emelia, and praises her for the sacrifices she’s made (working two and three jobs to make ends meet for Freddy and his brother) to provide for her family. Emelia Adu’s sacrifices, hard work, and parental discipline are forwarded as a key influence on Freddy’s wholesome character, strong


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work ethic, and quick maturation, which enabled him to make a smooth and successful transition to professional soccer at the age of fourteen. While this inspiring narrative of hope and optimism appears at first as a welcome departure from the racialized demonization of single motherhood of the 1980s and 1990s, it advances the ideas and logics of a neoliberal racial project by implying that race and racism no longer matter in new millennium America by lionizing Ms. Adu in typical neoliberal fashion for choosing hard work, individualism, personal sacrifice, and self-reliance over dependency, victimhood, and bearing witness to new millennium America’s continued racial inequalities and discrimination. Emelia Adu’s neoliberal narrative of self-reliance and “excellence in parenting” was most often conveyed via a story about her turning down Inter Milan’s $750,000 offer to sign Freddy at the age of ten after he starred in a tournament in Italy. Key to this story is her refusal of this extraordinary amount of money even as she, a single mother, was struggling to make ends meet, working two jobs around the clock to provide for her two sons. As the story goes, despite the enormous amount of money offered to Emelia and Freddy by the world-renowned Italian football club, she refused their approach without a second thought as she felt that sending Freddy to Italy at such a young age to become a professional footballer was inappropriate. In her mind such an experience would compromise both Freddy’s personal development and her desire to see Freddy get a quality education in the United States (De Vries 2003; Wahl 2003). This story lauding Ms. Adu’s excellent parenting of Freddy is supplemented by other instances of Freddy crediting his mother for instilling in him the “proper” values—hard work, humility, willingness to pay his dues, deference to coaches, etc.—that have enabled him to become an elite soccer player. In one such interview, Freddy recalls how, during his years at the U.S. youth development residency program—a time when Emelia could not afford to travel from Maryland to Florida to see Freddy—she would often end their phone conversations by reminding him to always “be humble” (Wahl 2003). At first glance, this celebratory narrative lauding Emelia Adu for her positive influence on Freddy appears to be a progressive and welcomed departure from the derogatory and demonizing narratives and representations of young black males as “gangstas and thugs” and single black mothers as “welfare moms” that regularly circulated during the 1980s and 1990s (Cole and King 1998; Reeves and Campbell 1994). As these incendiary racial narratives produced images of single black mothers as irresponsible “welfare moms” draining federal tax monies (often imagined as coming straight from the pockets of “hard-working,” white, middle-class Americans) they simultaneously relied on, as they produced, images of young black males as deviant, irresponsible, uncaring, and selfish absent fathers prone to criminality, a lack of industriousness,


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drug use, undisciplined sexuality, and violence (Winant 2004; McDonald and Andrews 2001). Deploying the logics of the neoliberal racial imaginary, these stories contained the social problems afflicting urban America, rendering them visible as the supposed product of the black community’s impoverishment of values and the deficient wills of black individuals living there. These stories effectively erase the continued existence and effects of white privilege/white racism in post–civil rights America while masking the devastating effects of the (neoliberal) global economy and disinvestment on urban black communities. Importantly, the narratives served as the discursive conduits through which neoliberal (white) America rationalized the gutting of federal welfare programs for the poor—a key aim of the neoliberalist agenda. So, on the face of things, this framing of Emelia’s positive influence on Freddy could easily be read as a racially progressive story because it fails to perpetuate the racist representations of young black men and single black mothers that dominated the 1980s and early 1990s. But, such a reading of this neoliberal narrative praising Emelia Adu’s self-reliance and disciplined parenting— drenched as it is in its inspirational, positive, and optimistic tone—fails to recognize how this narrative activates the logics of neoliberal racism. This particular casting of Emelia Adu as a “good” neoliberal (black/African immigrant/postracial) American citizen and distanced from “bad” dependent American-born black subjects facilitates neoliberal (white) America’s embrace of Freddy. This conditional acceptance is a reward for Freddy’s and his mom’s repeatedly professed faith in American neoliberal ideas like racial meritocracy, self-reliance, self-optimization, and love of country. The Adus are accepted into America’s postracial imagined community because their story enables race to appear not to matter and institutionalized racism as hard to even imagine; ideas that neoliberal (white) America—tired of being forced to contemplate white privilege and moral responsibility over America’s racial wrongs (both in the past and present)—is desperate to convince itself are true. Even further, this portrayal of Adu’s story appears to provide seemingly irrefutable proof that black achievement in new millennium America is merely a matter of black individuals’ willingness to submit to the values of neoliberalism (i.e., refusal of dependency on the government, faith in the market, and refusal to bear witness to the impact of race on the social). As recent immigrants to the United States, the Adu’s American Dream story— bolstered by tales of Ms. Adu’s sacrifices, hard work, and good choices—enables neoliberals to characterize American-born African Americans’ claims that continued systemic racism and racial inequalities in the United States limits their ability to realize their American dreams as little more than an excuse for their own failures of will.


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As Ms. Adu’s influence is cast as a key influence producing Freddy’s disciplined docility, it also performs the crucial function of distancing Adu’s youthful black masculinity from notions of black masculinity as criminal, hypersexual, defiant, and undisciplined, which enable America’s celebration, embrace, and commodification of Freddy. Adu’s commodification potential is always dependent upon his imagined distance and difference from a thuggish, undisciplined urban, young, black masculinity demonized for its alleged failure of will. It is perhaps useful to consider here America’s embracing of Freddy Adu in relation to the lack of respect and scorn afforded to Jody, the protagonist in John Singleton’s new millennium film, Baby Boy, who symbolizes this form of American black masculinity. The importance of Singleton’s Jody to Freddy Adu’s story is that Jody represents the invisible “other” within the public lionization of Adu through Freddy-mania. That is, Jody represents every black American male whose social demonization by, or (at least) lack of compassion from, neoliberal (white) America is, at least in part, predicated on and derived from its explanation of Freddy’s success as a product of his extraordinary will cultivated by his mother’s disciplined example. Neoliberal (white) America’s love of young black men like Freddy Adu attempts to hide, even as it is implicitly used to justify, its resentful contempt for young black men like Jody. Stated a bit differently, neoliberal (white) America celebrates Freddy’s story of success (as a product of black will and agency) in order to convince itself it plays no role in producing the racial and economic conditions that produce Jody’s story (Cole 1996). In short, the stories of Freddy and Jody are two opposing sides of the same coin of neoliberal racism. Some recent events in Adu’s life have shown the conditional limits of Adu’s embrace by white America and how quickly Adu’s media image and public perception can shift from the “Freddy” to the “Jody” side of this neoliberal racial coin. The first took place at the end of the 2005 MLS season when Adu complained to the press about not starting in a match after having won player-of-the-week honors after he scored an amazing goal in D.C. United’s previous game (see White 2005, 2006; Galarcep 2005; Hughes 2005; Rock 2005). In response to this and other sporadic, yet much publicized, conflicts with D.C. United’s authoritarian coach, Peter Nowak, sports writers and American soccer fans frequently mobilized a coded racist rhetoric that compared Adu with the likes of Terrell Owens, who at the time represented the poster child for young, black, masculine athletic arrogance, self-centeredness, and petulance (Hughes 2005; Rock 2005; White 2005). The harsh, pedantic tone of the criticism levied at Adu along with this repeated comparison to Owens evidence how Adu’s acceptance in neoliberal (postracial/white normative) America is precarious and conditioned upon his strict adherence to a black masculine subjectivity that is phenotypically


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black, postracial, yet, ostensibly normatively white and that consistently defers to white masculine authority. The second example took place in the summer of 2006 upon the U.S. men’s national team’s elimination from the World Cup at the feet of Ghana (Adu’s native homeland). Immediately afterward, the American sports media sought out Adu’s reaction to the match. In initial interviews, for the first time, Adu expressed ambivalence about playing for the United States in future World Cups. In one interview he even suggested he would strongly consider playing for Ghana if given the opportunity (even implying that Ghana’s soccer future looked brighter than the United States’). Conspicuously absent from his initial comments was his previous constantly reiterated promise to one day proudly take the field for the United States, which the media always held up as proof of Adu’s love for his adopted country in the media discourses of Freddy-mania (see Jones 2006; Goff 2005; Wahl 2003). The following day Adu went on Pardon the Interruption (PTI) to clarify his original statement. On PTI, Adu attempted to clarify his original statement by saying that playing for the United States was his first choice, but he could not take for granted that the opportunity to play for the United States would come and thus he must keep open the option of playing for Ghana. His comments did not satisfy a portion of those U.S. fans whose immediate resentful responses revealed a surprising level of racialized animosity and white paternalism toward Adu (at least a surprise to those strongly invested in the validity of the logics of neoliberal racism). Many of Adu’s critics lambasted him for his supposed ungratefulness toward the United States which, from their perspective, provided him with the opportunity, fame, and riches he would not have experienced anywhere else in the world. On the global Internet message board, BigSoccer.com, about one-quarter of the reactions of apparent fans of U.S. Soccer castigated Adu. The clearest expression of the duplicity and limits of neoliberal (white) America’s embrace of Freddy came from the comments of BigSoccer.com member, OutKast3000: I say that if Adu chooses Ghana over the US . . . the US should deport him and his family. This is the sort of stuff that is wrong with America—everybody wants to be an American until it is convenient or otherwise beneficial for them to suddenly decide oh you know what since I was born in Ghana, I’ll be Ghanaian. It should not work that way—in my opinion you are American or not! Support the country that supports you. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way . . . but by golly it should. (OutKast3000 2008)

This quick transformation of Adu from “savior of American soccer” to just another selfish black athlete or ungrateful immigrant of color worthy of immediate deportation exposes the deceit of neoliberal racism; race still does matter, even if its influences and effects manifest without explicit racial marking or sign of blatantly racist rhetoric (Roediger 2002).


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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that Freddy Adu was manufactured into a sporting celebrity because particular aspects of his life—his recent immigration to the United States; his smiling, disciplined, youthful phenotypically black/postracial/yet normatively white masculinity; his deference to agents of white patriarchy; his repeatedly professed childlike love of America; and his potential to become America’s first global soccer superstar—enabled his story to operate as an inimitable popular cultural vehicle to disseminate, popularize, and naturalize the ideas and logics constitutive of the neoliberal racial imaginary. Indeed, Freddy-mania operates as a first-rate profit making and ideological vehicle of neoliberal racism because Adu’s story appears—I suspect to most readers—to be an unmediated and transparently factual story authorized, in many cases, through quotes from Freddy and Emelia Adu themselves. The apparent truthfulness of Adu’s story makes any critical reading of the conservative racial politics that implicitly constitute his sporting celebrity, like the one I offer here, often difficult to see and accept for many Americans outside academia, especially those interpellated by, and invested in, the ideas and logics of neoliberal racism. This is particularly true for culturally conservative members of neoliberal (white) America who, in their words, are presently exhausted by black Americans “playing the race card” or who regard any public discussion of race as part of a racial guilt industry intent on punishing contemporary whites for past racial wrongs they feel they haven’t committed. But, it can also be true for Americans of more moderate, liberal, or even progressive ilks who naively imagine racism solely in terms of individual prejudice (rather than as institutionalized and systemic), believe in color blindness as a viable mode of antiracism, or recognize the United States as a morally superior multicultural nation relative to more monoculturalist national “others” in the post-9/11 world (Melamed 2006). The insidious racial/racist politics of Freddy-mania are also difficult to discern, especially as his story features in the national/global media spotlight, has made Adu into a multimillionaire, and is expressed through a narrative that employs an optimistic, hopeful, and inspirational tone that, at first glance, seems to resist negative black stereotypes while casting Freddy and his mother, Emelia, as strong, determined, and self-disciplined African/American individuals who appear to achieve the American Dream through their own individual will and hard work. I must admit that as a fanatic supporter of the men’s U.S. national soccer team (and owner of a U.S. hero jersey adorned with Adu’s name) who was initially seduced by Freddy-mania, it was difficult at first to even contemplate Adu’s commodified celebrity and media spectacle as part of a new, more insidious form of cultural racism. Indeed, it was in and through the process of constructing


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this analysis that I was able to recognize how Freddy-mania only appears to the extent that corporate behemoths like Nike, Pepsi, Major League Soccer, U.S. Soccer, the U.S. State, and neoliberal (white) America simultaneously authorize and generate economic and political racial value from his story. Indeed, the commodification of Adu’s soccer talents—whether through the selling of “hero” jerseys, U.S. Soccer merchandise, MLS tickets, or Sierra Mist—is mediated through, and dependent upon, the meanings about race, racism, immigration, neoliberalism, and white America that can be articulated in and through his story. Neoliberal (white) America’s affection for Freddy—like its love/hate for too many contemporary black male athletes—is conditional upon the strategic ways in which Adu can be racialized to allow them to imagine themselves how they would like to be recognized: as nonracist, caring, and compassionate American citizens who are open to all regardless of race or ethnicity. Yet, closer inspection of neoliberal (white) America’s apparent affection for Freddy Adu reveals its conditional quality; its white paternalism; its neglect of socially marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable black American citizens; its impulse to punish those who do not subscribe to its ideologies; its dependence on the generation of profits; and its celebration of people of color in selective and strategic ways that resecure normative whiteness while fostering the illusion of living in a postracial moment. It is imperative all Americans recognize how optimistic neoliberal racist narratives lionizing heroic people of color that explain their successes as a product of their individual agency alone to imply that race is no longer a barrier in American society are one cultural means through which the ideas and logics of the neoliberal racial imagination gets secured as the commonsense way in which many, if not most, Americans imagine race and racism in new millennium America. Failing to bear witness to, understand, and then challenge the racial politics that underlie and are activated by these seemingly banal and unpolitical, feel-good neoliberal spectacles like Freddy-mania implicates each of us as part of the social system reproducing America’s racial asymmetries of power and socioeconomic inequalities in this supposed postracial moment.

POSTSCRIPT It’s just seventeen days until the 2010 World Cup begins in South Africa. Tonight, the U.S. men’s national team faces the Czech Republic in the first of three “friendly” matches intended to prepare the U.S. team for the World Cup. Freddy Adu will not be wearing the red, white, and blue this evening. Nor will he represent the United States for the first World Cup ever held on African soil.


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After reviving national and international faith in his extraordinary footballing talents with a strong showing at the 2007 under-20 World Cup, Adu realized his dream of playing professional football in Europe by moving from the MLS to the legendary Portuguese club, Benfica, for a $2 million dollar transfer fee. Unable to crack Benfica’s starting eleven during his first season, Adu experienced two unsuccessful loan spells to clubs in France and Portugal over the next season and a half. In January 2010, in what many have described as his “last shot” to make it in European football (Wahl 2010), Adu signed with Greek First Division club, Aris Thessaloniki, on an eighteen-month loan. Unlike his previous stints in Portugal and France, Adu has made a number of starts for Aris, scoring a pair of goals and contributing several assists over the last five months of the 2009–2010 Greek season. Yet, his recent displays of renewed form were not enough for U.S. coach Bob Bradley to select Adu for the U.S. World Cup team. Adu’s omission from the United States’ 2010 World Cup squad has not generated anywhere near as much media attention as his introduction to the American soccer public six years ago. Perhaps this absence of media coverage for Adu’s exclusion is not worthy of critical analysis. Many will surely say that he is, after all, only twenty years old, and it is rare for a player of that age to make any country’s final World Cup roster. But, I cannot seem to overlook the deafening silence within the American soccer media (yes, there is a niche American soccer media!) over Adu’s omission. Top American soccer writer, Grant Wahl’s, story in the April 19 issue of Sports Illustrated is an exception. Interestingly, his story carries the headline: “Didn’t You Used to Be the Future?” (Wahl 2010). Immediately I recall the title to Wahl’s contribution to Freddy-mania from seven years earlier, “Who’s Next? Freddy Adu” (Wahl 2003). Wahl’s article begins to trouble me halfway through reading it when the thought creeps into my mind that he’s writing Adu’s public/sporting obituary. I begin to wonder: Why must this Adu die (Beltran 2005)? Is there no room for this Freddy Adu if he’s not the “next” black athlete whose unique, different, and stylized footballing talents neoliberal (white) America can profit from, imagine itself as, and/or consider as “one of us” in order to imagine itself as benevolent, color-blind, and nonracist in the present, if not “the future”?

WORKS CITED African American Registry (2010). African American Registry (2010). Freddy Adu: The ‘Natural’ of Soccer. Retrieved September 1, 2010, from www.aaregistry.org/ historic_events/view/freddy-adu-natural-soccer. Associated Press. (2003). Lofty expectations. Retrieved January 31, 2005, from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/soccer/11/19/adu.mls.apl.


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Baddoo, T. (2003, August 5). Adu raising U.S. hopes ahead of U-17 World Cup. Retrieved March 6, 2006, from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/us/ news/2003/08/05/adu_baddoo/. BBCSPORT.com. (2004). Prodigy makes pro debut. Retrieved November 4, 2005, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_football/3597425.stm. Beltran, M. C. (2005). The new Hollywood racelessness: Only the fast, furious, (and multiracial) will survive. Cinema Journal, 44 (2), 50–67. Brown, M., Carnoy, M., Currie, E., Duster, T., Oppenheimer, D., Shultz, M., and Wellman, D. (2003). White-washing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cole, C. L. (1996). American Jordan: P.L.A.Y., consensus, and punishment. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13 (4), 366–97. Cole, C. L., and Andrews, D. (2001). America’s new son: Tiger Woods and America’s multiculturalism. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sports stars: The politics of sport celebrity (pp. 70–86). New York: Routledge. Cole, C. L., and King, S. (1998). Representing black masculinity and urban possibilities: Racism, realism, and hoop dreams. In G. Rail (Ed.), Sport and postmodern times (pp. 49–86). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. De Vries, Lloyd. (2003, November 20). Freddy Adu says hello. Retrieved January 1, 2005, from www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/20/national/main584743.shtml. Dinan, S. (2004, April 30). U.S. visa lottery called a threat. Retrieved October 10, 2005, from www.usagreencardcenter.com/news_full_version.htm. Farrelly, M. J. (2006). America’s “green card lottery” could soon be eliminated. Retrieved April 6, 2006, from www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ msg18548.html. Galarcep, I. (2005, October 24). Adu’s disenchantment grows. Retrieved November 11, 2005, from http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=346895&root=m ls&cc=5901. Giroux, H. (2004). The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Goff, S. (2005, October 11). Freddy Adu shuns Ghana: Thrilled for native Ghana, but wants to play for U.S. team. Retrieved November 10, 2005, from http:// ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=91884. Gordon, A. (1998). The new diaspora-African immigration to the United States. Journal of Third World Studies, 15 (1), 79–103. Hacker, A. A. (2003). Two nations: Black and white, separate, hostile, unequal. New York: Scribner. Hasinoff, A. A. (2008). Fashioning race for the free market on America’s Next Top Model. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25 (3), 324–43. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. (2001). Extended lives: The African immigrant experience in Philadelphia. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from www.hsp.org/default. aspx?id=174. Hughes, R. (2005, October 26). Adu’s teen angst draws punishment. Retrieved November 1, 2005, from www.nytimes.com/iht/2005/10/26/sports/IHT-26soccer. html. Jones, G. (2006, January 7). Shot of a lifetime. Retrieved April 6, 2006, from http://0-web.lexisnexis.com.helin.uri.edu/universe/printdoc.


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LaCanfora, J. (2007, December 25). On his own, Adu has grown. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/24/ AR2007122401934.html. Leonard, D. J. (2004). The next M. J. or the next O. J.? Kobe Bryant, race and the absurdity of colorblind rhetoric. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 1 (3), 284–313. Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mahoney, R. (2004). In MLS cities, much Adu about Freddy. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from www.usatoday.com/sports/soccer/mls/2004-06-08-adu-impact_x.htm. McDonald, M., and Andrews, D. L. (2001). Michael Jordan: Corporate sport and postmodern celebrityhood. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sports stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 24–35). New York: Routledge. Melamed, J. (2006). The spirit of neoliberalism: From racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism. Social Text, 24(4), 1–24. OutKast3000. (2008). Post titled: Re: Adu undecided on United States? Retrieved May 5, 2008, from http://www.bigsoccer.com. Reeves, J. L., and Campbell, R. (1994). Cracked coverage: Television news, the anticocaine crusade, and the Reagan legacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rock, B. (2005, December 9). United spat: Much Adu about nothing. Retrieved December 15, 2005, from http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,635167496,00. html. Roediger, D. (2002). Colored white: Transcending the racial past. Berkeley: University of California Press. St. John, W. (2007). Refugees find hostility and hope on soccer field. Retrieved May 24, 2010, from www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/21fugees.html?_r=1&scp=1& sq=the%20fugees%20soccer%20team&st=cse. Steinberg, S. (1989). The ethnic myth: Race, ethnicity, and class in America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. United States Department of State. (2005, July). Freddy Adu. Retrieved November 11, 2005, from http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0705/ijse/adu.html. Wahl, G. (2010, April 19). Didn’t you used to be the future? Retrieved April 16, 2010, from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1168400/index.htm. Wahl, G. (2003, March 7). Who’s next? Freddy Adu. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2003/03/03/freddy/. White, J. (2005). Upset over playing time, Adu hints at leaving United. Retrieved November 19, 2005, from www.usatoday.com/sports/soccer/mls/united/2005-10-18adu-frustration_x.htm. Winant, H. (2004). The new politics of race. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.


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7 Me and Bonnie Blair: Shani Davis, Racial Myths, and the Reiteration of the Facts of Blackness C. Richard King

In early 2006, Disney released Glory Road, a retelling of the triumph of Texas Western over the University of Kentucky in 1966 to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball championship. Forty years later, it relished the powerful underdog story: the victory of an all-black team over a segregated and storied program from the undead Jim Crow South. In common with other recent sport films (Giardina 2005; King and Leonard 2006), it offered a nostalgic, even celebratory, reworking of a “real” event, intent to remind audiences of deeper “truths.” Although panned by critics, Glory Road underscored social change through sport, reiterating familiar, if not clichéd, myths about the end of racism, breaking the color line, and palpable progress in race relations (see King and Springwood 2001). The opening of the 2006 Winter Olympics, featuring the most diverse U.S. team ever, seem poised to allow Americans to affirm their commitments to inclusion and equality. The Games, however, would expose the hollowness of dominant racial ideologies while reinforcing the dehumanizing force of racism. Indeed, African American speed skater Shani Davis simultaneously afforded an occasion to rehearse racial myths and to restate the facts of blackness. Over the past decade, he has emerged as a world-class athlete, displaying a unique combination of prowess, dedication, and character. Unlike many of his peers who specialize in either short track or long track, Davis enjoys and excels at both events. A member of the U.S. Winter Olympic team, he opts to train away from his teammates in Calgary, Canada, and to be sponsored by a Dutch corporation. An African American, he has risen to the top in a field dominated by Europeans and EuroAmericans. And despite 165


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his working-class background, Davis has thrived in a vocation demanding access to cultural capital, material wealth, and leisure time. Finally, as commentators almost universally delight in recounting, as a youth when his peers in Chicago adored basketball great Michael Jordan, eagerly consuming merchandise bearing his name and likeness, Davis idolized speed skater Bonnie Blair and proudly wore a T-shirt celebrating her around his neighborhood. For all of this, however, Davis is, to borrow a colloquialism, the exception that proves the rule. In fact, the interpretive frames used to make sense of the speed skater reinforce dominant preconceptions and preoccupations about race, class, and gender, revealing the current shape and ongoing significance of racialization in American sport and society. They expose the processes and practices at the heart of what has been dubbed alternately new racism, color-blind racism, or cultural racism: on the one hand, deracialization, or efforts or intent to erase race while disavowing racism, and, on the other hand, the seemingly inevitable return and reiteration of racialization in more subtle and powerful forms. Significantly, as I argue in what follows, it is precisely those features that make Davis exceptional that have facilitated efforts to deny and reproduce the differences that racial difference makes. My analysis affirms and extends the increasingly sophisticated study of black athletes, which has aptly demonstrated the ways in which their bodies and behaviors demarcate key cultural boundaries, mediating moral dramas and power plays, while facilitating the application and amplification of sincere fictions intent to restabilize racial hierarchies (Leonard 2006; Collins 2005; King and Springwood 2001; Leonard 2004; Spencer 2004; Andrews 2001; Cole and Andrews 2001). My intent here is not to retell Shani Davis’s life story. Instead, I undertake a critical reading of competing accounts of the athlete, his achievements, and his identity to clarify the underlying articulations of ideology, power, and difference that anchor them. My approach builds on the insights of Stuart Hall (1997) and others working in cultural studies whose critical engagements with sporting (and other social) worlds conceive of representations of difference as signifying practices that reflect, extend, and, under the right circumstances, challenge racial hierarchies. Such an approach probes the ways in which representations of difference produce meaning in context. The circulation and consumption of racial representations, then, as the analysis that follows underscores, actively constitute racial meaning and the broader racialized social order. My undertaking, moreover, resonates with the critical sport studies outlined by Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald, who advocate reading sport. Reading sporting compels us to read in a different more theoretically charged manner. The methodology of “reading” sport—that is, of finding the cultural meanings that circulate within narratives of particular incidents or celebrities—


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also requires attention to the ways that sexuality, race, gender, and class privileges are articulated in those accounts. (2000, pp. 10–11)

Thus, while the organization and enactment of mundane sporting worlds offer rich insights, cultural crises and public panics provide the most fertile social fields for critical analysis. As a consequence, my interpretation of Davis concerns itself primarily with the production and reception of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Specifically, I probe the stagings of Davis by himself and others in advance of the competition, highlighting the manner in which they emphasize racelessness, individualism, and mobility; then, I unpack the new racism animating the outrage expressed over Davis’s decision not to participate in the team pursuit event and its impact on EuroAmerican skater Chad Hedrick’s quest to win five gold medals. Throughout, I argue that while Davis, in echoing many of the themes central to deracialization in post–civil rights America, should have been primed for cultural embrace and commercial success not unlike that enjoyed by Michael Jordan and for a time O. J. Simpson, the very logic grounding his acceptability ultimately reracialized him, affirming the centrality of sport in current efforts to restate the facts of blackness.

(NEW) RACISM Racism must not be confused with prejudice; it instead must be understood as domination. It is not simply that whites lack knowledge or have bad attitudes; racism refers to a system of social relations, a set of structural inequalities, cultural forms, and ideological norms, all rooted in racialized conceptions and categories. Moreover, rather than an aberrant, extreme, or antiquated feature of the American experience, racism must be understood as normal, everyday, and ever-present, defining American institutions and ideologies (Delgado 1995, p. xiv; Ladson-Billings 1999, p. 12). And like race, Hall reminds us, racism must be grounded, understood as constructed and conditional: Racism is always historically specific. Though it may draw on the traces deposited by previous historical phases, it always takes on specific forms. It arises out of the present—not past—conditions. Its effects are specific to the present organization of society, to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural processes—not simply to its repressed past. (qtd. in Gilroy 1990, p. 265)

Racism is both ideological and institutional, involving much more than individual intention, ideas, or attitudes. For all of this, racism has become increasingly slippery. In the absence of overt markers, racism is often difficult to both define and locate within


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contemporary discussions. Despite the unwillingness or inability of commentators, pundits, politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens to come to terms with the persistent presence of race and racism, scholars have crafted critical frameworks, noteworthy for the sophistication they bring to bear upon the reconfigurations of racism in post–civil rights America (see, for example, Collins 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Brown et al. 2003; Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2001; Ansell 1997). Patricia Hill Collins (2005) and others have referred to this reconfigured racial formation as new racism. Structured by emergent global economic flows and transnational webs of power, mass media and spectacle play an increasingly important role in the manufacture of consent: They “present hegemonic ideologies that claim that racism is over. They work to obscure the racism that does exist and they undercut antiracist protest” (2005, p. 54). Three novel features, according to Amy Ansell, have proven crucial to the solidification of this social formation and its capacity to reproduce racial hierarchy in this context: 1. A sanitized, coded language about race that adheres to, more than it departs from, generally accepted liberal principles and values, mobilized for illiberal ends; 2. Avid disavowals of racist intent and circumvention of classical antiracist discourse; and 3. A shift from a focus on race and biological relations to a concern for cultural differentiation and national identity. (1997, p. 59) Notwithstanding the vast statistical data illustrating racial inequality, the established common sense of new racism allows individuals and institutions to explain away “the apparent contradiction between professed color blindness, and the United States’ color-coded inequality” (Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 2). Embracing a variety of lenses and rhetorical strategies, whites are able to rework America’s contemporary racial reality to legitimize notions of fairness, freedom, opportunity, equality, democracy, and America. The increasing visibility of people of color in the media, popular culture, and sport has proven fundamental to efforts to advance new racist formulations of racial progress. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) conceives of color blindness as a primary building block of the racial ideologies that supports and extends the reigning racialized order of things. Like all ideologies, he continues, color blindness works because it offers a set of frames to account for and make sense of race and racism. Specifically, he suggests that within the context of new racism whites employ four frames: (1) abstract liberalism, an ethos blending individualism, a rhetoric of equality, and choice; (2) naturalization, or the assertion that “racial phenomena . . . are natural occurrences” (p. 28);


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(3) cultural racism, the appeal to culture to explain difference; and (4) minimization, or efforts to reduce or dismiss the continuing significance of race and racism. Importantly, then, color blindness blinds Americans to the realities of white supremacy as both an historical force and a social condition. White supremacy is best understood as a set of ideological and institutional arrangements that has structured U.S. society past and present, endowing EuroAmericans with privileges and advantages on the basis of their skin color. Whereas white supremacy formerly demanded “self-conscious” schemes and explicit hierarchies (such as eugenics and scientific racism), as well as unapologetic restrictions and legal prohibitions (on citizenship, immigration, and race mixing, for instance) (Fredrickson 1981), today the defense of white power hinges on denial and deflection that locate racism in the past or within “fringe” or “extremist” movements (including the white nationalists discussed herein) while recoding racial rhetoric in the languages of diversity, cultural difference, and the key words of the mainstream civil rights movement (reverse racism, for instance). In what follows, I want to map out the complexities of new racism, highlighting accepted features and unanticipated elements. That is, whereas the coverage of Davis clearly frames him in terms that simultaneously erase and reinscribe racism—abstract liberalism, cultural racism, code words, and minimization—of equal importance, and contra Bonilla-Silva, Davis himself embraces the frames of color blindness, while audiences strive to expose the facts of blackness.

SPORTING RATIONALITY AND RACELESSNESS Sporting discourses encourage racelessness. The rationalization of competition, including uniform rules, precise time keeping, standardized fields of play, and record keeping, pivot around abstraction, universalism, and comparability. They build an archive of incontrovertible accomplishments; quantifiable facts, ripped from context, discourage critical reflection. These building blocks of sporting narrative, importantly, allow no room for race, power, or circumstance. Gatekeepers and fans alike transform these tidbits into talismans, fetishes embodying the significance of events and individuals. Repeatedly, accounts of Davis dwell on these details, but many offer little more than a catalog of feats and facts. To offer but one example from a fan site (www.ithaca.edu/youngintorino/shanidavis.html): Name: Shani Davis Birthdate: August 13, 1982 Hometown: Chicago, IL


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Current Residence: Calgary, Alberta, Canada Olympic Sport: Speed Skating Medals: Gold, Men’s 1,000 Meter (2006, 2010); Silver, Men’s 1,500 Meter (2006, 2010) World All Around Champion (2005) Set the World Record in the Men’s 1,500 Meter Long Track (2005) U.S. All Around Champion (2003, 2004 and 2005) Bronze Medalist, World Short Track Relay Team (2005) 1,500 Meter World Champion (2004) First Overall U.S. Junior Speed Skating Championships, Long Track (2001) Second Overall U.S. Junior Speed Skating Championships, Long Track (2000) Short Track Junior American Record 1,000 Meter (2002)

Only a beginning to be sure, these fragments limit narrative possibilities. Playing fields become more important than social fields as athletics and accomplishments eclipse ideology and discourage engagement. Such erasures and silences, in turn, make it easier for fans, players, commentators, and gatekeepers to forget about, turn away from, and work against racialization and its effects.

THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF SKATING Although Davis purportedly idolized Bonnie Blair as a youth, he has come to see his role in the skating world as more akin to her contemporary, basketball great Michael Jordan. In fact, he repeatedly has told reporters that he would like to be like Mike, or at least regarded as the Michael Jordan of skating. For Davis, like Jordan, this has meant more than being a great athlete, receiving the admiration of kids, or even cultivating an affirmative and approachable air. Most basically, it has demanded that he endeavor to transcend race. In pursuit of racelessness, Davis has repeatedly denounced the import of race, echoing the sincere fictions structuring post–civil rights America. When asked about making the U.S. Olympic speed skating team in 2002, the first African American to accomplish this feat, Davis replied: It means something, it does not matter what color I am. Black or white, Asian or Hispanic, it does not matter to me as long as the message that I am portraying to the people that watch me on television is positive. And it shows them that they can do things that are different besides tossing a football, hitting a bat at a baseball or shooting a basketball. I am just showing them that stepping outside of that bubble is okay. (Schy 2005)

Here, Davis slides between a trivialization of race that affirms the principles of color blindness and a seeming invocation of difference that marks


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his audience as like him (black), limited by boundaries and conventional associations between African Americans and specific sports. When asked a similar question before the 2006 Winter Olympics, he once more minimized race, preferring the frames of individualism and abstract liberalism. Allen: San Diego: How does it feel to be the first African American skater to qualify for the Olympics? Davis: I don’t think it feels any different than any other person who qualified for the Olympics. I’m just happy to be here and have a good shot at chasing my childhood and teenage dreams. (Shani Davis’s Mailbag)

In fact, in advance of the Games, he routinely “deflected all lines of questioning that involved the importance of his being a black champion,” preferring instead for the public to “celebrate his victory, regardless of his color” (Carpenter 2006). Or, as he told another reporter, “Regardless of color, I want to be the best I can be” (Adelson 2006). On the eve of his victory in the 1,000 Meters, moreover, Davis minimized the importance of his achievements as a black athlete, “It’s a breakthrough, but it’s what people make of it” (“Shani Davis Makes History” 2006). Obviously, breaking the color line and accomplishing an African American first were irrelevant, matters of interpretation, rather than markers of progress. Ultimately, prior to the games, Davis believed race to be an individual concern and of much less consequence than personal desire and achievement. As he told one interviewer, “I try not to make much of it. Being black is the choice of the parents who made me. It has no effect on my skating. I go out there like every other skater and want to win” (Zarefsky 2006). Three months after the Olympics, Davis still had an ambivalent relationship with his blackness (Rosen 2006): Q: Do you feel like you were representing all African-Americans at the Olympics? A: Just in general, I skate and whoever they want to associate my accomplishments with, I have no control over it. But I think the way things were swung, was that I was going to bat for the African-Americans out there, and I have no problem with it.

Note, his detachment here, his unwillingness to associate himself, his pronounced desire to put race off.

BOOTSTRAPS Davis not only endorsed a familiar color-blind logic intent to deny the significance of race but he also proclaimed the importance of individual effort to success and mobility. In presentations to young people as well as inter-


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views, the speed skater reiterates the same themes. “If you put your mind to it and you believe, you can achieve it. You cannot give up—even if the road is a tough road” (“Shani Davis Makes History” 2006). Or, “It showed that all the hard work and all the sacrifice paid off . . . Kids in general, if you put your mind to it and you believe it you can achieve it” (“Shani Davis Takes the Gold” 2006). Importantly, Davis does not specify the barriers, obstacles, and challenges. Neither race nor class enters into his rhetoric. They do not matter. Instead, it is persistence, commitment, sacrifice, faith, and effort by abstract individuals that counts. Indeed, although teased as child, Davis persisted, pursuing his personal dreams. “I always went against the grade . . . I didn’t care what people said. That’s skin deep. I did what I like” (“Ridicule: Racism Fail to Slow Speed Skater” 2005). Not surprisingly, reporters and commentators echoed the bootstrap frame employed by Davis, repeating almost ad nauseam his mobility despite the odds and obstacles because of his hard work and the sacrifice made by his mother. Similarly, many of his supporters share Davis’s common interpretation. Jesse Chavez, a fan from Chicago, found in Davis a motivational narrative, one in which contra Davis marked race briefly, only to hold it under erasure: He’s the first African American to win [an individual gold], and that’s great, but especially since he is from the South Side, his story is kind of an inspiration for all the kids who want to do anything. He shows us no matter where you are from or what your background is, you can succeed if you put your mind to it. (Lewis 2006)

Forget about race: identity, not power, matters; the individual rather than society makes a difference.

LIFE’S NOT FAIR In many respects, Davis’s raceless rhetoric runs counter to his own experience, complicating his self-presentation as well as public perceptions of him. If space provided, an entire catalog of dismissive attitudes and disparaging comments that have long shadowed his presence in speed skating and which culminated at the 2006 Winter Olympics might be recorded here—two earlier reiterations of race/racism in a seemingly raceless world warrant brief mention.1 In the summer of 1996, while training at the Olympic Village in Lake Placid, New York, Davis joined an impromptu basketball game against his roommate, Dave Needham. In the course of the ensuing game Needham called Davis “boy” some thirty-five times (by Davis’s count). Enraged at the conclusion of the game, Davis hurled the ball at his roommate, injuring the latter’s leg. Both skaters were suspended, but


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notably Davis received a harsher penalty (Sanful 2002). Nearly five years later, in his native Chicago, Davis was stopped and searched by two white, plainclothes police officers as he walked down the street one evening. At the time, Davis remarked, “I felt powerless due to the fact he [the officer] had a weapon and I felt my life could be at stake at any moment. I felt like a criminal. I mean, he made me feel like dirt” (Shaw 2003). The speed skater joined a class action lawsuit against the city that has yet to be settled. The commonness of racial profiling in Chicago led one commentator to suggest that “for future protection” Davis should “wear his Olympic Gold medal around his neck” (Anderson 2006). A few months earlier, not even his gold medal could protect him from a racist backlash.

RESTATING THE FACTS OF BLACKNESS While Shani Davis deferred race regularly in interviews and press conferences, embodied experiences—with the police and teammates, for instance— repeatedly restated the facts of blackness. And, in contrast with the racelessness projected by the media, organizers, and much of the public, the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino, Italy, would not witness popular embrace of the African American speed skater as anything other than a black athlete, outside and against white America. The trouble for Davis began with a media spectacle that constructed Davis and long-time rival Chad Hedrick in diametrically opposed terms—urban, black youth marginalized by his sport and succeeding against the odds versus the all-American boy from Texas poised to win five gold medals—and escalated when Davis refused to participate in the team pursuit event, endangering Hedrick’s quest. In the subsequent media storm, the former inline skater from Texas became a valorized victim and team player wronged by an immature, selfish, and arrogant punk, whose every action (from interview style to sponsorship) became suspect. Although most commentators would deny race or racism informed their positions, the subsequent reaction against Davis pivoted around his blackness, albeit through code words and superficially deracialized sentiments. In the post–civil rights era, where the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin, has become the mantra of the neoconservative backlash, it is not surprising that character would become a central concern. Many observers saw in Davis a maladjusted person, exhibiting irrational tendencies and unwarranted emotions. Bill, for instance, found him to be “a selfish angry man regardless of the color of his skin”2; and mbubby claimed, “It is obvious that Davis has serious mental issues.”3 Assessment of demeanor, behavior, and expressions, particularly anger, remain powerful ways to problematize difference and racialize without race. Others went further,


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preferring to infantalize Davis: “He is not a mature man,” according to babubby, “but a little boy.”4 Worse were comments that policed the invocation of race, suggesting that not only was his character flawed (in common with poor white trash) but also that by being unable to admit this, he as a black man (unlike model minorities) had to play the race card: Shani has a chip on his shoulder and behaved deplorably, end of story, make excuses for him if you like, call Hedrick a “trashy cracker” if you must, but Davis is a brat who’s attitude has spoiled something that is supposed to be pure. Even if there is drama, why can’t he rise above it and represent USA for something we want to be seen as. You don’t see Ohno with a sourpuss face, or Kwan pulling the race card.5

And the echoes of previous racial formations reverberate powerfully in the present: a brat, a spoiler, a bad actor, a malcontent, an impure and unruly presence, a weak black man unable to cope and thus must make excuses. Explanations of Davis’s flawed character ranged widely but most often settled on his upbringing. To many commentators, the speed skater was the byproduct of the ghetto, a gangster out of place, unrefined, and ill mannered. “You are at the Olympics (world stage),” 1000M noted, “not the streets of Chicago, Davis. Get a freaking clue.”6 Lys added, “He gave a stunning display of his gang mentality.”7 And Cra charged, “Shani aint nothing but a piece of s#$% punk and I hope he breaks his leg.”8 In these comments, “streets of Chicago,” “gang mentality,” and “punk,” all code blackness and describe it as deviant, criminal, and problematic. Together, his failed character and its purported origins led many commentators to question his commitments to team and nation. Indeed, Davis exemplified the (black) athlete. He was a “typical arrogant, pampered, and self-centered athlete,” or worse, “Shani Davis has abundantly shown that he’s no Jackie Robinson.”9 Far from the role model and hero who changed race relations and has become the mythic icon embodying integration and the end of race, Davis is a self-absorbed athlete looking out for himself, not society or teammates. As Julie the Jarhead put it: “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is in Shani.”10 Hunter went further, once more erasing race, even as he reiterated racist sentiments: I don’t care if he is white, black. Pink, or blue. Color has nothing to do with my discust [sic] of this so called man. He is on TEAM USA! “TEAM”: That means you work as a TEAM and do what ever you can for the TEAM and the COUNTRY “USA” not Canada. I have never seen a more selfish act than what this young man has done. He has had the chance to stand up and be a Tiger Woods, Magic, Ali, or Jordan, but NO he had to be TEAM DAVIS it’s all about him.11

Although not about color, Davis clearly is not fully human, nor does he possess the qualities of other athletes who have more successfully tran-


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scended race. His failure to put the interest of a white skater before his own and to stay in place and remain subservient and loyal compelled many to denounce Davis. Whereas some observers employed gender as a blunt weapon, “May be there’s room for him on the women’s curling team,”12 others prefer to associate him with animals through scatological references: “I hope the only box he gets his face plastered on is a box of kitty litter.”13 More common, however, were interrogations of his Americanness, affirming that blackness still results in disenfranchisement. Look, this isn’t about race. It’s about a very lonely speed skater. A *Candian* speed skater wearing a US outfit . . . not adorned with the US sponsorship worn by every last one of his teammates, but that of a Dutch corporation . . . he may have been born in Chicago—but he lives in Canada, all the while very visibly snubbing his teammates . . . anybody who values the patriotic aspects of these Olympic games.14

Claims to citizenship—inclusion and equality—continue to hinge on race, despite the sentiments of this commentator, who does not question Hedrick’s commitments or self-interest but instead targets Davis. In the end, the angry mob that set upon Davis for not staying in his place gave voice in more comfortable terms to the comments of one anonymous online commentator: Can’t you fucking people get over it? It’s the OLYMPICS . . . we’re not “in da hood” . . . we’re in front of the world, and this moron decides to act . . . not like an American . . . but like a nigger. It’s actually funny to watch you people and your simian antics: Dancing around the end zone after scoring a touchdown, flunking SATs, filling the jails, and generally just acting like the total losers you are. This is just another example of that. The black ape-man who doesn’t understand “sportsmanship.” Just proves the basic principle: You can take the nigger out of the hood, but you can’t take the hood out of the nigger.15

More than a half century after Frantz Fanon assessed the fact of blackness, in coded and obvious ways, in a friendly and hateful manner, in an intentional and artifactual fashion, EuroAmericans repeat, “The negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look a nigger” (1967/1952, p. 113). For many, in February 2006, Shani Davis became not the first African American to win a gold medal in an individual event at the Winter Olympics or a great athlete worthy of celebration; no, he became a nigger.

CRITICAL POSSIBILITIES Although not given voice in mainstream venues, the spectacle surrounding the speed skater fostered critical reflections on race and sport, revealing the limits of common sense understandings of race and racism. While many


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of the marginalized counterreadings celebrated Davis’s accomplishments, criticized Hedrick, or challenged the media coverage, an important feature of a number of commentaries was the correlation between race and power, particularly white privilege. For instance, the blog Yellowcontent noted What is the deal with white people thinking that a person of color is “bad” simply because they don’t do what people want them to do? Sure, it’s fun when people listen to you, or you agree with them, but isn’t disagreement a normal state of human existence. When folks in an ethnic majority question ethnic minorities more for not “doing what they are told” we can see an ugly underbelly of ethnic privilege. Basically, they don’t like the fact that they don’t have control over the people of color . . . Hedrick and five medals is not going to improve the quality of my life. Shani Davis’ accomplishments just might in some minor, yet significant way.16

Similarly, Terrence remarked on his blog, Sometimes the overtones of white privilege are overt, which I believe is the case in this situation. Other times it is unconscious behavior. This attitude of white entitlement happens in many facets of life—business, education, sports, entertainment, etc. Surely, there are a lot of white people who do not feel or act this way, but many do feel and act as such.17

And finally, “Shani Davis got it right. We’re off the plantation now. He’s not some white athlete’s ‘man servant.’”18 These comments share in a recognition of the force and effects of racial power while hinting at instability. Davis refuses to stay in his place or acquiesce and as consequence unsettles an established set of expectations, which pundits, journalists, teammates, and fans endeavor to fix through their application of racial common sense that demonizes, pathologizes, and dehumanizes Davis. This same common sense and the racialized social order it anchors, moreover, makes critical analyses like these inaudible to most Americans—either marginalized and hence underheard or incomprehensible and thus refuted.

MEDIA MAKEOVER? In advance of the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Calgary Herald noted that Shani Davis had undergone a transformation. Indeed, the profile expresses surprise that, in contrast with his reputation, Davis was “witty, warm and accommodating.” A change that caused the author to wonder if this was a calculated public relations makeover or “the emergence of the real Shani Davis” (Johnson 2010). Michelle Iscaason (2010) went so far as to suggest “a kinder, gentler Davis” came to Vancouver in 2010. Perhaps because of his accessibility to sport journalists hungry for celebrity story lines, his suc-


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cess at the 2010 Games, where he won a gold medal, repeating in the 1,000 Meters and a silver medal in the 1,500 Meters, or his reconciliation with teammates, it was the media itself that appeared (at least in tone) to have given Davis the makeover. In the absence of a conflict with his white teammate, Chad Hedrick, he was given his due as a superstar, unrecognized, even neglected, by most Americans. Rather than a villain, intent to harm the team and the nation, sport journalists painted a more human portrait of a more likable athlete. Oddly, they achieved this largely by highlighting his love of other cultures and nations, specifically Japan and the Netherlands, and the status, integration, and celebrity he had achieved there. While still positioned outside, beyond the pale as it were, some commentators sought to refute previous framings, affirming his Americanness (Crouse 2010a; Crouse 2010b; Isaacson 2010; Johnson 2010). For instance, columnist Kevin Blackistone (2010) suggested that Davis must be embraced as fully American: “Davis is an American ideal—the self-made man.” As in the past, his achievements, hard work, and dedication at once stabilize a mythic meritocracy and prove a claim to citizenship that should have never been in question—and would not have been had Davis been white. Indeed, as Blackistone highlights, even at the 2010 Games the media took issue with Davis’s individualism and the distance he continued to put between himself and the U.S. speed skating establishment, while letting white athletes like Shaun White and Bode Miller off the hook by not remarking on them. Despite the makeover, then, even as they re-presented Davis to the American public, the sport media employed a white racial frame that rested upon and reiterated the same double standards. The facts of blackness were restated in more overt ways as well. While numerous participants in online discussions of Davis praised his achievements in Vancouver and laid claim to them as especially noteworthy for blacks, almost invariably comments would be posted questioning his character and Americanness, reminding others of his purported transgressions in 2006 and condemning (primarily) African Americans for introducing race into the conversation. Such devolutions hold little surprise to anyone who has read, even casually, online discussions that touch upon questions of race and identity. More elaborate postings also recycled the dominant frames from Turino. Mary, on her blog Eden Freedom, lamented Davis’s behavior after winning his gold medal, wondering what distracted him from the flag and carried him deep into thought during the medal ceremony.19 In addition to the return of past tropes, new white fears were given voice. With an image of Shani Davis skating in Vancouver behind him and under the heading Jheri-Curling (an obvious play on a hair care product aimed at African Americans and a traditional winter sport), comedian and television host Bill Maher (2010) sought to express it through humor during The New Rules segment of his weekly show:


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New Rule: No black athletes in the Winter Olympics. There’s a reason we schedule these things in the cold and snow, so the tropical people won’t show up and kick our ass. Look you’ve got football, basketball, [and] the presidency. Is it too much to leave us the ice dancing?

Here, Maher uses a joke to reiterate fictions his audience believes to be true: whiteness is imperiled; mainstream society and institutions formerly dominated by whites have been overrun by nonwhites (“tropical peoples”) who are physically superior and by implication culturally inferior; a mongrel creation threatens to prevail, one adorned with black hair and urban style in an unexpected and by design unwelcome place. And here, Maher echoes sport journalists and countless Americans who through Shani Davis restate the facts of blackness as they produce and consume sincere fictions about race, sport, and society.

CONCLUSION Perhaps his much-maligned mother Cherie best captures the themes of this chapter as well as the prominence of racism in speed skating. In her response to a question about her advice to other African Americans who might consider the sport, she quipped, “I’d tell them to run track” (Sanful 2002). What she misses here is that the problem cannot be outrun, precisely because it is not limited to white dominated sports. To speak metaphorically, speed skating in its long-track variation requires participants to crossover, alternating between the inside and outside lanes. Like skaters, Davis (and other) black athletes who crossover always already return. Their blackness overdetermines their production and reception in post–civil rights America. New racism has restructured common sense understandings of race, reworking of racial myths in more comfortable and comforting terms, which effectively restabilize racial hierarchies while letting those with power of the hook. Moreover, Davis illustrates the important, if understudied, ways in which African American athletes internalize and employ the vocabularies of new racism. In fact, if nothing else, Shani Davis’s brief career highlights what I would argue should be one of the key questions for future work on race and sport, namely how and why black athletes embrace the frames of color-blind racism, even when they know the facts of blackness.

NOTES 1. To these we might add allegations that Davis conspired with Apollo Anton Ono and Rusty Smith to fix a qualifying heat at the speed skating trials for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Although later cleared, he felt humiliated by the ac-


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cusation and abandoned by the USOC. Once reinstated, Davis became an alternate on the short track team, but he was not allowed to live with the men’s team and was forced to practice with the women’s team (See Couch 2006; Sanful 2002). 2. www.keithboykin.com/arch/2006/02/18/shani_davis_makes_history. 3. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 4. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 5. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 6. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 7. www.topix.net/forum/olympics/winter/T6P86JAL2ROCMPE4S. 8. www.topix.net/forum/olympics/winter/T6P86JAL2ROCMPE4S. 9. www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1579694/posts. 10. http://gaypatriot.net/?comments_popup=1048. 11. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 12. www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1579694/posts. 13. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 14. www.keithboykin.com/arch/001825.html. 15. http://terrencesays.blogspot.com/2006/02/shani-davis-vs-white-privilege. html. 16. http://yellowcontent.blogspot.com/2006_02_19_yellowcontent_archive. html. 17. http://terrencesays.blogspot.com/2006/02/shani-davis-vs-white-privilege. html. 18. http://blackathlete.net/artman2/publish/BASN_BLACKBOX_54/Shani_Davis_ Got_It_Right_We_re_Off_The_Plantation_Now.shtml. 19. http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2010/02/shani-davis-medal-ceremony. html.

WORKS CITED Adelson, E. (2006). Davis’ win, and nothing else, will stand the test of time. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/winter06/speed/ columns/story?id=2335461. Anderson, M. (2006, May 14). Pulled over for driving while black unleashes anger. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved May 16, 2006, from www.suntimes.com/output/anderson/ cst-edt-monroe14.html. Andrews, D. L. (2001). Michael Jordan, inc: Corporate sport, media culture, and late modern America. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ansell, A. E. (1997). New right, new racism: Race and reaction in the United States and Britain. New York: New York University Press. Birrell, S., and McDonald, M. G. (2000). Reading sport, articulating power lines. In S. Birrell and M. G. McDonald (Eds.), Reading sport: Critical essays on power and representation (pp. 3–13). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Blackistone, K. (2010). Shani Davis personifies American ideal. Fanhouse. Retrieved May 20, 2010, from http://olympics.fanhouse.com/2010/02/18/shani-davispersonifies-american-ideal/.


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Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001). White supremacy and racism in the post–civil rights era. Boulder: Lynn Rienner. Brown, M. K., Carnoy, M., Currie, E., Duster, T., Oppenheim, D. B., Shultz, M. M., and Wellman, D. (2003). Whitewashing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carpenter, L. (2006, February 9). For Davis, the only color that matters is gold. Washington Post. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/02/08/AR2006020802304.html. Cole, C. L., and Andrews, D. L. (2001). America’s new son: Tiger Woods and America’s multiculturalism. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 70–86). New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2005). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York: Routledge. Couch, G. (2006). Shani Davis back on the right track. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from http://blackathlete.net/artman2/publish/Winter_Games_10/Shani_Davis_Back_ On_The_Right_Track_1537.shtml. Crouse, K. (2010a, February 13). American speedskater Shani Davis belongs to the world. New York Times. Retrieved May 20, 2010, from www.nytimes.com/2010/ 02/14/sports/olympics/14davis.html?adxnnl=1&fta=y&adxnnlx=1274983254-Nfl7lX9JYY8exTZeEa1LLg. Crouse, K. (2010b, February 17). Davis earns repeat gold and validation. New York Times. Retrieved May 20, 2010, from www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/sports/olympics/ 18speedskate.html. Delgado, R. (1995). Critical race theory: The cutting edge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Doane, A., and Bonilla-Silva, E. (Eds.). (2003). White out: The continuing significance of racism. New York: Routledge. Fanon, Frantz. (1967/1952). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Fields, B. J. (1990). Slavery, race, and ideology in the United States of America. New Left Review, 181, 95–118. Fredrickson, G. M. (1981). White supremacy: A comparative study in American and South African history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giardina, M. (2005). Sporting pedagogies: Performing culture and identity in the global arena. New York: Peter Lang. Gilroy, P. (1990). One nation under a groove: The cultural politics of race and racism in Britain. In D. T. Goldberg (Ed.), Anatomy of racism (pp. 263–82). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (Ed.) (1997). Representation. London: Sage. Hall, S., and du Gay, P. (Eds). (1996). Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage. Isaacsson, M. (2010). A kinder, gentler Davis. Retrieved May 20, 2010, from http:// sports.espn.go.com/chicago/columns/story?columnist=isaacson_melissa& id=4913700. Jackman, M. R. (1994). The velvet glove: Paternalism and conflict in gender, class, and race relations. Berkeley: University of California Press.


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Johnson, G. (2010, February 11). The new Shani Davis a massive makeover. Calgary Herald. Retrieved May 20, 2010, from http://www.calgaryherald.com/sports/Shan i+Davis+massive+makeover/2548667/story.html. King, C. R. (2004). Apologies and apologists: The disavowal of racism and the abjuration of anti-racism in the contemporary U.S. SIMILE: Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education, 4 (4). Available online at http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k4h1423136xj4061/. King, C. R., and Leonard, D. J. (2006). Visual economies of/in motion: Sport and film. New York: Peter Lang. King, C. R., and Springwood, C. F. (2001). Beyond the cheers: Race as spectacle in college sports. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Just what is critical race theory, and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? In L. Parker, D. Deyhle, and S. Villenas (Eds.), Race is . . . Race isn’t: Critical race theory and qualitative studies of education (pp. 7–30). Boulder: Westview Press. Leonard, D. J. (2006). The real color of money: controlling black bodies in the NBA. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30 (2), 158–79. Leonard, D. J. (2004). The next M. J. or the next O. J.? Kobe Bryant, race, and the absurdity of colorblind rhetoric. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 28 (3), 284–313. Lewis, M. (2006). Despite his ambivalence about race, Davis’ gold boosts black Chicaogans. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from www.blackamericaweb.com/siteaspx/ bawnews/davis220#. Ridicule, racism fail to slow speed skater. (2005, December 24). Arizona Republic. Rosen, K. (2006, May 18). Q&A: Shani Davis. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Sanful, J. (2002). The black iceman cometh. Retrieved January 12, 2006, from www .blackathlete.net/ski&surf/ssr022002_2.html. Schy, S. (2005). US speedskater Shani Davis sets sights on Olympic history. Retrieved January 12, 2006, from www1.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2005-1206-voa62.html. Shani Davis’s Mailbag. Retrieved February 21, 2006, from http://www.nbcolympics. com/print/5091948/detail.html. Shani Davis makes history, ruffles feathers with Winter Olympics victory. (2006, February 20). Target Market News. Retrieved May 25, 2006, from targetmarketnews .com/storyid02210602.htm. Shani Davis takes the gold. (2006, February 18). Chicago Sun Times. Shaw, A. (2003). Olympic skater files racial profiling lawsuit. Retrieved May 16, 2006, from http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=News&id=18827. Spencer, N. E. (2004). Sister act VI: Venus and Serena Williams at Indian Wells: “Sincere fictions” and white racism. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 28 (2), 115–35. Zarefsky, M. (2006). Shani triumphs in world all-arounds. Retrieved January 12, 2006, from www.rogerspark.com/people_paws/shanidavis.htm.


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8 The Dennis Rodman of Hockey: Ray Emery and the Policing of Blackness in the Great White North Stacy L. Lorenz and Rod Murray

“Racism is not in the National Hockey League. Of all the sports in the world, it’s the one that doesn’t have racism.” —Don Cherry (Coach’s Corner 2006)

Speaking from his pulpit on Hockey Night in Canada’s “Coach’s Corner,” the most watched segment on Canadian television, the infamous Don Cherry (Gillet, White, and Young 1996) made this proclamation denying the existence of racism in professional hockey. Cherry’s remarks were a response to an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail (Wharnsby 2006, p. S1) in which Ted Nolan reflected upon the racism he endured throughout his career as an Aboriginal (Ojibwa First Nation) hockey player and coach. Countering Nolan’s claims of racism, Cherry stated, “It’s not that it’s racism, it’s that [Nolan] is tough to fire” (Coach’s Corner 2006). Uncharacteristically apologizing for putting it bluntly, Cherry concluded that Nolan is a “GM killer.” Ever the one to try to soften the tone of Cherry’s comments, cohost Ron MacLean then offered some clarity by explaining that racism wasn’t the issue, it was that, “You get blackballed because you don’t play the game” (Coach’s Corner 2006). Not playing the game the way the moral vanguard thinks it should be played, on and off the playing surface, has posed a number of problems for the people running professional sports in recent years. For example, in the fall of 2005, the National Basketball Association (NBA) imposed a strict, off-court dress code because too many of the league’s emerging stars were dressing in urban, hip-hop style.1 With black players constituting a significant majority of NBA rosters, the dress code quickly became part of a wider discussion about racial politics, marketing, and “black style” (Oriard 2007) 183


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in the sport. Since the new dress regulations targeted the clothing and jewelry (or “bling” in the current vernacular) favored by a group of young black players, allegations of racism were raised by some NBA players and media commentators (Adami 2005; S. Brunt 2005; Pearce 2005). However, according to league officials, the dress code was in no way racially motivated, it was simply about bringing “professionalism” back into basketball (D’Allesandro 2005; Lage 2005) in order to rehabilitate the NBA’s image among (mainly white) fans, sponsors, and advertisers (S. Brunt 2005; Cole 2005; McNulty 2005; Starr 2005; Wise 2005). The NBA began to embrace rap music and other elements of hip-hop style in the early 1980s, and the league was a trailblazer in terms of its promotion of black players (Zirin 2007; Hartmann 2006; Rhoden 2006; Boyd 1997; Andrews 1996; Cole and Andrews 1996) and its efforts to sell “black culture” to “white America” (Powell 2008, p. 108). In the words of Dave Zirin, the NBA essentially became “the ‘hip-hop league’—not running from associations with urban culture but marketing them to death” (2007, p. 108). By the early 2000s, however, there was a growing sense that the NBA might have gone too far in this direction, to the point that the league “was becoming too ghetto” (Powell 2008, p. 99). The dress code adopted in 2005–2006 is therefore part of a bigger “backlash against the hip-hop baller” (Leonard 2006, p. 170)—a wider “racialized culture war” (Leonard 2006, p. 158) connected to such issues as the disappointing performance of U.S. national teams in international tournaments (Andrews 2006, pp. 24–25), the arrest of a number of black NBA players, and, in particular, the 2004 brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills involving members of the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers, including Ron Artest, which spilled into the stands and included altercations with a group of spectators (Zirin 2007; Leonard 2006). As Zirin writes, The NBA higher-ups fear that “the public” views pro ballers as one step removed from the yard at Riker’s Island. They are concerned that “Main Street USA” thinks the league is too gangsta, too hip-hop, too urban, all of which is code for “too young, Black, and scary.” (2007, p. 115)

While approximately 75 percent of NBA players are African American (Eitzen 2006; Lapchick 2008), only about 2.5 percent of players in the National Hockey League (NHL) are black (Paikin 2008). In 2003–2004, for example, just seventeen black players skated in the NHL (Paikin 2008). However, despite these differences in the racial composition of the two leagues, both the NBA and the NHL dealt with what they perceived as “problems” involving the behavior and public image of black players during the 2005–2006 season. Shortly after the furor over the NBA dress code erupted in October 2005, a parallel controversy developed in hockey over similar means of personal expression. Ray Emery, a goaltender with the Ottawa Senators, is


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black. And, if you asked the Senators’ management, they would probably tell you that he was acting like it, too. Over the course of the 2005–2006 season, Emery was questioned and criticized on several occasions for behaviors and style choices that—like those of many NBA players—could be considered “too hip-hop” (C. Brunt 2005, p. D2). For example, Emery’s decisions to get another graffiti-art tattoo, dye his hair platinum blond, and, finally, paint the image of Mike Tyson on his goalie mask all drew the ire of team management. With blacks and other people of color forming only a small minority of players in the NHL, the hip-hop backlash in hockey was neither as threatening nor as widespread as that in basketball. However, while the case of Ray Emery was not sufficient to elicit a leaguewide response, the treatment of this “gangsta” goalie was comparable to the NBA dress code in that ultimately it was “white” cultural norms that were being recentered and reinforced by policing forms of black expression. This chapter explores cultural conversations about race and blackness in Canadian sport by examining media narratives surrounding Ottawa Senators goaltender Ray Emery during the 2005–2006 NHL season. Newspaper reports and commentary related to Emery between December 2005 and April 2006 form the basis of this case study. Case studies have a long and impressive record as a sound methodological approach in the social sciences. They are particularly noted for their ability to initiate the process of discovery (Yin 2003a, 2003b; Mitchell 1983). While researchers are limited in the generalizations that they can draw, case studies are nonetheless especially useful for intensively examining and understanding a single case, engaging in theoretical analysis, and generating insights and hypotheses that may be explored in subsequent studies (Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster 2000; Vaughn 1992). The 2005–2006 hockey season serves as a useful case study for investigating the contested meanings of race in contemporary sport. The controversy that enveloped Ray Emery can be seen as a “magnified moment” (Messner 2002, p. 22) in the social and cultural construction—and containment—of blackness in the “Great White North.”2 Media coverage of Emery and other black athletes during this time period shaped and reflected a range of racial discourses that will be assessed in this chapter. Our analysis draws upon ideas and methods used in a number of other historical and sociological studies of sports media narratives (Oriard 2006, 2001, 1993; Birrell and McDonald 2000). Like other scholars who have used textual analysis of

sports coverage to shed light on various dimensions of modern sport, our goal is to “read” sport (Oriard 1993) in the following way: [A]s a methodology for cultural analysis, reading sport compels us to read in a different, more theoretically charged manner. The methodology of “reading” sport—that is, of finding the cultural meanings that circulate within narratives


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of particular incidents or celebrities—also requires critical attention to the ways that sexuality, race, gender, and class privileges are articulated in those accounts. (Birrell and McDonald 2000, pp. 10–11)

This study applies these insights and methodologies to media accounts of several contentious issues and events involving Ray Emery in 2005–2006. More specifically, this chapter uses the highly charged public debate that occurred around the NBA dress code as a backdrop against which the parallel controversies surrounding similar racialized forms of expression in the NHL can be read. Our analysis of the popular media narratives related to these flashpoint events reveals that racialized constructions of black athletes as menacing, criminal, and dangerously different were prominent in coverage of both hockey and basketball. Although the NHL and the NBA are seemingly worlds apart, especially in regard to the presence of black players, we suggest that the various forms, expressions, and effects of racism are similar in these two sports, as well as in Canada and the United States more generally. In particular, we argue that criticisms of Ray Emery are part of the broader “practice of policing young black males who defy dominant expectations” (Leonard 2006, p. 160). In the end, the NBA and the NHL’s Ottawa Senators made comparable efforts to discipline and contain the threatening black bodies under their control.

MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS AND THE NEW RACISM In Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald write, Racial and ethnic relations scholarship begins with the insight that “race” is a social construction and that racial meanings are constantly being refigured in accordance with and in contrast to the fluid new racism of contemporary American popular culture. Earlier studies that focused on the cultural forces that worked to exclude members of racial and ethnic minorities from sport have been joined by efforts to document ways in which raced bodies are represented in sport. (2000, p. 5)

This study assesses cultural representations of blackness in the NHL in relation to contemporary forms of racism in North American society. Drawing upon insights derived from theories of the “new racism” (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Leonard 2006) and what Frances Henry and Carol Tator (2006, 2002) call “democratic racism,” we analyze efforts to curtail some of Ray Emery’s off-ice activities and self-representations as part of a bigger project “to put Black male bodies and styles under surveillance and control” (Leonard 2006, p. 171). In particular, we look at the ways in which “race” and racism are downplayed or denied (Henry and Tator 2006, 2002) in such situations in order to maintain white privilege and dominance. We also pay special


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attention to specific conditions in Canada and in the sport of hockey. As Gamal Abdel-Shehid states, “Canadian national identity and the sense of belonging works only via the policing, disciplining, and regulation of those marked as outsiders, or ‘non-citizens’” (2005, p. 2). Similarly, Steven J. Jackson describes how the Canadian media constructed black sprinter Ben Johnson “as the ‘other’ and as a threat to the (imagined) Canadian community” (1998, p. 27). We argue that Ray Emery can be seen as one of these dangerous “outsiders.” As a result, this research also addresses important gaps in the study of race and sport in a Canadian context, and, in particular, the need for additional examinations of the role of racism and racialized identities in Canadian hockey (Abdel-Shehid 2005, 2000; Pitter 2006). Francis Henry and Carol Tator identify “democratic racism” as one particular variant of the new racism: Democratic racism arises when racist beliefs and behaviors remain deeply embedded in “democratic” societies. Obfuscations and justifications are deployed to demonstrate continuing faith in egalitarian ideals, even while many individuals, groups, and institutions continue to engage in systemic racist practices that serve to undermine those ideals. (2002, p. 23)

In addition, they suggest that the “new” forms of racism are discursive and that democratic racism is demonstrated most clearly through . . . the discourses of dominance. To examine this form of the “new” racism, we require sensitive analytic tools to identify how racialized and racist meanings are woven into media presentations and reproduced through them. (Henry and Tator 2002, p. 24)

This case study takes up Henry and Tator’s challenge by assessing the meanings woven into newspaper coverage of Ray Emery. These media representations—and misrepresentations—both mirror and construct a number of “racialized discourses” and “racial filters” (Henry and Tator 2002, pp. 11–12, 225) that contribute to the prevalence of “democratic racism” in North American society today. The discourses that underpin democratic racism in contemporary culture include the discourse of “otherness,” the discourse of denial, and the discourse of color blindness (Henry and Tator 2006, 2002). These discourses, frames, and filters will be examined throughout this study as we analyze a range of media narratives related to cultural perceptions of race in hockey.

RAY EMERY: HIP-HOP MEETS HOCKEY Then along comes a cockroach-eating goalie who dresses like a gangsta rapper and shows up at practice doing a Dennis Rodman impersonation. —Ken Campbell (2006, p. B5)


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“Razor” Ray Emery was not the first black player to play in the NHL. The “Jackie Robinson of Hockey” is a title held by Willie O’Ree, who broke into the league amid very little fanfare back in 1958. O’Ree appeared in fortyfive NHL games during parts of two seasons between 1958 and 1961, and, as Steve Paikin points out, “The next black player in the NHL would not appear for more than another decade” (2008, p. A18). Since then, only about forty other black hockey players have skated on NHL ice, though about half of this group has entered the league since 1991 (Paikin 2008; Pitter 2006; Harris 2003).3 Hidden underneath the oversized pads and full mask worn as a goaltender, Emery’s blackness is potentially less evident than the dark skin and long dreadlocks of Anson Carter or Georges Laraque. Nevertheless, Ken Warren of the Ottawa Citizen points out that “Emery cuts a striking figure as he steps into the Ottawa Senators’ dressing room” (2005, D1). On the day of this particular interview, “Emery is wearing a shockingly bright white track suit, drawing attention to the diamond stud earring flashing from his right ear lobe.” It is a look that is in stark contrast to the standard jeans-sweatshirt-ball cap outfit favored by most NHL players on practice days. Naturally, it only takes a few seconds for the first catcall to come from across the room. “Hey, T.O.,” yells Senators star centre Jason Spezza, referring to flamboyant and controversial National Football League wide receiver Terrell Owens. If Emery hears the wisecrack from his good friend, he ignores it. (Warren 2005, p. D1)

But it isn’t just on this day that Emery’s style of dress has stood out from what is typical of his peers in the hockey world. Emery’s uniqueness was already evident to many of the people in the Ottawa Senators organization at an after party hosted by the team in Florida during the 2001 NHL draft. [Jason] Spezza, chosen second overall by Ottawa, was a little bit anxious about meeting all the scouts and front-office staff of his new organization. First impressions being what they are, Spezza put on a crisp new golf shirt, freshly pressed slacks, and arrived early. Some while later, the kid the Sens had grabbed in the fourth round, 99th overall, sauntered in wearing baggy blue shorts, a T-shirt that hung to his knees and a ballcap perched sideways atop his head. Spezza didn’t know what to think, other than what every ounce of sense was telling him: Whoever this guy was, Spezza would be avoiding him. (Spector 2006, p. S3)

The dominant discourse framing media narratives of Emery is what Henry and Tator call the discourse of “otherness” (2006, pp. 26–27; 2002, pp. 231–32). Despite being born and raised in Canada and developing his


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skills in the Canadian hockey system, Emery is constructed as an outsider (Abdel-Shehid 2005) or a threatening “other” (Jackson 2004, 1998). As Henry and Tator explain, “The ubiquitous we represents the White dominant culture or the culture of the organization . . .; they refers to the communities that are the other, and that possess ‘different’ (i.e., undesirable) values, beliefs, and norms” (2002, p. 231). Although Emery’s race is rarely mentioned explicitly, his “blackness” is always present—but it is framed as “attitude” or “style.” Abdel-Shehid (2003) makes a similar observation about Canadian basketball, noting that contentions of racism in the men’s national basketball program were erased by displacing “race” with notions of “place” and “playing style,” rooted in the “inner city.” In effect, this made allegations of racism “impossible” (Abdel-Shehid 2003, p. 248). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva captures the subtle and apparently nonracial ways in which this marking of blackness occurs when he suggests that “color-blind racism otherizes softly” (2006, p. 3). In contrast to the typical (white) hockey player, Emery is portrayed as a bit of a “bad boy” who listens to “hard gangster rap,” brings his “flashy pinstriped suits on road trips,” and drives “a limited-edition white Hummer” (Warren 2005, p. D1). He is strange and different, fitting uneasily into the world of hockey. Emery is Rodman, or “T.O.”—more NBA or NFL than NHL. The following profile captures this sense of “otherness” clearly, explaining how Emery is “fashioning his own distinct style” as he strives to be Ottawa’s “franchise goaltender for a long time”: Over the years, the culture of hockey has created a “one for all and all for one” mantra as a necessary part of teamwork. That has tended to breed conservatism in players away from the ice. With a few exceptions, players generally dress, walk and talk from the same playbook. Then there’s Emery. “I have different interests,” he says as he relaxes in his luxurious new downtown condo. “Even when I was a kid, I was in different crowds because of what I liked, and how I dressed. I like to be a bit unique. I like everything in music, I like to try different things out. If you look in my closet, I’ve got some rap stuff, some bandanas, but then I have tight European suits. I like different aspects of different cultures.” (Warren 2005, p. D1)

At the same time, some of these media discourses connected Emery to stereotypes of young black men as criminals and gang members (Koppel 2007; Leonard 2006; Tator and Henry 2006; Leonard 2004; Henry and Tator 2002). With his bling, baggy shorts, and bandanas, Emery can be equated to the professional basketball players who were in need of the dress code’s discipline (Dahlberg 2005; Mushnick 2005; Robinson 2005; Siler 2005; Will 2005). For instance, Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson observed that, during the NBA playoffs, “you’ll have a player step to the


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podium wearing a do-rag and sunglasses and holding a child on his lap and it sends out an image, I don’t know, of prison garb or thuggery or smells of defiance in a way” (Lorenz and Murray 2005, p. A14). An editorial in the Windsor Star offered a more critical perspective on such stereotypes, noting, “A dress code specifically designed to clean up young black players so they’re not mistaken for punks only reinforces the prejudice that black men sporting baggy pants and throwback jerseys are just seconds away from a mugging or other crime” (NBA Dress Code 2005, p. A8). Just as the NBA was concerned about defiant black males in unsettling gangster gear, it appears that Emery’s white teammates (and perhaps the reporters who covered them) thought they might be better off steering clear of the “rapper” goaltender. “The Ottawa Senators have worked furiously over the past 13 years cultivating an image as Canada’s squeaky-clean bilingual franchise,” wrote Ken Campbell (2006, p. B5). And Ray Emery threatened to undo all that work in just a few short months. Early in the 2005–2006 NHL season, following a yearlong lockout that cancelled the entire 2004–2005 campaign, Emery was the number-two goaltender for the Ottawa Senators, behind future Hall-of-Famer Dominik Hasek. After rather short-lived stints in the league during the two previous seasons, Emery got off to an impressive start by winning his first six appearances of the year. That brought his career mark to 9–0, a league record for most consecutive wins from the start of a goaltender’s time in the league. Clearly, Emery was showing signs of being the NHL starting-caliber goalie that the Senators hoped he would become after signing him in 2001. However, it was some of Emery’s early season off-ice antics that started to ruffle the club’s feathers. While the team was in Raleigh, North Carolina, for a road game against the eventual Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, team captain Daniel Alfredsson dared Emery to eat a cockroach for $500. He did. With that money, Emery paid for a new tattoo. “Anger is a gift” in graffiti style was now forever etched into the skin of his right arm. This tattoo joined several others on Emery’s body, like his nickname—“Razor”—emblazoned across his chest, initials of his family members, an African symbol for the number one, and his zodiac symbol, Libra. Emery openly admitted that he did not expect that the tattoos would be appreciated by everybody when he said, “The tattoos, I guess that fits into a different crowd than the stereotypical hockey player. I think maybe it’s just that I might be of a newer generation. I kind of see it as being part of a different generation, a different upbringing” (Warren 2005, p. D1). The tattoos are yet another mark of Emery’s “otherness.” However, apparently the club was none too happy when a picture of Emery getting his new tattoo appeared the following day on the cover of the Ottawa Sun newspaper. Not wanting to get into a discussion about Emery’s personal decision to get a tattoo, Senators general manager John Muckler said that he was more disappointed with “the way it was handled, flaunted”


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(Warren 2005, p. D1). You see, to Muckler, this was the kind of behavior that falls outside of what is expected of a professional hockey player. “I’m not going to get into a man’s personal life,” he added. “We’re just trying to teach an individual what it takes to be a major league player. You have to work very hard at it and to be successful in this business, it has to be his priority. He is a talented player, he has a lot of things going for him” (Warren 2005, p. D1). Without having to read too hard between the lines, this message was clearly intended to let Emery know that he needed to start making better choices if he was going to be able to stick around the NHL and realize the potential he had for a successful career. The tattoos would be there forever, but Emery proved that he was a quick learner when the platinum blond dye job he tried a few months later only lasted one day before he begrudgingly returned his hair to its natural color. As Allen Panzeri reported, “Why Emery changed his mind so quickly is a mystery, but it appears as if he got the hint that looking like the NHL’s version of Dennis Rodman was not exactly the kind of image the Senators want to present” (2006a, p. B2). Emery’s response was simply, “I liked it, and that’s all I’m going to say” (Panzeri 2006a, p. B2). This was just one more attempt at expressing his individuality that the club management nipped in the bud. Again, Emery’s experience mirrored that of NBA players targeted by the dress code. “We need to have our players look more professional to show more respect for the game and consumers,” stated NBA commissioner David Stern. Echoing John Muckler, Stern added, “That’s just part of what we’re trying to do to let the public know that our players are good people” (Lage 2005, p. C2). The direct comparison to Dennis Rodman is also instructive. While Rodman is a complex cultural figure (Lafrance and Rail 2001, 2000), he “is an unmistakable embodiment of ‘bad’ blackness” (Lafrance and Rail 2001, p. 40). As Douglas Kellner points out, Rodman, “with his bleached and undisciplined hair, earring, fancy clothes, and regularly rebellious behavior represents the ‘bad’ Black figure” (1996, p. 462). The same could be said for Ray Emery.

BLACKNESS BEHIND THE MASK Hockey players, hidden under helmets and pads, can often seem removed from the viewing public. Goalies, hidden under larger helmets and even more pads, can seem anonymous. But their custom-made masks, professionally designed and painted for thousands of dollars, allow them to reveal a small part of their personalities. . . . While basketball players simply flex their arms to show off their tattoos, hockey goalies simply nod their heads to model their masks. —Lee Jenkins (2006, p. D3)4


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Two boxing legends adorned Emery’s early NHL goalie masks—one of the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and the other of a more recent middleweight champion, Marvin Hagler. However, when Emery added a third boxing figure to his collection, Cam Cole’s reaction captured the dominant sentiments of team officials and the public: “Even taking into account that goalies are not like normal people, Senators backup Ray Emery’s ill-advised decision to have an image of wacko boxer Mike Tyson painted on his goal mask ranks among the dumbest ideas ever by an NHL player” (2006, p. F1). Much like the platinum blond hairdo Emery tried earlier in the season, his customized mask featuring the image of former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson “had a shelf life of just one NHL game” (TSN.ca 2006). Again, it was Senators general manager John Muckler who intervened. “We didn’t ask him not to wear the mask . . . we just had a discussion about what was right and what was wrong. He said he would take it off,” claimed Muckler (TSN. ca 2006). Another news report stated, “Muckler said he didn’t demand that Emery remove the image of Tyson. Instead, he listened to Emery’s point of view and then expressed his. In the end, Emery agreed that Muckler had a point” (Panzeri and Scanlan 2006, p. B9). Emery told Muckler that he had chosen the image of Tyson because “he admired Tyson as a boxer—and that he wasn’t saying he was a role model. Tyson was the heavyweight champ when he was growing up, ‘was a big deal’ and ‘a lot of (other) people were fans of (his)’” (Adami 2006, p. D1). But to Muckler, and much of the viewing public, Tyson now represents “a convicted rapist and a female abuser,” not a boxing icon (Panzeri and Scanlan 2006, p. B9; Panzeri 2006b, p. E3). Although, on one level, Tyson fits neatly within the chosen boxing theme that had previously been accepted on Emery’s masks, the former champion’s reputation—especially his 1992 conviction for rape—was sufficient to put his image over the line (Adami 2006; Cashmore 2005; Roberts and Garrison 2000). As a result, Emery’s Mike Tyson mask was never seen again. While it is easy to see why Tyson could be considered a “boxing pariah” and described as a “vulgar and hideous man” (Adami 2006, p. D1), the controversy surrounding Emery’s goalie mask is more complex and nuanced than it first appears. To begin with, when we consider how other convicted criminals have been treated within the world of sport—especially white hockey players—there is some evidence to suggest that a double standard may be operating in comparison to a black offender like Tyson. At the very least, the hockey establishment appears to be demonstrating a degree of hypocrisy in terms of how it treats the issue of violence against women. Similar concerns could also be voiced in relation to the NHL’s acceptance of other goalie mask art that might be considered offensive in ways that are analogous to the image of Mike Tyson. These examples raise the question of the degree to which the blackness of Tyson and Emery influenced perceptions of the controversial mask.


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First, in contrast to the strong backlash against Tyson, a number of NHL players returned successfully to the league almost immediately following their criminal transgressions. For instance, both Craig MacTavish in 1984 and Dany Heatley in 2005 were convicted of vehicular homicide in connection with fatal car accidents (CBC Sports 2005; Sports People 1985). After serving a one-year jail term, MacTavish went on to a lengthy playing and coaching career, mainly with the Edmonton Oilers. Meanwhile, Heatley has become a superstar in the NHL and has regularly represented Canada in international hockey competitions, including the 2006 and 2010 Olympic Winter Games. While the circumstances in each case are different, would Mike Tyson—or a guilty Ray Emery—have been accepted back into the NHL so easily? Although the Senators’ quick move to prevent the glorification of Tyson might be seen as a positive step that demonstrates greater respect for women and a more careful consideration of the consequences of crimes such as sexual assault, the reception given to the Tyson mask also highlights the hockey establishment’s failure to take similar crimes seriously on other occasions. The gap between the NHL’s response to Tyson’s image on a piece of equipment and hockey’s usual treatment of violence against women is striking. For instance, in the book Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport, Laura Robinson (1998) documents the horrific treatment of many young women by Canadian junior hockey players, including numerous acts of sexual abuse and sexual violence. She describes the hockey locker room as a “rape culture,” a place “where females are referred to as ‘groupies,’ ‘puck bunnies,’ ‘pucks,’ and ‘dirties’” (Robinson 1998, p. 5). Robinson shows that what is perhaps most notable about the sexual assault charges that have been brought against Canadian hockey players “is how little alarm this has caused the sports media and hockey officials” (1998, p. 7). The prevailing “attitude was that the girls and women who came forward to police were troublemakers who thought that perhaps if they slept with hockey players they’d make into the NHL, as a wife or full-time groupie” (Robinson 1998, p. 7).5 If the hockey community condemned all acts of sexual abuse as decisively as it cracked down on Emery’s Mike Tyson artwork, there would not be as much room to question why responses to the Tyson mask seem to be disproportionately strong. Similarly, reactions to Emery’s use of Tyson’s portrait must also be considered in the context of other potentially controversial masks worn by NHL goaltenders. For instance, Antero Niittymaki, a backup goalie for the Philadelphia Flyers, was apparently trying to overcome his “mask envy” (Jenkins 2006, p. D3) when he had a customized mask painted depicting an unnamed mobster firing a tommy gun. The spent shell casings cascade down the side of his mask. Meanwhile, John Grahame of the Tampa Bay Lightning is “trailed by a couple of buxom


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brunettes” (Jenkins 2006, p. D3) in what could be likened to a 1970sstyle mural painted on the side of a van owned by one of those guys that parents would never let their daughters date. Yet, Emery is the only one to have experienced a case of “mask censorship” (Jenkins 2006, p. D3). Apparently, Mike Tyson’s criminal background makes him an unacceptable image for mask artwork but blazing machine guns and suggestive depictions of bikini-clad women are not violent or sexist enough to warrant censure. In light of these comparisons, we suggest that the virulent response to Ray Emery’s Mike Tyson mask was heightened by concerns about the blackness of both men. As Leonard writes, “Blackness as hypersexual, as violent, as privileged, and as pollutant functions as the predominant trope for examining sexual violence” (2007, pp. 27–28). In a thorough examination of black male sexuality, Leonard (2004, pp. 292–98) demonstrates that the “harrowing spectre of the black rapist” (Abdel-Shehid 2005, p. 43) remains very much at the forefront of the public imagination. For instance, Leonard argues that a key subtext of the Kobe Bryant trial was “the constant threat that Black male bodies pose to White femininity. In some senses, White supremacist discourses play on a ‘rape card’ that marks sexual violence as a crime of Black men terrorizing White women” (Leonard 2004, p. 292). This “stereotypical vision of a Black man as a hypersexual brute” (Leonard 2004, p. 296) clearly informs public perceptions of Mike Tyson (Wynn 2003; Sloop 1997; Lule 1995). Regardless of Tyson’s guilt or innocence, his public image has been shaped by demeaning racist archetypes that depict him as “a crude, sex-obsessed, violent savage who could barely control his animal instincts” (Lule 1995, p. 181). As John M. Sloop explains, the multiple cultural representations that collectively constitute “Mike Tyson” positioned him as “likely to be guilty of rape” even before his trial began, mainly because the boxer “fits comfortably in the cultural stereotype of the sexually insatiable black with an appetite that demands attention at any cost” (Sloop 1997, pp. 102, 111). Thus, in a hockey culture that, historically, has shown little respect for women, one can’t help but detect a strong sense of irony in interpreting the erasure of an image of a black boxer on the mask of a black goaltender as a demonstration of the NHL’s determination to address the issue of sexual violence against women.

POLICING BLACKNESS IN THE “GREAT WHITE NORTH” Quite simply, many NBA fans, and even those on the periphery, have been turned off by too many tattooed, mean-talking toughs whose musical tastes include tunes that promote murder and misogyny. —Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen (2005, p. D4)


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“Many Canadians are reluctant to admit that racial oppression and inferiorization persist in this country,” writes Joseph Mensah. “As Canadians, we have the tendency not only to ignore our racist past, but also to dismiss any contemporary racial incidence as nothing but aberration in an essentially peaceful, tolerant, charitable, and egalitarian nation” (2002, p. 1). As such, Canada is supposed to be a place where “race” never enters the equation. Robert Pitter suggests that something you learn growing up in Canada is “that talking about racism is not the Canadian thing to do” (2006, p. 125). When asked about it, Ray Emery also “insists that race hasn’t been much of a major issue in his career.” He adds, “There have been a few isolated incidents, but I’ve not made a team or anything like that because of it, it was just because I wasn’t good enough. . . . There are different, stupid things people yell, but you don’t really hear them” (Warren 2005, p. D1). Moreover, although Canada’s official federal government policy of multiculturalism is intended to legitimize and affirm the country’s cultural and racial pluralism, “Canadians appear deeply ambivalent about the public recognition of other cultures, the freedom of non-White racial and nonEuropean cultural groups to maintain their unique identities, and the right of minorities to function in a society free of racism” (Henry and Tator 2006, p. 2). Despite long-standing myths that Canada struggles with fewer “racial problems” and exhibits “less racism” than the United States, racial attitudes, prejudices, and discrimination are actually very similar between the two countries (Mensah 2002, pp. 1–2). This case study of media narratives related to NHL goaltender Ray Emery suggests that there are also significant parallels between Canadian and American responses to issues surrounding race in sport. In both hockey and basketball during the 2005–2006 season, the blackness of male athletes was constructed “as menacing and threatening, as a pollutant that requires surveillance and control” (Leonard 2006, p. 175). In each situation, the relevance of race was downplayed or denied and masked by references to “professionalism,” business success, and “major league” attitudes. This denial (Tator and Henry 2006, 2002; van Dijk 2002) or minimization (Bonilla-Silva 2006) of racism is a key frame through which “democratic” or “color-blind” (Bonilla-Silva 2006) racism is expressed. For instance, Marcia C. Smith stated that, with the NBA dress code, David Stern was “merely doing sound business by infusing more professionalism and corporate conservatism into the league” (2005, p. 1). “It’s called being professional on and off the court,” claimed Terence Moore. “That’s all the NBA is asking players to do” (2005, p. D3). In his dealings with Emery, Senators general manager John Muckler took a similar approach. He continually tried to make it clear that he wasn’t getting personal. He never ordered Emery to change his hair color or lose the


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Tyson mask—and his response to Emery was definitely not about race. “We told him that he was our second goaltender at the time and that he had to be a good professional in every way,” stated head coach Bryan Murray. “Not that he wasn’t. He was a young guy with a little time on his hands. We told him, ‘If you want attention . . . get it with your ability to play’” (Campbell 2006, p. B5). Put simply, Muckler and Murray claimed that they were merely looking out for Emery’s best interests, trying to ensure that he knew how to be a “professional” in the NHL. However, at least one Ottawa journalist offered a counternarrative that subtly suggested that Emery’s race may have been a factor in how he was treated over the course of the season. “Emery was also criticized for bleaching his hair earlier this year,” wrote Wayne Scanlan. But didn’t Bryan Smolinski [a white player] do the same thing a while back, without a hue and cry over it? Hmmm. Yesterday, former NHL defenceman Garry Galley raised a good question on the radio. If Dominik Hasek [a white goaltender] had a Tyson logo on his goalie helmet, would it have become a big deal? Or would everyone dismiss it as just a flaky move by loveable Dom[?] (Scanlan 2006, p. E1)

As Brian Wilson showed in his work on representations of black basketball players with the Toronto Raptors, we hope that what has become clear in this chapter are the ways in which some of the subtle, newer forms of racism evident in American sporting contexts like the NBA “are also pertinent to the Canadian context” (Wilson 1997, p. 187) as well as in the historically “white” sport of ice hockey. We also hope that “a better understanding of the social construction of racism [has been] attained” (Wilson 1997, p. 187) through this case study. Race scholars have been consistent in urging us to rethink or reimagine blackness as a legitimate part of contemporary (and historical) Canadian culture as well as Canadian sport cultures like hockey (Pitter 2006; Abdel-Shehid 2005; Abdel-Shehid 2000; Walcott 2000; Brand 1994). But, as this chapter suggests, at present we seem to have difficulty thinking of blackness in terms other than derogatory or threatening stereotypes. According to Henry and Tator, “The new racism rarely demonstrates itself in violence or overt racist behavior”; instead, it “manifests itself in more subtle and insidious ways and is largely invisible to those who are part of the dominant culture” (2002, p. 23). This study has made visible some of the “subtle and insidious ways” in which the new racism operates in contemporary sport by assessing the media discourses around Ray Emery. Drawing upon David J. Leonard’s analysis of the recent history of the NBA, we see the treatment of Emery “[a]s part of larger and long-standing reactionary cultural and ideological projects that blame Black culture, in this case hip-hop, for the pollution, corruption, and denigration of Ameri-


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can [and, in this case, Canadian] life” (2006, p. 159). Leonard adds, “Just as crime signifies Blackness and vice versa, Blackness has come to embody a pollutant within the NBA that necessitates surveillance and regulation” (2006, p. 160). Ray Emery’s blackness also came to be seen as a “pollutant” within the NHL, and the Ottawa Senators did their best to keep their “gangsta” goalie’s behavior in check. As Gary Whannel observes, “Examination of representations of black sportsmen still tends to suggest that, for them, the rules are different, the conventions more strict and the options more limited” (2002, p. 179). Thus, like many other black male athletes, Emery was perceived as a “bad boy whose behaviour and style of dress and adornment pushes at the boundaries” (Whannel 2002, p. 179). Our analysis in this chapter also supports Abdel-Shehid’s characterization of Canadian hockey as a sport whose “white core . . . is under constant siege from a series of villains” (2000, p. 82). These villains include “any form of masculinity marked as effeminate, and any form of popular culture marked as ‘foreign’ or homosexual” (Abdel-Shehid 2000, p. 74). As a result, Stephen Brunt’s description of the NBA dress code in the fall of 2005 “as an effort to whiten up the NBA, to dilute its hip-hop aspect, to appeal to a white audience that might otherwise be scared off by the image of young, black men in street fashions” (2005, p. S3) strangely foreshadowed the threat that “the Dennis Rodman of hockey”—obviously a “foreign” influence—would soon pose to the NHL. Finally, the questions raised about Emery during the 2005–2006 season are relevant to Pitter’s consideration of “the barriers encountered by black and Aboriginal players in Canadian hockey—and the significance of racialized identities to the very idea of being Canadian” (2006, p. 123). Media narratives of Emery’s experience not only contributed to cultural constructions of blackness in Canada and in hockey, they also demonstrated that such cultural constructions could be mobilized to constrain certain racialized forms of expression. Perhaps the way that Ray Emery played the game was not white enough—or “Canadian enough” (Pitter 2006, p. 137)—to earn full acceptance within the culture of hockey.

NOTES 1. At the beginning of the 2005–2006 season, NBA commissioner David Stern announced a leaguewide edict mandating a “business casual” minimum dress code for players traveling to games, appearing at press conferences, or sitting on team benches while out of uniform. Under these new rules, T-shirts, sleeveless shirts, sweatsuits, jerseys, and jeans (except for “dress jeans”) were prohibited. Sneakers, sandals, flip-flops, headgear, sunglasses worn indoors, headphones, chains, pendants, or medallions visible over clothing were also banned. Although white superstars like “notoriously dishevelled dresser Canadian Steve Nash” (Pearce 2005,


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p. L4) would not be able to wear their snowboard-style pants or baggy jeans any more, the dress code imposed on the NBA was clearly aimed at young black players. See Lorenz and Murray (2005), S. Brunt (2005), Cole (2005), and Feschuk (2005). 2. The term “Great White North” is a common nickname for the country of Canada. The name calls attention to the snow and cold climate typically associated with Canada, although, in racial terms, Canada is predominantly a “white” nation, as well. In addition, we acknowledge that our study is limited to an examination of English Canadian news sources, not the French Canadian media. We make this clarification to avoid reinforcing any assumed homogeneity and uniformity of any one Canadian identity. 3. Figures from Harris (2003) have the number at thirty-eight, while Pitter (2006) says thirty-three of this thirty-eight were Canadian born. It is not clear whether their numbers include Ray Emery, who only played three games in the 2002–2003 season. 4. A photo archive of masks worn by NHL goaltenders can be viewed at http:// goaliesarchive.com/masks.html. 5. Perhaps the most vivid of Robinson’s case studies is the example of Jarett Reid, a promising player with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) for three seasons from 1990 to 1993. Reid would eventually be convicted on a number of sexual and physical abuse charges brought against him by former girlfriends. However, the lenient ways in which Reid was treated by hockey officials, the media, and his community pose a revealing contrast to discourses of Mike Tyson during the Emery mask controversy (see Robinson 1998, pp. 15–55).

WORKS CITED Abdel-Shehid, G. (2005). Who da man? Black masculinities and sporting cultures. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Abdel-Shehid, G. (2003). In place of “race,” space: “Basketball in Canada” and the absence of racism. In R. C. Wilcox, D. L. Andrews, R. Pitter, and R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Sporting dystopias: The making and meanings of urban sport cultures (pp. 247–63). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Abdel-Shehid, G. (2000). Writing hockey thru race: Rethinking black hockey in Canada. In R. Walcott (Ed.), Rude: Contemporary black Canadian cultural criticism (pp. 69–86). Toronto, ON: Insomniac Press. Adami, H. (2006, January 31). Senators may veto Emery’s mask art. Ottawa Citizen, D1. Adami, H. (2005, October 23). So it’s goodbye to the gangstas, bye-bye bling. Ottawa Citizen, D4. Andrews, D. L. (2006). Sport—commerce—culture: Essays on sport in late capitalist America. New York: Peter Lang. Andrews, D. L. (1996). The fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s blackness: Excavating a floating racial signifier. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13, 125–58. Birrell, S., and McDonald, M. G. (2000). Reading sport: Critical essays on power and representation. Boston: Northeastern University Press.


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Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Boyd, T. (1997). The day the niggaz took over: Basketball, commodity culture, and black masculinity. In A. Baker and T. Boyd (Eds.), Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity (pp. 123–42). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Brand. D. (1994). Bread out of stone: Recollections, sex, recognitions, race, dreaming, politics. Toronto, ON: Coach House Press. Brunt, C. (2005, October 20). Dress code targets blacks. Edmonton Journal, D2. Brunt, S. (2005, October 21). NBA’s dress code may be a disguise for another problem. Globe and Mail, S3. Campbell, K. (2006, April 23). Emery marches to a crazy beat Sens don’t hear. Toronto Star, B5. Cashmore, E. (2005). Tyson: Nurture of the beast. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. CBC Sports. (2005, February 4). Dany Heatley avoids jail time. Retrieved June 25, 2008, from www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2005/02/04/heatley050204.html. Coach’s Corner. (2006, May 23). Don says Ted Nolan deserves another chance to coach in the NHL. Retrieved August 15, 2006, from www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/ hnic/coach.html. Cole, C. (2006, February 2). Naslund simply can’t be serious. Vancouver Sun, F1. Cole, C. (2005, November 1). Sunrise or sunset? National Post, S3. Cole, C. L., and Andrews, D. L. (1996). “Look—it’s NBA Showtime!”: Visions of race in the popular imaginary. Cultural Studies, 1, 141–81. D’Alessandro, D. (2005, October 20). Addressing the problem. Star-Ledger, 29. Dahlberg, T. (2005, October 19). Stern sends message with dress code. Las Vegas Review-Journal, 4C. Eitzen, D. S. (2006). Fair and foul: Beyond the myths and paradoxes of sport (3rd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Feschuk, D. (2005, October 19). Stern mandate fashion mistake. Toronto Star, E3. Gillet, J., White, P., and Young, K. (1996). The prime minister of Saturday night: Don Cherry, the CBC, and the cultural production of intolerance. In H. Holmes and D. Taras (Eds.), Seeing ourselves: Media power and policy in Canada (2nd ed.) (pp. 59–72). Toronto: Harcourt Brace. Gomm, R., Hammersley, M., and Foster, P. (2000). Case study and generalization. In R. Gomm, M. Hammersley, and P. Foster (Eds.), Case study and method: Key issues, key texts (pp. 98–115). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Harris, C. (2003). Breaking the ice: The black experience in professional hockey. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Hartmann, D. (2006). Bound by blackness or above it? Michael Jordan and the paradoxes of post–civil rights American race relations. In D. K. Wiggins (Ed.), Out of the shadows: A biographical history of African American athletes (pp. 301–23). Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. Henry, F., and Tator, C. (2006). The colour of democracy: Racism in Canadian society (3rd ed.). Toronto: Thomson Nelson. Henry, F., and Tator, C. (2002). Discourses of domination: Racial bias in the Canadian English-language press. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.


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Jackson, S. J. (2004). Exorcizing the ghost: Donovan Bailey, Ben Johnson and the politics of Canadian identity. Media Culture Society, 26 (1), 121–41. Jackson, S. J. (1998). A twist of race: Ben Johnson and the Canadian crisis of racial and national identity. Sociology of Sport Journal, 15, 21–40. Jenkins, L. (2006, February 22). Headgear offers a peek at the man behind the mask. New York Times, D3. Kellner, D. (1996). Sports, media culture, and race—some reflections on Michael Jordan. Sociology of Sport Journal, 13, 458–67. Koppel, N. (2007, August 30). Are your jeans sagging? Go directly to jail. New York Times. Retrieved June 23, 2008, from www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/fashion/30 baggy.html. Lafrance, M., and Rail, G. (2001). Excursions into otherness: Understanding Dennis Rodman and the limits of subversive agency. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 36–50). London and New York: Routledge. Lafrance, M., and Rail, G. (2000). “As bad as he says he is?”: Interrogating Dennis Rodman’s subversive potential. In S. Birrell and M. G. McDonald (Eds.), Reading sport: Critical essays on power and representation (pp. 74–107). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Lage, L. (2005, November 19). NBA trying to rebound from basketbrawl. Edmonton Journal, C2. Lapchick, R. E. (2008). 2006–07 Racial and gender report card. Orlando, FL: Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport/DeVos Sport Business Management Program. Retrieved October 12, 2008, from www.bus.ucf.edu/sport/cgibin/site/sitew.cgi? page=/ides/index.htx. Leonard, D. J. (2007). Innocent until proven innocent: In defense of Duke lacrosse and white power (and against menacing black student-athletes, a black stripper, activists, and the Jewish media). Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 31, 25–44. Leonard, D. J. (2006). The real color of money: Controlling black bodies in the NBA. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 30, 158–79. Leonard, D. J. (2004). The next M. J. or the next O. J.? Kobe Bryant, race, and the absurdity of colorblind rhetoric. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 28, 284–313. Lorenz, S., and Murray, R. (2005, October 28). New dress code may mollify white fans and advertisers. Edmonton Journal, A16. Lule, J. (1995). The rape of Mike Tyson. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12 (2), 176–95. McNulty, R. (2005, October 25). New code not racist, just good business. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, D2. Mensah, J. (2002). Black Canadians: History, experiences, social conditions. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing. Messner, M. A. (2002). Taking the field: Women, men, and sports. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, J. C. (1983). Case and situational analysis. Sociological Review, 31, 187–211. Moore, T. (2005, October 20). NBA dress code restores sanity to ludicrous image. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, D3. Mushnick, P. (2005, October 21). NBA dress code worse for wear. New York Post, 130.


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NBA dress code. (2005, October 24). Windsor Star, A8. Oriard, M. (2007). Brand NFL: Making and selling America’s favorite sport. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Oriard, M. (2006). A linguistic turn into sport history. In M. G. Phillips (Ed.), Deconstructing sport history: A postmodern analysis (pp. 75–91). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Oriard, M. (2001). King football: Sport and spectacle in the golden age of radio and newsreels, movies and magazines, the weekly and the daily press. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Oriard, M. (1993). Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Paikin, S. (2008, April 10). Breaking hockey’s colour barrier. National Post, A18. Panzeri, A. (2006a, January 20). Dye gets cast by goalie Emery: Natural hair colour back after just two days. Ottawa Citizen, B2. Panzeri, A. (2006b, February 1). Emery gets hint, wipes Tyson off mask. Ottawa Citizen, E3. Panzeri, A., and Scanlan, W. (2006, February 1). Senator drops rapist from face mask. National Post, B9. Pearce, T. (2005, November 26). Stepping up their sartorial game. Globe and Mail, L4. Pitter, R. (2006). Racialization and hockey in Canada: From personal troubles to a Canadian challenge. In D. Whitson and R. Gruneau (Eds.), Artificial ice: Hockey, culture, and commerce (pp. 123–39). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Powell, S. (2008). Souled out? How blacks are winning and losing in sports. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Rhoden, W. C. (2006). Forty million dollar slaves: The rise, fall, and redemption of the black athlete. New York: Crown Publishers. Roberts, R., and Garrison, J. G. (2000). Heavy justice: The trial of Mike Tyson. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. Robinson, D. (2005, October 24). New NBA standards a needed change. Deseret Morning News, D1. Robinson, L. (1998). Crossing the line: Violence and sexual assault in Canada’s national sport. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Scanlan, W. (2006, February 1). Emery blocks facemask furore. Ottawa Citizen, E1. Siler, R. (2005, October 19). Jackson speaks out in favor of league’s dress code. Los Angeles Daily News, S4. Sloop, J. M. (1997). Mike Tyson and the perils of discursive constraints: Boxing, race, and the assumption of guilt. In A. Baker and T. Boyd (Eds.), Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity (pp. 102–22). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Smith, M. C. (2005, October 22). Change for the better. Orange County Register, 1. Spector, M. (2006, April 5). Emery getting attention for all the right reasons. National Post, S3. Sports People; MacTavish is free. (1985, May 14). Retrieved June 25, 2008, from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DEFD7153BF937A25756 C0A963948260. Starr, M. (2005, October 31). Sports: Duds go out of bounds. Newsweek, 49.


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Tator, C., and Henry, F. (2002). Discourses of domination: Racial bias in the English Canadian press. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tator, C., and Henry, F. (2006). Racial profiling in Canada: Challenging the myth of “a few bad apples.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press. TSN.ca. (2006). Emery won’t use Tyson mask again. van Dijk, T. A. (2002). Denying racism: Elite discourse and racism. In P. Essed and D. T. Goldberg (Eds.), Race critical theories: Text and context (pp. 307–24). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Vaughn, D. (1992). Theory elaboration: The heuristics of case analysis. In C. Ragin and H. Becker (Eds.), What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry (pp. 173–202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walcott, R. (2000). Rude: Contemporary black Canadian criticism. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Warren, K. (2005, December 11). The apprenticeship of Ray Emery. Ottawa Citizen, D1. Whannel, G. (2002). Media sport stars: Masculinities and moralities. London and New York: Routledge. Wharnsby, T. (2006, May 23). Nolan speaks his mind after years on the coaching sidelines. Globe and Mail, S1. Will, G. (2005, November 20). Mentality of entitlement fostering bad manners. Toronto Star, A17. Wilson, B. (1997). “Good blacks” and “bad blacks”: Media constructions of AfricanAmerican athletes in Canadian basketball. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 32, 177–89. Wise, M. (2005, October 23). Opinions on the NBA’s dress code are far from uniform. Washington Post, A1. Wynn, N. A. (2003). Deconstructing Tyson: The black boxer as American icon. International Journal of the History of Sport, 20 (3), 99–114. Yin, R. K. (2003a). Applications of case study research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yin, R. K. (2003b). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zirin, D. (2007). Welcome to the terrordome: The pain, politics, and promise of sports. Chicago: Haymarket Books.


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9 Contesting the Closet: Sheryl Swoopes, Racialized Sexuality, and Media Culture Samantha King

In the last week of October 2005, three-time Olympic gold medalist and Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) Most Valuable Player (MVP), Sheryl Swoopes, announced in a first-person account in ESPN The Magazine that she is a lesbian. Swoopes, who at the time was a forward with the Houston Comets, explained her decision in the following way: My reason for coming out isn’t to be some sort of hero . . . I’m just at a point in my life where I’m tired of having to pretend to be somebody I’m not. I’m tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love (Swoopes 2005).

Swoopes was not the first active WNBA player to come out. Sue Wicks had done so in the Village Voice in 2000, Michele Van Orp to Minnesota’s Lavender magazine in 2004, and other players, such as Latasha Byears, have always been open about their sexuality but went through no formal coming out in the media. Swoopes, however, was the most high-profile athlete in all of women’s and men’s team sport in the United States to publicly acknowledge a homosexual identity. While Swoopes has not been the object of a massive transnational branding campaign that gave athletes like Michael Jordan (the male sport star to whom she is most often compared in the mass media) global name recognition, she is one of the most successful and prominent players in the history of the women’s game. She set numerous records (many of which still stand) on her way to winning both a national championship as a member of the Texas Tech Lady Raiders and the Naismith College Player of the Year award in 1993. Swoopes was the first signee when the WNBA was created 203


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in 1996, and she won four national titles as a member of the Houston Comets, for whom she played until she transferred in 2008 to the Seattle Sonics. In addition to her three MVP awards, she is a three-time winner of Defensive Player of the Year and was named to the league’s All-Decade Team as part of the celebration to mark its ten-year anniversary. From its inception, the league placed Swoopes, who is African American, at the center of their marketing efforts. Her celebrity status had already been greatly enhanced following Nike’s introduction, the previous year, of the Air Swoopes, the first athletic shoe to be named for a woman. When Swoopes become pregnant with her then husband, Eric Jackson (who is also African American), in 1997, her prominence was further elevated, largely in the service of shoring up the heteronormativity that women’s participation in aggressive sports is deemed to threaten and managing the racial and gender discourses that construct black women as bad (single) mothers and black men as absent and irresponsible fathers (Banet-Weiser 1999; McDonald 2000). As Sarah Banet-Weiser (1999) writes: “Swoopes’s pregnancy became a press bonanza, with soft news stories about maternity in general, balancing baby with basketball, and the generous sacrifice of Swoopes’s husband, Eric Jackson, to stay home with the baby” (p. 414). The significance of these constructions cannot be underestimated given the particular context in which they occurred. During the mid-1990s racially saturated discourses about welfare dependence and the disintegration of the nuclear family had reached a frenzy, culminating most prominently in the passing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which ended the sixty-year federal guarantee of cash payments to the poor. Against this backdrop, Swoopes, a highly successful working mother and wife, stood as evidence of the United States’ new postracial culture in which personal failing, rather than structural inequality, was imagined as the sole barrier to membership in America’s middle class. Swoopes and Jackson were, to quote Mary G. McDonald and David L. Andrews (2001), the “moral obverse” of the welfare queen and the errant father whose moral inadequacies their fairy tale life was implicitly used to condemn (p. 26). Swoopes was long divorced from Jackson when she came out, and many WNBA and sports media insiders had been aware for several years of her relationship with Alisa Scott, her partner. But the public image of Swoopes remains indelibly linked to the postfeminist and color-blind celebrations of her maternity and her relationship with Jackson that characterized her early years in the WNBA, an articulation that no doubt added to the considerable media interest generated by her announcement. While ESPN: The Magazine broke the story, People and Essence both published long, feature-length interviews with Swoopes, and newspapers across the country offered a mixture of news reportage and editorials on the implications of her revelation.1


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Swoopes was also the subject of substantial lesbian and gay media coverage and appeared on the covers of two major magazines geared to this audience, the Advocate and Curve. Although media conveyed a range of responses to her announcement, in general the views expressed in the mainstream, black, and lesbian and gay press were affirming of her decision and her new public identity. Within this broadly positive response, five key themes emerged as journalists sought to assess the meaning of the story: The difficulty of understanding and categorizing Swoopes’s identity given that she had previously been married to a man; the consequences of her announcement for the homophobic culture of the WNBA, even as the intensity of that homophobia was downplayed by claims that the coming-out process is easier for a female athlete than a male; Swoopes’s endorsement deal with Olivia, the “world’s largest lesbian lifestyle company,” which was generally presented as evidence of greater tolerance for homosexuality in the culture at large; the problem of homophobia in “the black community,” which was consistently positioned as more bigoted in this regard than the unnamed but implied “white community”; and Swoopes’s relationship with her partner and former coach, Alisa Scott. With few exceptions, journalists claimed that Swoopes’s declaration was neither shocking nor surprising. The response of Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was typical: “Swoopes’ statement that she is a lesbian rocked the sports world, but only in a gentle way” (2005). The fact that the media grappled with these five issues, however, suggests that the story actually raised some interesting questions about identity, sexual economy, racialized sexuality, and the erotic dynamics of power relations. Like any coming out, that is, Swoopes’s announcement revealed more about the social context in which her declaration took place than it did about Swoopes herself. Her story thus provides an opportunity for interrogating this context, particularly as it is represented in mainstream, black, and lesbian and gay print media responses. In pursuing this analysis, I seek to enter into a broader conversation among scholars whose work takes the analysis of queer sexualities in the realm of sport beyond a narrow focus on homophobia, heteronormativity, and sexual difference in order to interrogate how sexual identity intersects with processes of racialization and capital accumulation and how queer cultural formations participate in, as well as resist, such processes (Davidson 2007; Dworkin and Wachs 1998; Jamieson 1998; McDonald 2006; Pronger 2000; Sykes 2006). For example, Mary G. McDonald (2008) shows how challenges on the part of lesbian fans to homophobia and heteronormativity sanctioned by the New York Liberty management have been constrained by the fan’s identitarian approach and have been complicit with the marketing strategies that the WNBA


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itself relies upon. Seeking to employ what I describe elsewhere as a “robust” queer perspective (King 2008), I join McDonald in troubling the equation of visibility with power and legitimacy, and in critically interrogating, rather than reproducing, white bourgeois normativity. While McDonald’s essay highlights late capitalist relations and a concomitant rhetoric of equality as the central contexts through which the strategies of “Lesbians for Liberty” must be understood, I am particularly interested in how media coverage of Swoopes’s sexuality articulated with a slightly different, though related, cultural context: “homonormativity,” or the mainstreaming of lesbian and gay politics. Lisa Duggan (2003) defines homonormativity as a politics in which equality is understood as “access to the institutions of domestic privacy, the ‘free’ market, and patriotism” (p. 179). According to Duggan, this perspective “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them,” by, for example, abandoning support for sexual freedom in favor of support for state regulation of sexuality through marriage (2003, p. 50). Scholars generally agree that the emergence of homonormativity over the past two decades has occurred through two primary mechanisms of normalization: 1) the incorporation of gay and lesbian politics into consumer capitalism, such that visibility, marketability, and the capacity to accumulate property are now viewed as primary signs and engines of progress; and 2) the battles for legal protection for samesex domesticity and for lesbian and gay individuals to serve openly in the military, which have become the main concerns of lesbian and gay political organizing in the United States. The mainstream lesbian and gay movement has thus solidified around a narrow, assimilationist agenda focused on gaining access to the rights and privileges enjoyed by the straight population. In the meantime, platforms that make visible differences among queer subjects, that challenge the entrenchment of the transparent white subject at the heart of lesbian and gay politics, or that tackle broader social forces like poverty or militarism have been squeezed out of the picture. It is important to note here that just as heteronormativity is not confined to those who identify as heterosexual, homonormativity is not the sole proclivity of lesbians and gays. Instead, it is a dynamic grid of discourses and practices that pervades contemporary society and inevitably informs, albeit in divergent ways, how same-sex identities, desires, and practices are approached in the culture at large. In other words, the “straight” media also participates in the construction of marriage as the primary lesbian and gay issue and measures tolerance for homosexuality in terms of the ability of gays and lesbians to participate in consumer capitalism. I thus deploy homonormativity as a lens through which to assess “straight” media sources as well as those oriented towards a specifically lesbian and gay audience.


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While questions of marriage and military service formed an inevitable specter in the background of the Swoopes story, in the analysis that follows I argue that her visibility and potential marketability as a lesbian represented a more prominent preoccupation in media coverage.2 Specifically, the realization that Swoopes’s new public identity could be used to sell products to lesbian consumers was positioned, uniformly and uncritically, as a key index of political progress for gays and lesbians even as much energy was also devoted to examining the entrenched homophobia of the WNBA. I also contend that the rather singular focus on the importance of lesbian visibility, and the homophobia that allegedly prevents its expression, left little room for consideration of the messiness of sexual identities that Swoopes’s story suggested. Nor did discourse acknowledge the ways in which sexuality intersects with other forces of difference and inequality, beyond a focus on homophobia in the black community, the primary discourse through which Swoopes’s racial identity was made visible. I suggest that in spite of, or perhaps because of, her racial identity, media representations were able to articulate whiteness as a queer norm. This maneuver was achieved by positioning the “black community” as homophobic, socially backward, and repressed and the “white community,” by implication, as tolerant, progressive, and sexually free. In contrast, discussions of Swoopes’s life with her partner, Alisa Scott, and her son, Jordan, were more disruptive, as normative heterosexuality (bourgeois and white) was variously positioned and then decentered as the norm against which “queer life should be measured” (Warner 1999, p. 89). In the pages that follow, I elaborate on each of these claims, beginning with an assessment of how the media sought to contain the transgressive character of Swoopes’s biography. From there I move to a discussion of the economic value that was widely agreed to stem from Swoopes’s announcement even in the face of what the media identified as deep and widespread homophobia in the WNBA, and I link Swoopes’s generally positive reception to her normative gender identity and bourgeois self-presentation. This section is followed by an analysis of representations of homophobia in the African American community and of Swoopes’s relationship to her partner and her son. The essay concludes with an assessment of what these narratives, taken collectively, suggest about the normative impulses of the contemporary Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ) movement, particularly in relation to the politics of race.

CLOSETS The day the story hit the newsstands, I was attending a sociology of sport conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Somewhat in spite of ourselves,


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the queers among us were rather excited by this news. It felt, as it often does when someone “switches teams,” like something of a collective triumph. I write that we felt pleased, “in spite of ourselves,” because we shared, I think, a theoretical and political perspective that recognizes “the closet” and “coming out” as culturally specific, racially, and economically inflected discourses that both enable and constrain the transformative potential of queer politics. To elaborate, the closet is a way of expressing and regulating subjectivity that often operates quite differently for economically marginalized or racialized subjects than it does for the privileged, although such differences are denied by the universalizing way in which it is deployed (King 2003; Seidman 2002). Coming out to straight audiences when one does not have the same access to the economic and cultural safety nets that exist for many white or middle-class lesbians and gays may compromise the liberatory potential of this particular act, but coming out into bourgeois, white, and often racist lesbian and gay communities has also not always been possible or desirable (King 2003). Beyond this, the closet—or being out of it—is not the standard to which all “lesbians” and “gays” necessarily aspire but are sometimes prevented from attaining because of economic and racial marginalization. Instead, for some who have “same sex” or live in same-sex relationships there simply is no “gay” or “lesbian” essence to hide or to reveal, but because such ways of living refuse the primacy of sexuality, they are unintelligible within the logic of the closet (King 2003). Coming-out stories therefore have the capacity to reinforce the notion that sexual identity is a fixed and essential component of the individual that must be acknowledged by that individual and revealed to others if one is to attain authentic self-knowledge and sexual freedom. There is no room in such narratives for the “jouissance of leading a double life” that the closet enables (McCaffrey 2005, p. 221). Such stories also usually deny the incoherence and instability of sexual identities and thus stand in contrast to approaches that refuse to see self-knowledge and freedom as attainable through a singular focus on sexuality to the exclusion of other axes of difference. Like the majority of fans at WNBA games and the target readership of the gay and lesbian magazines that enthused about Swoopes’s declaration, this group of predominantly white lesbian sport sociologists were thus claiming an attachment to Swoopes that depended on an erasure of her—and our—racial identities, not to mention other manifestations of difference. It turns out that a close reading of Swoopes’s coming-out narrative reveals that it did not, in fact, fit neatly into a linear account of self-awakening. She did not claim to have discovered her true, authentic lesbian self that had, until she began her relationship with her partner, Alisa Scott, seven years before, been consciously or unconsciously repressed. Instead, she told


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ESPN, “Do I think I was born this way? No. And that’s probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are” (Swoopes 2005). In a later interview with People magazine, she elaborated: I had a boyfriend, and the thought of it never crossed my mind. I always had gay friends and we were cool. We hung out. But I didn’t think about women that way. My marriage was beautiful, but we were both young, and we both grew up and went our separate ways. I tried to make it work, but I wasn’t happy anymore (Rubin 2005).

In an unusually frank first-person account of her experience published in Essence, Swoopes returned to this theme: I don’t call myself a bisexual. I enjoyed the sex I had with my ex-husband, yet I can’t picture myself ever sleeping with a man again. There’s something about being with another woman that makes me feel complete. Because I’ve been intimate with a man and, now, a woman, I know the difference. Many would say that people are born gay. For me, being gay is a choice. Before and during my marriage, I never once thought of being with a woman (Swoopes and Burford 2006).

Here Swoopes suggests a state of permanence and wholeness to her current identity, but she also highlights the changing nature of her desire, and does so without claiming that the lesbian version is somehow more authentic than the straight version, as conventional accounts tend to do. Swoopes’s description of her experience is most remarkable for its explicit discussion of sexual desire, especially in the context of what Laura Harris (1996) identifies as the “invisibility and silence that have enshrouded conceptions of black female sexuality” (p. 6). This “absentpresence” has a long and tangled history. It is not the case that black women’s sexualities have been ignored in dominant discourse, or by black women themselves, but rather that they are frequently prevented from giving voice to their own desires or pleasures, of rendering their lives in honest, self-affirming, or complex ways (Hammonds 1994; Crenshaw 1992; Morrison 1992; Spillers 2003).1 Although there are, of course, considerable differences among black women in terms of the sexual agency they exercise, enduring historical legacies of slavery, colonization, and biological racism have conspired to construct them, primarily in contrast to white women, as the embodiment of sex (and therefore, in fact, not women). Darlene Clarke Hine (1989) uses the term culture of dissemblance to describe the politics of resistance through secrecy that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as a way for middleclass black women to “protect the inner sanctity of their lives” (p. 915)


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in the face of sexual danger and degradation. Dissemblance is not historically constant, and opportunities for sexual expression rise—hip-hop is a frequently cited example—and fall. But the continued pervasiveness of racialized sexual violence and white, middle class, heterosexual femininity as the norm against which all other forms of femininity are measured positions black women as “the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb” (Spillers 2003, p. 153). In this context, Swoopes’s forthright discussion of her intimate relationships represents an unusual and particularly profound instance of self-expression and affirmation. It may also help explain why her most revealing interview took place in a magazine with a predominantly black female readership. The disruptive nature of Swoopes’s renderings was tempered by competing discourses, however. In one case, she was angrily rebuked in a letter to the editor of the Advocate: How can you headline Sheryl Swoopes as a champion when she’s made numerous public statements that her sexuality was a choice? Coming out is a personal process, and maybe she’s still coming to grips with being a lesbian. But for God’s sake don’t grab the microphone to come out and then say it’s a choice. She just alienated a nice big chunk of her fan base, not to mention throwing more fuel on the antigay fire that’s sweeping our legislatures. If you’re going to be out, be proud; otherwise, please just shut up. (Lauer 2005, p. 10)

This response offers a particularly striking example of the binary thinking that constrains popular discourse on homosexuality. Categorizing same-sex desire as innate and hence beyond individual control does not lead automatically to safety from discrimination or greater sexual freedom, although it does further entrench such desire as requiring explanation and hence is pathological. Nor is it clear why making claims to an innate homosexuality is a sign of pride whereas making claims to sexual orientation as a choice is not. Regardless of Lauer’s intended meaning, it is clear that only those whose lives follow a particular script are permitted to speak for lesbians, and Swoopes is not one of them. Such limits to richer interpretations of Swoopes’s announcement appeared at every turn, even when the evidence obviously begged for a different approach. Her acknowledgement that she was already out to many people in her life (e.g., her partner, son, mother, brother, ex-husband, friends, fellow players in the league, and league officials) indicates quite clearly the weakness of the closet as a category for understanding sexual identity. But the opportunity to make note of this was taken by only one commentator (Voepel 2005) and by Swoopes herself. Other narratives framed Swoopes as not knowing and then knowing that she was gay (e.g., “Swoopes says she discovered only later in her life that she was gay” [Kreidler 2005]), and


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her sexuality as repressed and then free (e.g., “What persuaded her to come aboard? It’s best expressed in Olivia’s slogan, she says: ‘Feel free’” [Stockwell 2005]). Swoopes’s experiences were therefore subsumed into a universal and normal “gay” experience (she was less frequently referred to as a lesbian), which cast her sexual identity as primary and erased those facets of her biography that could not be contained by the transparent white and bourgeois subject at the heart of homonormative identity politics.

CONTRACTS The significance of Swoopes’s announcement in general, and its consequences for the economic health and cultural legitimacy of the WNBA specifically, were similarly contradictory. The deep investment of the commercial lesbian and gay media in the politics of pride, identity, and visibility was evident in the fanfare with which they treated her coming out. Cyd Zeigler of Outsports wrote that, “Swoopes’ story is now one of the biggest stories in the history of gay sports” (Zeigler 2005), while an Advocate headline declared, “She Is Our Champion” (Stockwell 2005). Restrained responses to Swoopes’s announcement were more evident in the mainstream press and were often complemented by claims that downplayed the significance of the story: “it wasn’t much of a secret anyway,” wrote Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle (2005), and Wallace Matthews argued in Newsday that Swoopes’s declaration was not “worldshattering” (Matthews 2005). Such responses were justified on occasion by reference to the large number of lesbians in the WNBA and, more frequently, by the argument that it would be a much bigger deal if a male athlete of Swoopes’s standing came out. For instance, Pat Forde of ESPN. com wrote that “what will take considerably more courage is for a man to do the same thing”—a view that likely underestimates the homophobia that surrounds and pervades women’s sport culture given that Swoopes and Byears are the only two active players to be out to a broad public, even if Forde is correct in intimating that any athlete’s coming out will vary depending on who that athlete is and with the particular context in which it occurs (Forde 2005). Other critics made similar claims while also contributing to the run-of-themill trivialization of women’s sport. The Morford article (2005), for example, was headlined: “Where Are the Gay Pro Athletes? No, the WNBA Doesn’t Count.” In turn, two columnists took their colleagues to task for their muted response to the Swoopes story, which they read as a reflection of the sexism of the sport media and for dismissing the problem of homophobia in the WNBA. Julie Hollar, of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, made her case with a headline that neatly summarized her position: “Not a Man, Not a


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Story: No Coming Out Party for Swoopes” (Hollar 2005), while David Zirin’s piece appeared in the Nation online under the title: “Sheryl Swoopes—Out of the Closet—and Ignored” (Zirin 2005). It is also likely that racial thinking shaped the relative quiet with which Swoopes’s announcement was greeted. While black women have been depicted as failing to fulfill the requirements of normative femininity in a variety of ways, they have rarely been imagined as lesbians. There exists a double silence surrounding black lesbian sexuality (Hammonds 1994). Patricia Hill Collins (2005) explains this absence by arguing that the colonial association of sexual promiscuity and unchecked reproduction with black Americans produced an enduring logic in which black homosexuality is assumed to be impossible: Either Black people could not be homosexual or those Blacks who were homosexual were not “authentically” Black. . . . By a curious twist of logic, these racist assumptions about an authentic Blackness grounded in a promiscuous heterosexuality helped define Whiteness as well. . . . Beliefs in a naturalized, normal hyper-heterosexuality among Black people effectively “whitened” homosexuality (p. 106–07).

Thus, the relative lack of excitement generated by Swoopes’s announcement in the mainstream media may also be explained by the inability of journalists to fit her story within a well-established and comfortable racial script, an observation further born out by discussions of homophobia in the WNBA. Of the articles that offered extended analyses of Swoopes’s story, several focused on this issue, with headlines including: “WNBA Is Terrified of Its Gay Athletes” (Bondy 2005); “The WNBA’s Delicate Balancing Act” (Evans 2006, p. C1); and “Unfair or Not, the L Word Continues to Hover around Women’s Sports” (Dahlberg 2005). In each case writers noted the refusal of the league to recognize and embrace their considerable lesbian fan base or their lesbian players: “The WNBA, forever looking over its shoulder at its Sugar Daddy, David Stern, has turned its back on this constituency since its inception,” wrote Filip Bondy of the New York Daily News in a piece that typified this perspective (Bondy 2005). While these articles offered quite elaborate investigations of homophobia, this homophobia was without exception universalized, so that discussions of how homophobia and racism work in concert with one another to shape the experiences of players and fans were absent. They thus marked lesbian identities but denied the multiple racial and class identities that players and fans inhabit and the ways in which white women and racialized women are differentially positioned by homophobic discourses. In this regard, the coverage followed an established pattern of privileging gender and sexuality over race in discussions of the WNBA (Banet-Weiser 1999).


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Although the weight of the coverage centered on the “problem” its lesbian constituents represent for the league, several items also observed that a number of individual teams have recognized the purchasing power of their lesbian audience by marketing directly to this (apparently undifferentiated) demographic group. Regardless of whether the coverage drew attention to the league’s efforts to disappear the lesbians who are central to its economic viability or to the individual teams that were taking an alternative approach, however, it tended to place a great deal of faith in the transgressive potential of lesbian and gay visibility largely by equating “being seen” with political empowerment and political empowerment with economic empowerment. In addition to occluding the varying ways lesbians are positioned in relation to consumer culture, this discourse overestimates the transformative capacity of visibility. While visibility is a necessary part of any movement for social change, it cannot be the endpoint of that change, and it brings with it no guarantees (Danuta Walters 2003). Visibility allows subjects to be seen and often to speak, but only “from the very position of difference that constituted them in the first place” (Bunzl 2000, p. 322). It does not lead automatically to the erasure of stereotypes, the end of violence, the redistribution of resources, or to greater freedom, whatever that might look like. What is does guarantee, however, is that a singular focus on one form of visibility (be it sexual, racial, or gender) will inevitably exclude or erase those other facets of politicized identity that it cannot contain. In the Swoopes story, the singular focus on the importance of undifferentiated lesbian visibility, and the homophobia that allegedly prevents its expression, further entrenched white gay visibility as the norm and, ironically, the invisibility of black lesbian sexualities (Hammonds 1994; Harris, 1996). Although Swoopes’s experience was mobilized to highlight homophobia in the league, it was also held up as evidence that the world was on a path to greater tolerance for homosexuality and lesbians on a path to greater equality with the straight population, although which lesbians and which straight people was never specified. The primary evidence for these claims lay in the frequent references to the potential windfall that might accompany Swoopes’s announcement. Swoopes, unlike Martina Navratilova twenty-five years earlier, was unlikely to lose endorsements, the media noted. In fact, she had already gained one big one, an agreement with Olivia—“the world’s largest lesbian lifestyle company.” Wrote Kevin Blackistone of the Dallas Morning News: “That Swoopes decided to go public with her sexuality is in a sense a sign of progress against sex and sexuality discrimination. She doesn’t have to worry about the type of backlash Martina Navratilova felt when she lost endorsements” (2005). This narrative of progress, measured by economic individualism and the incorporation of lesbian identities into the marketplace, was further reinforced by reference


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to the fact that Navratilova was also, since March 2005, the proud owner of an Olivia contract. When she signed with them she noted: “It’s an amazing thing to actually get an endorsement because I’m a lesbian, rather than not get one because I’m a lesbian” (Lehoczky and Shister 2005, p. 6). The different response to Swoopes and Navratilova was not simply a reflection of historical progress, however. As Nancy Spencer (2003) argues, Navratilova was spurned by her sponsors not simply because she was a lesbian but because of Cold War ideologies that shaped her depiction as an emotionally cold, masculine, Czechoslovakian lesbian, as not properly American and not quite a woman. In contrast, Swoopes’s image as the “exceptional” black woman—hard-working, nurturing, feminine, professionally successful—was well established by the time she came out. This, combined with a context that is characterized by greater tolerance for some versions of lesbianism within popular culture, helped to produce Swoopes as a figure who could be comfortably consumed by a predominantly white media and by white lesbian and other consumers. Were she butch, or darker skinned, or not in a stable relationship, her currency may have been compromised. One of the more interesting lines of analysis to emerge around homophobia in the WNBA appeared in two New York Daily News articles that compared Swoopes’s treatment to that of Byears, an African American, working-class, masculine lesbian who had been released by the LA Sparks in 2003 following accusations that she, along with three men, drugged and then sexually assaulted a fellow player at a team party. Never arrested or charged for the alleged offences, Byears later sued the LA Sparks for wrongful termination based on gender and sexual orientation. Her case, which the team agreed to settle, was built partly on the fact that three weeks after the accusations against her surfaced, the LA Lakers, the Sparks sister team who were at that time under the same owner, threw huge amounts of moral and material resources behind Kobe Bryant’s defense in the face of similar accusations. In a front-page investigation of the Byears case, the Los Angeles Times noted that while Byears’s economic value to the Lakers franchise was negligible compared with Bryant’s position as a marquee player, she was a key factor in the Sparks’ WNBA championship wins in 2001 and 2002 and popular with players and coaches alike (Kobrin and Levin 2005). What both the LA Times and Daily News journalists were able to show, however, was that it was not just that Byears was treated differently because she was a woman, or because she was a lesbian, but because she was a particular kind of woman, and a particularly kind of lesbian: “Byears is not Swoopes, not by a long shot or a bruising rebound. She’s a bulldog of a woman, a pure power forward,” wrote Filip Bondy for the Daily News (Bondy 2005, p. 11). In a separate article, his colleagues T. J. Quinn, Christian Red, and Michael O’Keeffe noted that “She isn’t the lipstick lesbian that some of the


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American public find palatable; she was the league thug, a tough rebounder who was known as the Dennis Rodman of the WNBA” (Quinn, Red, and O’Keeffe 2005). These writers mobilize highly classed and racialized imagery in order to convey the difference between Swoopes and Byears: “Byears has tattoos and cornrows and gold teeth, and when she was growing up, she says she wanted to be a pimp,” wrote Quinn, Red, and O’Keeffe. But the result is an article that clearly highlights the limits of understanding homophobia in the WNBA in isolation from forces of gender, race, and class and, as a result, offers a much richer analysis of the Swoopes’s story than any other. Indeed, the two Daily News pieces were the only contributions to the Swoopes coverage that addressed how Swoopes’s normative gender identity and bourgeois self-presentation mediated the response to her coming out. They helped to highlight the kinds of insights that get lost when commentators subsume, overlook, or misrecognize the internal diversity of the category lesbian and the multiple routes through which homophobia and heternormativity operate. But, in addition, they implicitly draw attention to the dangers of placing gender and class normative lesbian sexualities at the center of our analytic worlds.

COMMUNITIES Quinn, Red, and O’Keeffe also offered one of the few, albeit fleeting, breaks in the mainstream and lesbian and gay media’s construction of the “black community” as more homophobic than the unmarked, but implied, “white community,” by noting that Byears “was always open about her sexuality, always supported by her family” (2005). While the authors take this discussion no further, their piece stands out because it did not participate in the prevailing tendency to diagnose with confidence the chronic homophobia of the black community. Such claims appeared in the piece where the story broke—Swoopes said, “I know it’s not accepted in the black community. I know I’ll probably take a lot of flack”—and again and again as the coverage unfolded. In an interview for the Advocate, Anne Stockwell (2005) put the following question to Swoopes: “Rightly or wrongly, the African-American community is said to be very homophobic, perhaps more homophobic than America at large. Why do you think that is, and do you hope to change it?” To which Swoopes replied, “I guess if I had to say, I think overall the African-American community is probably more religious than any other community.” Significantly, this idea was promoted even as media stories suggested that Swoopes had in fact gained considerable support from black people in her life; revealed, but did not explicitly note, that the only two WNBA players who are out to a wide audience are African American;


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and highlighted what could have been, but was not, identified as “white homophobia” on the part of WNBA officials and fans. Such observations were not recognized as disrupting—or could not disrupt—the narrative of black homophobia because of the degree to which sexual tolerance—and homosexuality itself—has been so thoroughly whitened. A measurable and monolithic, religious (read: Christian) black community was thus positioned as homophobic, socially backward, and repressed, while the “white community” was by implication positioned as the vehicle through which Swoopes and other black lesbians or gays might attain acceptance, freedom, and comradeship. The repetition of this well-established narrative (re)produces a number of problematic effects: It erases the complex lineages and manifestations of homophobia among blacks—and whites and other racial groups—in the United States. It erases the complex lineages and manifestations of homophobia among whites, including queer whites. It disconnects homophobia among blacks from homophobia among whites, and racism, including queer racism, from homophobia and heteronormativity. And it suggests that the black community is an entity wholly separate from queer blacks. While the discourse of homophobia in the black community was the primary way race was made visible in the coverage of Swoopes, her nonnormative sexual and racial identities were also managed, legitimized, and regulated through the repeated linking of her sexual object choice to love, a marriagelike relationship, and a family. References were made to her “committed relationship with Scott” (Swoopes and Burford 2006), to her “having a son and being a mother” representing the “most important thing” in her life (Graney 2006), to her son calling Swoopes “Mommy 1” and Scott “Mommy 2” (Rubin 2005), and to the three of them looking like a “settled family” (Stockwell 2005). Alongside these descriptions, however, stood narratives about Swoopes’s relationship with Scott that did not shy away from complicating this picture. In a People interview, for example, Swoopes was quite candid about the boundaries that the couple crossed when they first became acquainted: “At practices she’d flirt with me and I’d flirt with her,” she said (Rubin 2005). And to Essence magazine she revealed: Even before she arrived to work as assistant coach for my team, the Houston Comets, I overheard a couple of my teammates saying “You know who’s coming to coach here? Alisa Scott—and they say she can get any woman she wants.” Then we began flirting with each other on the court, and she’d catch me looking at her with eyes that said, “I want you.” (Swoopes and Burford 2006)

Given Swoopes’s forthrightness about the fact that Scott was her coach when their relationship began, and for at least four years after that (accounts of this vary), it is somewhat surprising that more critical attention was not devoted to this aspect of the story. Only one article, by Stephen


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Smith of the Philadelphia Inquirer, focused primarily, and negatively, on the ethics of coach-player relationships: “The appearance of impropriety, of compromising one’s position and organization, is flagrant where Scott is concerned,” he wrote (2005). The absence of moralizing about such relationships, which are far more complicated than common sense criticisms based on a top-down and unidirectional notion of power would suggest, was refreshing, but it should not necessarily be understood as an indication of a broad shift toward more complex and open-minded thinking about the power dynamics of erotic relationships or of less bigoted media coverage. Other possible reasons for this elision include the fact that the power relations at play may have seemed less problematic given that Scott was the assistant coach and Swoopes the big star (albeit not a wealthy one). Scott was also no longer working for the Comets when Swoopes made her announcement, they are adults of similar ages, and they live together in a nuclear family situation. In addition, they are both African American, and Scott is fairly masculine and well built; neither woman thus conforms to dominant racialized and gendered beauty standards, which made drawing further attention to their coupling incongruent with the white, heterosexual gaze that organizes media coverage of women’s intimate lives. Finally, given the small amount of inches usually paid to women’s sports, and given the focus of much of the Swoopes coverage on the oppressive sexual climate of the WNBA, it might have been hard for journalists to avoid charges of homophobia had they focused on the subject of ethics; or alternatively, it just may be that they do not have a language for discussing the intimate lives of black lesbians, let alone those that make visible the operation of power that imbues any sexual relationship.

CONCLUSION By highlighting the complexities of Swoopes’s identity and the process of coming out, exploring the contradictory coverage of homophobia in the WNBA, questioning the notion that Swoopes’s endorsement deal represents evidence of greater tolerance for homosexuality, contesting the rhetoric of homophobia in “the black community,” and interrogating narratives about Swoopes’s relationship with her partner, my goal has been to highlight how Swoopes’s story is about so much more than sexual tolerance and intolerance. In the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, now a canonical text in queer studies, Michael Warner (1993) writes of the need for scholars of lesbian and gay sexuality to focus on a “wide field of normalization” rather than confining themselves to homophobia as their primary category of analysis and to lesbian and gay lives as their major source of material. While a large swathe of academic


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writing on sexuality has made great progress in that direction, a shift that was enabled by and enabling of queer activism outside the university, the emergence of homonormativity has helped prevent such a shift from percolating more broadly into popular discourse on lesbian and gay sexualities. Here I have sought to show what it would mean to contextualize the story of Sheryl Swoopes’s coming out within a wide field of normalization and thus to offer an alternative set of discourses to those that currently organize the popular domain. A more queer approach to the Swoopes story recognizes the symbolic power of lesbian visibility but does not argue for this as a political strategy or goal in itself; it understands, in other words, that socially endorsed visibility always produces new exclusions and that it tends to signify and enable assimilation into dominant norms, not resistance to them. To work within a wide field of normalization also demands that we consider how norms of gender, class, and race intersect with sexual norms to accommodate a figure like Swoopes but not a figure—masculine and working class in both lineage and aesthetic—like Latasha Byears. An effort of this type leads us, moreover, to write against conventions that mark progress in terms of marketability and consumer power, and to assess, instead, the accrual of endorsements within a broader critique of the inequalities—economic, sexual, and racial—wrought by late capitalism. Indeed, if the anti-identitarian impulses of queer theory are taken seriously, an analysis of Sheryl Swoopes’s coming out should reveal as much about contemporary racial and economic discourses as it does about discourses of sexuality. More accurately, her story indicates how these discourses work together so that, for example, the black community gets racialized through discourse about homophobia, and the whiteness of the proper LGBTQ subject, who is out, proud and fully invested in the economic individualism of consumer culture, gets upheld. The normative investments made visible through representations of Swoopes suggest that there is no reason to assume that sport culture will become a hotbed of perversion— sexual or otherwise—any time soon. In the meantime, scholars of sport must remain acutely aware of the homonormative tendencies of both straight and LGBTQ cultural formations and ensure that our work is committed to exposing them. We can take pleasure in our favorite athletes coming out, that is to say, but we should recognize the dangers these pleasures signify and strive to imagine different places from which a queer politics of sport can emerge.

NOTES 1. I derived a total of 278 hits from a search of the Factiva, LGBT Life, Ethnic NewsWatch, and Reader’s Guide indexes using one set of search terms—“Sheryl Swoopes” and “lesbian”—alone.


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Contesting the Closet: Sheryl Swoopes, Racialized Sexuality, and Media Culture 219 2. My sources include twenty in-depth magazine, newspaper, and Internet articles on Swoopes’s coming out published between October 2005 and March 2008. Fifteen of these were gleaned from an initial search of the Factiva, LGBT Life, and Reader’s Guide indexes, which produced 271 hits before I eliminated duplicate articles, short pieces without substantial content, and those that mentioned Swoopes only in passing. The remaining five sources were identified through the Google search engine.

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Hollar, J. (2006, February). Not a man, not a story: No coming out party for Swoopes. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Retrieved March 2, 2008, from www. fair.org. Jamieson, K. M. (1998). Reading Nancy Lopez: Decoding representations of race, class and sexuality. Sociology of Sport Journal, 15, 343–58. Kane, E. (2005, October 29). To be gay and black isn’t easy. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Retrieved February 20, 2008, from Factiva database. King, J. (2003, June 25–July 1). Remixing the closet: The down-low way of knowledge. The Village Voice. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from www.villagevoice.com/ news/0326,king,45063,1.html. King, S. (2008). What’s queer about (queer) sport sociology now? A review essay. Sociology of Sport Journal, 25, 419–42. Kiritsy, L. (2007, October 25). Swooping in. Bay Windows, 19. Retrieved February 20, 2008, from LGBT Life database. Kobrin, S., and Levin, J. (2005, August 21). The glass closet. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved on May 20, 2008, from the National Newspaper Index. Kreidler, M. (2005, October 27). Swoopes puts ball back in WNBA’s court. Sacramento Bee, C1. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from the Factiva database. Lauer, P. (2005, December 20). Hoopla over Swoopes. Letter to the editor. Advocate, 10. Lehoczky, E., and Shister, G. (2005, June 27). Hello Olivia, goodbye Rainbow. Advocate, 6. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from the LGBT Life database. Matthews, W. (2005, October 27). Male athletes have much more to lose. Newsday. Cited in J. Hollar (2006, February). Not a man, not a story: No coming out for Swoopes. Retrieved February 20, 2008, from www.fair.org/index.php?page=2839. McBride, D. (2005). Why I hate Abercrombie & Fitch. New York: New York University Press. McCaffrey, E. (2005). The gay republic: Sexuality, citizenship and subversion in France. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. McDonald, M. G. (2008). Rethinking resistance: The queer play of the Women’s National Basketball Association, visibility politics and late capitalism. Leisure Studies, 27 (1), 77–93. McDonald, M. (2006). Beyond the pale: The whiteness of sport studies and queer scholarship. In J. Caudwell (Ed.), Sport, sexualities and queer/theory (pp. 33–45). London: Routledge. McDonald, M. G. (2000). The marketing of the Women’s National Basketball Association and the making of postfeminism. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 35 (1), 35–37. McDonald, M. G., and Andrews, D. L. (2001). Michael Jordan: Corporate sport and post-modern celebrityhood. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sport stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 20–35). London: Routledge. Morford, M. (2005, November 2). Where are the gay pro athletes? No, the WNBA doesn’t count. What about the NFL? The NBA? What about the big, macho men? San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from Factiva database. Morrison, T. (Ed.). (1992). Race-ing justice, en-gendering power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the construction of social reality. New York: Pantheon.


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Contesting the Closet: Sheryl Swoopes, Racialized Sexuality, and Media Culture 221 O’Keeffe, M. (2006, June 25). Times are a-changing. Strahan’s handling of “gay tag” a breath of fresh air. New York Daily News, 94. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from Factiva database. Phillips, L. (2005). Deconstructing “down low” discourse: The politics of sexuality, gender, race, AIDS and anxiety. Journal of African American Studies, 9 (2), 3–15. Pronger, B. (2000). Homosexuality and sport: Who’s winning. In J. McKay, M. Messner, and D. Sabo (Eds.), Masculinities, gender relations, and sport. London: Sage. Quinn, T. J., Red, C., and O’Keeffe, M. (2005). Battle of the same sex: Byears lawsuit outs WNBA conflict on gay issue. New York Daily News. Retrieved on February 27, 2008, from Factiva database. Rubin, C. (2005, November 7). “I don’t want to feel like I can’t be who I am”— WNBA superstar Sheryl Swoopes goes public with her love—and her former coach Alisa Scott. People. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from Factiva database. Seidman, S. (2002). Beyond the closet: The transformation of gay and lesbian life. London: Routledge. Smith, S. A. (2005, October 28). Partner of Swoopes crossed coach line. Philadelphia Inquirer, p. D1. Spencer, N. (2003). “America’s Sweetheart” and “Czech-Mate”: A discursive analysis of the Evert Navratilova rivalry. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27, 18–37. Spillers, H. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stockwell, A. (2005, November 22). She is our champion. Advocate, 46–58. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from LGBT Life database. Swoopes, S. (2005, October 26). Outside the arc. As told to L. Z. Granderson. ESPN The Magazine. Retrieved February 20, 2008, from http://sports.espn.go.com/ wnba/news/story?id=2204322. Swoopes, S., and Burford, M. (2006, April). A league of my own. Essence, 139–40. Retrieved on February 20, 2008, from LGBT Life database. Sykes, H. (2006). Queering theories of sexuality in sport studies. In J. Caudwell (Ed.), Sport, sexualities and queer/theory (pp. 13–32). London: Routledge. Voepel, M. (2005, October 27). Swoopes could open door for others to follow. Retrieved March 1, 2008, from http://sports.espn.go.com/wnba/columns/story? columnist=voepel mechelle&id=2203893. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Younge, G. (2006, January 25). What’s race go to do with it? The Nation. Retrieved May 20, 2008, from www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/younge. Zeigler, C. (2005, October 26). Swoopes: The new Martina. Outsports. Retrieved on February 25, 2008, from www.outsports.com/women/20051026sherylswoopes2 .htm. Zirin, D. (2005, November 4). Sheryl Swoopes: Out of the closet—and ignored. The Nation. Retrieved March 2, 2008 from www.thenation.com/doc/20051121/ sheryl_swoopes_out_of_the_closet.


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10 “Life with no hoop”: Black Pride, State Power Jared Sexton

The black to fear is the one who has not yet been exposed to the discipline of self-pride. —Time, “Black Pride and Black Power” (1967)

“THERE’S SALTWATER IN OUR BLOOD”1 It’s an old joke, at least in the United States. I heard versions of it in the 1980s during my ten years of competitive swimming in the metropolitan area of Rochester, New York, and it served as a humorous rejoinder to the curious looks and often querulous comments about being a “colored swimmer” I received from white teammates and competitors. The late Nell Carter—singer, dancer, actress extraordinaire, and card-carrying black Republican—retold the joke to former African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela on a hot June day at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It was 1990, and Mandela was near the end of an eight-city tour of the United States following his historic release from nearly three decades of political imprisonment on the notorious Robben Island, four miles off the turbulent Atlantic coast of Cape Town. Many among the largely black audience of over seventy thousand laughed knowingly: “If black people could swim, slavery would have been impossible. We all would’ve swum back to Africa!” If Mandela could have swum his ass back to the mainland, they mused, maybe things would have been different for President de Klerk’s apartheid regime as well. Blacks can’t swim: the punch line evokes a pernicious and, it turns out, fairly recent stereotype insofar as it suggests some innate incapacity to acquire a knowledge or skill set or some natural incompatibility with aquatic 223


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environs (Associated Press 2008a). No one assumed the worst of Carter at this welcome ceremony for an icon of the worldwide black freedom struggle. By contrast, one cannot help but recall the infamous comments made by former Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis on a 1987 episode of ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel. When asked, per the theme of the evening’s program, why there were no blacks in managerial positions in professional baseball on this fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s historic breaking of the color line, Campanis, in a process of apparent free association, rationalized the persistent white monopoly by wading into the murky waters of analogy. “Why are black men, or black people, not good swimmers?” he asked rhetorically. The short answer: “Because they don’t have the buoyancy.”2 On this account, blacks can’t manage for the same reasons blacks can’t swim, because they “lack the necessities.” Thinking and swimming are, of course, rational activities. In their absence, inertia wins out. The inimitable black comedian Paul Mooney signified on that old chestnut during his 2007 Know Your History performance at The Laugh Factory in LA, offering that blacks had been barred from riding on the 1912 maiden voyage of the British-owned RMS Titanic because whites believed their “heavy nigger bones” would make them too much a liability. Membership has its privileges. Surely, there is ample quantitative data demonstrating much lower rates of swimming proficiency and much higher rates of drowning deaths among blacks relative to whites in every age group and region of the country. According to a 2008 study prepared for USA Swimming, for instance, nearly 60 percent of black children have not learned to swim (twice the figure for white children) and they are three times more likely than their white counterparts to die from drowning (the second leading cause of accidental injury-related death among youth). Nearly three-quarters of all blacks report having never been involved in swimming, whereas the numbers are nearly the opposite for whites. But, given that some 40 percent of black children have in fact learned to swim and nearly a quarter of all black people participate in some sort of swimming activity during their lifetimes, one must account for the remaining disparity. A child’s likelihood of learning to swim is strongly correlated with a range of sociological factors, including family environment (i.e., education and income levels, swimming proficiency, encouragement, and exercise habits), access to swimming facilities, and admiration of a highly competitive swimmer. Not surprisingly, the factors that contribute to the development of swimming proficiency are also strongly correlated with being white (or Asian) (Irwin et al. 2008). Lest we think that this is solely an outcome of the massive and growing racial wealth gap, it is important to add that class indicators account for well less than half of the difference in question (Powell 2010). In fact, “being Black reduces the odds of participation in swimming by approximately 60%, even while adjusting


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for age, sex, and household income” (Hastings, Zahran, and Cable 2006, p. 908). Among variables studied by a research team lead by University of Memphis professor of Health and Sport Sciences Richard Irwin was fear of water, or, more specifically, fear of injury and death. Children develop fear of water if adult caregivers express fear of water, and that fear acts as an inhibitor. But why should black people fear the water in some characteristic way? Here we run into a sort of vicious circle. Fear of water inhibits development of swimming proficiency and lack of swimming proficiency amplifies fear of water and so on. This vicious circle begs the question: which came first in the historic instance, black aquatic incapacity or black aquatic aversion? Is this dilemma connected to a long-standing and transatlantic phenomenon akin to an African-derived cultural transmission, or is it a more local and contemporary development linked to specific political and economic conditions? Pioneering research on the history of swimming published in the last decade would strongly recommend the latter conclusion, demonstrating that the widespread fear of water and general lack of swimming proficiency among black people in the United States are the exclusionary achievements of twentieth-century social engineering (Sugrue 2009). Between the 1920s and the 1940s, public swimming as state-sponsored bathing (hence the moniker for the “suits”) for the boys and young men of the “unwashed” European immigrant and black migrant masses was in decline and public swimming as a popular recreational activity—and eventually as a major competitive sport—for white families emerged. As young white women entered the scene and as laborers, professionals, and business owners of European descent intermingled with more frequency, even across generations, white communities systematically segregated blacks from municipal pools throughout the country, and perhaps nowhere more violently than in the North. The interwar years saw the increasing social and spatial incorporation of working-class European immigrant communities into the mainstream of white middle-class America, and this expansion of the social category of whiteness in the transition from industrial to modern society entailed a renewed policing of blackness at the water’s edge. “Pools became emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure and beauty. They were, in short, an integral part of the kind of life Americans wanted to live” (Wiltse 2007, p. 5). We might call this social reconstruction of municipal pools “hydrodynamic Jim Crow.” “Blacks can’t swim” is, then, a deeply equivocal statement in light of recent scholarship, to say nothing of the living memory of black oral history. It signifies both that blacks are powerless to do so and that they are prohibited from doing so. In other words, the statement cannot decide whether the point is that blacks cannot swim (and therefore should be excluded from participation on the rational basis of public safety) or that they


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must not swim (and therefore should be excluded from participation on the irrational basis of public health). Or, rather, they must not swim here. The edict of segregation in this case is pulled taut between its descriptive and prescriptive registers, prompting us to wonder about the relationship between the racist pseudoscience of leaden black bodies unable to float and the racist social practice of quarantining black swimmers from dissolving into liquid contact with whites. Is there a common logic underlying the claim that blacks are at risk in the water and the claim that whites are at risk in the water with blacks? Put slightly differently, is there some consistency between the notion that blacks are inherently deficient and the notion that this deficiency is, nonetheless, somehow communicable? Historian Kevin Dawson has permanently disabused us of the notion that the statement “blacks can’t swim” holds water as an essentialist proposition. Of course, the power of a stereotype lies not in its status (i.e., is it true?) but in its function (i.e., what work does it do in a given discourse?). That being said, it never hurts to debunk a myth whenever one is able. In fact, “blacks can’t swim” is better termed an urban legend, given its roots in the reconfiguration of the city, especially the urban metropolises that served as points of destination for the millions of the Great Migration in the first half of the twentieth century. What Dawson reveals in his seminal 2006 article in the Journal of American History, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” and the reader’s digest of his scholarly endeavors in a 2010 article for Swimmer magazine, “African Swimmers Made History,” is an archive of the rich aquatic history found throughout the African Diaspora, including what would become the United States. For the better part of the modern period, we learn, European accounts recognize not only that most Africans were sound and proficient swimmers but also often displayed abilities far superior to Europeans.3 Enslaved African swimmers and divers were used variously for the expansionist projects of the major metropolitan powers in Lisbon, Seville, Amsterdam, Paris, and London—salvaging valued supplies and matériel from sunken cargo ships; rescuing drowning or crewmembers stranded overboard; mining the ocean floor for the lucrative international trade in pearls; clearing swamps and creeks and rivers for the development of agricultural enterprise and commercial transportation routes; and, last but not least, providing entertainment for the slave-owning classes in “blood sport” contests against alligators, rays, and sharks (Dawson 2006, pp. 1341–50).4 In fact, Dawson avers that advanced swimming, including the use of what we now call freestyle, may have arrived and proliferated in the New World as “the corollary of skills slaveholders desired” (Dawson 2006, p. 1339).5 Though many Africans (and many Asian and Native people as well) swam freestyle throughout the modern period, “demonstrating its speed and strength to them for centuries,” Europeans and white Americans did not


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take up the form until after the 1912 Olympic Games, where Duke Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian without formal training or competitive swimming experience, broke not one, but two world records using the stroke (Dawson 2006, p. 1134). The unparalleled talents of African swimmers and divers in the Atlantic world were so generally acknowledged that wellknown French scientist and inventor Melchisédec Thevénot would opine in his 1696 Art of Swimming: “Swimming was in great esteem among the Ancients. But to come to our times, it is most certain that Negroes, excel all others in these Arts of Swimming and Diving” (qtd. in Dawson 2010, p. 50). Thevénot was implicitly addressing the historical decline of European swimming as well, making a point that opens up a materialist explanation for why “whites can’t swim” became a veritable truism spanning the better part of an epoch. However, the disparity in European and African swimming capabilities did not lead the authors of this collective reportage to question their superiority as such. The genius of race, “a complicated figure, or metaphoricity, that demonstrates the power and danger of difference, that signs and assigns difference as a way to situate social subjects” (Spillers 1996, p. 80), enabled the Eurocentric imagination to sustain itself in the face of all that was eminently controvertible.6 When chroniclers noted that Africans were proficient swimmers, they may also have been signaling that such swimmers were animal-like. [ . . . ] The writings of swimming theorists indicate that many westerners believed that, whereas animals instinctively knew how to swim, it was unnatural for humans to swim without logical instruction. [ . . . ] Since swimming theorists argued that logic was required to enable humans to swim, whites could conceivably have thought that people of African descent swam because they had used reason to overcome their fear of water. Whites, however, asserted that blacks were incapable of logic and reason. [ . . . ] Since whites did not believe that people of African descent were capable of logic or reason, they implied that animal-like instincts enabled blacks to swim naturally. (Dawson 2006, p. 1332)

Consistent across these wildly divergent impressions of black aquatic facility—from supremacy to shortfall—is that the condition indexes for the wily observer the impossibility of a dynamic principle and the total determination of the permanent quality, a direct line from instinct to anatomy by which the latter supersedes and preserves the former in subsequent iterations.

“IT AIN’T YOUR NAME, IT’S THE THINGS YOU DO”7 During the July 13, 2009, episode of National Public Radio’s Tell Me More, host Michel Martin talked briefly with historian Jeff Wiltse, author of the


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2007 book, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, and Jim Ellis, retired junior high school math teacher and, since 1971, founding coach of the venerable Philadelphia Department of Recreation Swim Team (PDR), the first black competitive swim team to gain genuine national attention.8 The segment’s topic was the then widely publicized allegations of racism against The Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, a now defunct private swimming facility located in an affluent and exceedingly white suburban setting about ten miles northeast of PDR’s impoverished North Philly headquarters.9 The allegations against The Valley Club, which opened its tony doors in 1954 as the monumental Brown v. Board of Education was being argued, included harassment by club members and exclusion by club management of four or five dozen black youth who had arrived on June 29, 2009, as part of a planned activity paid for by a local nonprofit day camp, Creative Steps, Inc. Adding insult to injury, Valley Club president John Duesler told the press when questioned about the campers’ harassment and exclusion that there was “concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion . . . and the atmosphere of the club” (NPR 2009). Wiltse and Ellis were invited to NPR’s Tell Me More in order to provide historical context for an incident that was framed in the dominant media—and the community protests as well—as an anachronism. “Jim Crow swims here” read one of the signs held by the small multiracial group of Philadelphians picketing outside the gates of The Valley Club several days earlier. Evoking pre–civil rights legal practices and their attendant political culture to describe these post-civil-rights-era events put rhetorical pressure on the prevalent neoliberal narrative about a “post-racial America” consolidated by the landmark 2008 election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Musings like this, wishful in the first and last instance about “the end of black politics” rather than the end of racial domination, were elevated to new levels of earnestness with indications of his candidacy’s viability (Bai 2008).10 Wiltse connected the Huntingdon Valley faux pas with a capsule history of the virulent (and ongoing) segregation of swimming facilities, a battle he argues was even more difficult and ill fated than that waged around public schools. When black civil rights organizations began to score legal victories against their exclusion from municipal pools in the 1950s, white patrons and city officials began retreating to private neighborhood clubs and backyard pools, resorting to the dereliction or destruction of former recreation sites. White “suburbanites recognized,” Wiltse explained, “that if they wanted to protect the social environment of their pools—in particular, if they wanted to exclude [blacks]—they had to create a private club [in] which they could then still legally exclude [blacks] whereas, if they opened up a public pool, they wouldn’t be able to do so” (NPR 2009). So even though municipal pools were legally desegregated, swimming, whether recreational or com-


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petitive, has yet to be integrated in any meaningful way. Ellis corroborated Wiltse’s broader history with examples from his local experience in Greater Philadelphia, relating that when his swimmers ventured out to suburban swim clubs for meets in the early 1970s, well after white flight had become entrenched, they were treated in much the same way as the Creative Steps campers described things in 2009. Facing financial difficulty from diminished membership of late, The Valley Club had revised its policy to admit local day camps as part of a marketing campaign to enlarge the geographic base of its revenue stream. The strategy of subsidizing white middle-class families’ segregated R&R with poor black families’ meager fees-for-service would prove entirely selfdefeating, as actionable discrimination against the unwelcomed guests was as likely there as humidity in the summer and the ensuing legal fees and fines would push the struggling outfit into bankruptcy by year’s end (Grant 2010). Creative Steps, for its part, was in search of new swimming facilities for its membership largely because the local municipal pools previously used were closed or out of service, many as casualties of the Great Recession of 2007 (Brennan 2009).11 Another way of saying this would be: Creative Steps was sojourning to the precincts of The Valley Club as a direct outcome of the same political and economic processes that continue to divide the two zones asymmetrically one from the other. The latter needs a pretty penny to maintain a lush suburban oasis “surrounded by lawns and shade trees” (Saffron 2009); the former needs respite from an urban desert featuring only a mirage of basic swimming infrastructure (Hastings, Zahran, and Cable 2006). In the same vein, Ellis’s storied PDR Swim Team has been disbanded indefinitely because their home pool, a brand new facility when it opened in 1980, now “needs two and a half million dollars worth of repairs” and so remains “shut down today to a whole community” (NPR 2009). The irony is that this facilities closure and team disbandment occurred after Ellis and PDR were made the subject of a major feature-length film distributed by Lionsgate Entertainment. Pride, directed by Zimbabwean newcomer Sunu Gonera in his Hollywood debut, opened in March 2007 to mixed reviews and a poor box office performance. The immediate effect of the biopic was not to catapult Ellis and his veteran program into the national limelight (though he has made small rounds on the national and international speaker’s circuit) but to sharpen the blow of PDR’s imminent demise and his own early retirement.12 Given the general trends, it is no shock that less than 1 percent of competitive swimmers in the United States are black or that only a handful of black swimmers have attained positions of international prominence to date. Cullen Jones is the latest to join this select group, with his gold medal performance in the men’s 4X100 meter freestyle relay at the 2008 Beijing


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Olympic Games. Maritza Correia became the first black woman to make the U.S. Olympic Team in swimming, winning silver in Athens 2004 for the women’s 4X100 meter freestyle relay. She is also the first black woman to medal in Olympic swimming from any country and only the second black swimmer to win an Olympic medal for the United State. The first African American Olympic medalist—and first black U.S. Olympic Swim Team member—was former University of California, Berkeley student Anthony Ervin, who took gold in the men’s 50 meter freestyle and silver in the men’s 4X100 meter freestyle relay at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Enith Brigitha’s two bronzes for the Netherlands in the women’s 100 and 200 meter freestyle in Montreal 1976 made her the first black swimmer from any country to win an Olympic medal in the sport. Suriname’s Anthony Nesty became the second in Seoul 1988 when he out-touched U.S. swimming great Matt Biondi to win gold in the men’s 100 meter butterfly. This is all to say that the emergence of high-visibility black competitive swimmers in both the national and international arenas is very much an early twentyfirst century phenomenon. Jones and Correia, at least, are aware of their collective novelty and the urgency that underwrites their recent success. The urgency is due not only to the symbolic value of breaking color lines in sports considered nontraditional for black participants but also to the fact that swimming, unlike baseball or basketball or football or track (or golf or tennis for that matter), involves critical life-saving skills.13 Both Olympians have participated in the privately funded Make a Splash Initiative, a partnership of the nonprofit USA Swimming Foundation and the corporate oil giant ConocoPhillips, designed to offer low-cost swimming lessons for black and Latino children at one of over two hundred local partners nationwide and, thereby, to help reduce the number of preventable water-related injuries and deaths among that population. Jones and Correia’s good works and good examples are highlighted in Joshua Waletzky’s 2009 independent documentary Parting the Waters, which follows the lives of several black and Latino youth seeking their own path to Olympic glory from the ranks of the Boston Elite Swim Team. Producer Jenny Levison perhaps overstates the case when she claims that in broaching the subject of race in swimming their film is “dealing with one of the last areas of segregation in our society.” But, in so doing, the project does insist rightly that the gross inequality of public investment in swimming infrastructure is a question of social justice. On this score, then, social entrepreneurism makes for good human interest stories, but it cannot begin to address the social structures that give rise to injustice.14 While it may be laudable that Jones and Correia use their popularity to promote charitable giving rather than simply to chase endorsement deals, it is important to note that they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, joining the ranks of political organizers forging a cul-


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ture of resistance or building a progressive social movement, as have many other prominent black athletes in the historic instance from Paul Robeson to Muhammad Ali (Zirin 2008). Jim Ellis is in more ways than one their patron saint, having helped to blaze the trail for their athletic exploits and, even more, for the warm public reception of their athletic exploits, including considerable underwriting for their outreach efforts. Ellis, after all, has been priming the pump of black swimming talent since before Jones and Correia were born. He sent former PDR students Michael Norment and Jason Webb to the 1992 U.S. Olympic Trials as the first black swimmers to qualify for the event (though neither made the team that year); and he sent participants to four consecutive Olympic Trials–Swimming after that watershed.15 Dozens of his graduates went on to swimming scholarships at notable colleges and universities. And so on. That he did all of this with ruefully underfunded, eventually ramshackle facilities at his disposal and against the grain of deeply segregated institutional arrangements locally, regionally, and nationally makes his accomplishments the perfect blend of personal crusade and quiet heroism. Perfect, that is, for corporate-sponsored Black History and Hollywood myth making.

“NOT 100 PERCENT, BUT GETTING THERE”16 Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris—to my knowledge, the only black reviewer to make the esteemed “Top Critics” list at the Rotten Tomatoes online clearinghouse—described Pride as a “public-service melodrama” (Morris 2007). Given the film’s PG rating and its clearly intended family audience, the phrase is less a friendly jab in an otherwise sympathetic discussion than it is an apt description. Cynthia Fuchs, film and television editor for PopMatters.com,17 concurred, adding: Pride brings something else that makes the after-school-special silliness seem secondary. First, and importantly, this is an uplift-the-race film where [unlike James Gartner’s 2006 Glory Road or Richard LaGravenese’s 2007 Freedom Writers] the inspirational coach/teacher/mentor is black. As well-intentioned as characters played [respectively] by Josh Lucas and Hilary Swank may be, this image (lit and designed with its significance in mind) resonates. This is enhanced by the fact that the kids’ very visible supporters at meets are the “community,” mostly anonymous black faces (parents and church members) who, despite the conspicuous device, do something unusual: they make a worthy political point (Fuchs 2007).

Just what is this “worthy” political point requires further discussion. From one angle, despite its formulaic plot, sentimental scoring, mediocre writing and direction, and unremarkable performances, the value of Pride is


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in what the film opens onto—on the one hand, the recent uptick in interest in black swimming history in academia, mass media, and independent arts; on the other, the fledging attempts to cultivate a contemporary tradition of black competitive swimming in the United States (Hersh 1998). Witness, for instance, the International Swimming Hall of Fame’s 2008 exhibit, “Black Splash: The Amazing History of Swimming in Black and White,” at the Old Dillard Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the Annual Black History Invitational Swim Meet sponsored since 1987 by the Washington, D.C., Department of Parks and Recreation; the Annual National Black Heritage Championship Swim Meet organized by the North Carolina Aquablazers Swim Team since 2003; or the Annual Chris Silva Championship Swim Meet hosted for nearly fifteen years by the City of Atlanta Dolphins Swim Team as a memorial to the former college great and first black American record holder and Director of Minority Programs at the International Swimming Hall of Fame (Borenstein and Robb 1990). These grassroots efforts represent the impulse of the early Jim Ellis, “the Afro-wearing, dashiki-clad firebrand who chose swimming as his method of community activism back in 1971” (John-Hall 2007, p. 66), when it reaches past the individual to the collective. From another angle, however, the political point of the film is disquieting. To the extent that the pursuit of swimming by blacks, from the recreational to the competitive, involves not only awareness of a need to dispel a stereotype but also an attempt “to establish and defend [the] right to participate in the general community of America” (Judy 1994, p. 221), it requires adjudication in the order of morality. What this means in the case of Ellis and his fictionalization as “Jim,” a character played deftly enough by Oscar Award nominee Terrence Howard, is that the story must construct a foil to highlight the grandeur of our protagonist and his contribution to what will be called “our house . . . our community.” The film opens with a scene set in Salisbury, North Carolina. The year is 1964, and young Jim is in town with his teammates from Cheyney State College for a regional swim meet at the Blue Ridge Aquatics Center. Ellis did swim for a year at Cheyney State, the historically black college now called Cheyney University, where he earned his BS in mathematics, before the coach resigned and the team was disbanded.18 But the four Cheyney State Chargers that first enter the screen as Jim’s teammates are all white. And when the team coach, who is also white, regretfully informs Jim in the hallway before the meet that the other presumptively all-white teams are threatening to cancel the event because “it seems somebody saw you get on the bus,” it confirms the film’s desire to rewrite Ellis’s story as one that was always already integrated. The effect of this opening gambit is to project antiblackness into an exterior and marginal space that blacks living and working in otherwise integrated places sometimes encounter


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rather than a structural condition that blacks must navigate constantly across an array of occupations and a range of stations. In the world according to Pride, white swimmers and coaches at the height of the civil rights movement, amid the rapid privatization of aquatics, participate unselfconsciously with their black teammate; they do not cave to the enormous social pressures to maintain recreational segregation, and they do not fail to come to the physical defense of a black man accosted by racist police and enraged white mobs—all in the backyard of a young Jesse Helms, whose nightly newscasts and weekly editorials on WRAL-TV (now a CBS affiliate) for the Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Company were spreading the ultraconservative gospel of the New Right throughout the Upper South (Associated Press 2008b).19 Coach Logan passes down to Jim a gem of patriarchal wisdom before taking a principled and fated stand: “My daddy always used to tell me, it’s a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.” Forgive us our trespasses, in the good name of competition, but when the cohort of white competitors refuse unanimously to enter the pool with Jim and the police arrive on cue to forcibly remove the intruder from the premises though he violates no ordinance, the coach’s sage advice changes abruptly. “Don’t fight ’em, Jimmy!” he pleads.20 We should underscore the fact that Jim’s insistence here on the right to participate in a sanctioned athletics event and, moreover, the right to speak freely in complaint of a denial of participation is not even civil disobedience. Yet, this modest proposal prompts the white father figure to intervene, first and foremost to keep Jim calm and then to announce to the crowd, “If they don’t want us to swim here, its fine, we’ll go home!” The police, as they are wont to do, shake down Jim in any case and after a terse exchange of pleasantries Jim fights back, striking an officer or two before he is wrestled into submission. Jim is left at the close of the scene in extreme close-up, face down on the pool deck, a police officer’s foot pinning his head to the tile, sobbing audibly: “I got rights. I got rights. I got wronged, right?”21 On first blush, the film appears agnostic in the face of Jim’s plaintive query. Ten years later, the college graduate and veteran swim instructor is denied employment in a teaching and coaching position at the prestigious and lily-white Main Line Academy, for which he is surely qualified. Granted an interview on the strength of his résumé, Jim is summarily dismissed by Principal Richard “Bink” Binkowski (Tom Arnold) when the latter discovers the applicant in question is black. The rationalization is simple: “I don’t think a person like yourself could communicate properly with our students.” Bink doubles as Main Line’s head swim coach, so the two will meet again, on the deck, in a displacement of the classical education that runs through the field of mathematics onto the tutelary mission proper to the domain of sportsmanship.22 As it turns out, discrimination carries perquisites. The standard fare rejection forces Jim into the overcrowded


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unemployment office, where he is finally paired with the menial labor that will provide the possibility condition for his ascent and his community’s inspiration. Sent to prepare the condemned Marcus Foster Recreation Center for closure by the city of Philadelphia, Jim finds a diamond in the rough; among the dilapidation, a salvageable junior Olympic swimming pool. He will have to invest his own time and energy into this forsaken public work, but he cannot avoid appropriating municipal resources to that end—hundreds of dollars in unauthorized wages from the Department of Recreation, hundreds of thousands of unauthorized gallons from the Philadelphia Water Department. As Jim pilfers from the uncaring city government, a group of five black male youth, school kids all, squeeze the last few days out of a basketball court just outside the pool’s graffiti-covered doors. Before the hoops are finally removed by a city maintenance worker (played by Jim Ellis in cameo), the boys are watched (and watched over) by a local pimp and drug dealer, Franklin (Gary Sturgis), whose crew circles like vultures in search of carrion. Franklin’s parked car is framed in the introductory sequence as if it blocks the forward progress of the yellow school bus that becomes the PDR Swimming transport. A stray basketball breaks Franklin’s radio, putting Reggie (Evan Ross)—weak, stuttering, unathletic, slight-of-frame, light-skinned—into his debt. Franklin targets this Achilles heel in a bid to recruit Andre (Kevin Phillips), the alpha male and eventual captain of Jim’s aspiring team. The recruitment (which is actually a recommissioning since Andre worked previously as Franklin’s lieutenant until a nonfatal gunshot wound retired him from the set) is ultimately unsuccessful because Jim intervenes with force against Franklin’s designs in a street confrontation that is crucial to the story’s unfolding. The battle over Andre’s loyalties, or rather, his custody, represents the Appomattox of this miniature civil war. Franklin is defeated morally in this moment, but his desperation drives him to commit a very unpopular act of vandalism against the Foster Center after it has become a proper hub of neighborhood activity by dint of Jim’s trademark “pride, determination, resilience.” Now acting in defense of territorial waters, Jim is authorized in dispatching Franklin and his minions, nearly drowning him to death in the process. And though Jim offers the obligatory apology to his team for the poor example his violent reprisal sets, issuing a self-imposed suspension from the coveted Eastern Regional Finals at the University of Baltimore, it is critical that, unlike events in 1964, no charges are filed against him for these multiple counts of assault and battery. The showdown with Franklin is the last of three pool deck fight scenes in the film, a count that warrants our borrowing Wiltse’s title as leitmotif. The first contest, as noted, opens the dramatic action and establishes the ethical problem to be adjudicated. The problem is elusive, however. Nestled in the theatrics of humiliation and peril, the problem, in the final analysis, is not


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that of normative white racist hatred but that of the black man’s response to being wronged. The third contest is definitive because it allows the young swimmers to leave collectively the fold of their surrogate domesticity, and Jim’s marked absence enables Andre in particular to emerge as protégé. But it is the second clash that proves most transformative. To give the newly minted PDR Swim Team suitable perspective on the stakes of their training, Jim takes them across town to face the best talents in the area. They receive their foreseeable thrashing from Main Line Academy with a bit too much good humor and aplomb until the showdown between the two team captains, one black and one white, reveals that winners arrogate to themselves the right to cheat. Andre attempts to fight back, like young Jimmy in Salisbury, and the black and white teams clear the benches. Coach Jim and Coach Bink mediate, and in the heated altercation Jim is told flatly: this late-game infraction, like the pregame slights and taunts, does not matter because PDR was losing so badly in any case. We kicked you, in other words, because you were down. Your dismal performance bespeaks a general lack of discipline, a problem of the will, and that weakness earns you nothing but our contempt. Bink thus clarifies: “If you want respect in this game, you’re gonna have to earn it.” Earning respect from state-sanctioned white power is not related to the restricted economy of exchange. One does not simply give respect and receive it in return. That is, one is not respected for being respectful. One is respected for being strong, even if one is, like ghettoized black youth and their mentors circa 1974, in a position of relative powerlessness. This is an important elision because it redirects Jim’s project from empowerment and organization to strength training and character building. It is a moderate inflection of the era’s political term of art: selfdetermination. Those aspects of the Black Power era that might include alterations of public policy and mobilization of constituency are left to the behind-the-scenes lobbying of the dark-skinned head of maintenance, Elston (Bernie Mac), who serves throughout the film as “uncle” in an interracial tale of parthenogenetic inheritance between (white) fathers and (black) sons. If Elston represents the activist impulse in caricature, homo civilus, then Franklin represents the domestic enemy in drag, homo criminalis. Jim and Elston collaborate on the renovation project, enjoining the responsible black city councilwoman, Ms. Sue Davis (Kimberly Elise), to give the “good black man” the support needed to reform the principles of black masculinity and thereby rescue the community from itself. A black woman’s support in this instance means not only reversing the facilities closure and allocating permanent funding to the recreation center in her function as political delegate but also, as is so often the case, noninterference with the organic development of the supposedly essential relation between black men and boys.23 Sue’s maternal guardianship obstructs that relation; Franklin’s paternal imposition perverts it. Yet, the supporting cast duo Elston/Franklin


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should not be thought in opposition to one another, but rather thought together in opposition to the third, exalted figure represented by Jim, what cultural theorist Ronald Judy terms ironically “homo Africanus Americanus moralis.” The three operative terms—civility, criminality, morality—triangulate Jim’s passage between the Scylla of political radicalization, missing the mark by assuming paradoxically that blacks are rights bearing and so have nothing to prove, and the Charybdis of lawlessness, “constituting a threat to the survival of the community by giving the police cause to attack” (Judy 1994, p. 226). Elston lives in a crypt of Black Power iconography, his advanced age reinforcing the obsolescence of all that is symbolized by the black fist and silhouetted African continent that adorn the dusty walls of the abandoned offices. Franklin, for his part, lives parasitically on the decomposing host neighborhood beyond the center’s mold and mildew. So, despite the early foregrounding of Jim Crow’s legacy, the battle that animates the film is an intramural one. Elston must be converted to Jim’s program. Sue must come to see his worth. Franklin must yield to his proprietary claim. In fact, the anticipated payback, in which Andre defeats his rival Jake (Scott Reeves) at the climactic regional meet to the sounds of James Brown’s famous anthem, is painfully deferred by Main Line’s spurious cancellation of their regularly scheduled appearance at PDR. In place of Andre’s home crowd vindication against Jake, who kicked him in the teeth at their first meeting, we have Jim beating Franklin to within an inch of his life. Unpunished physical violence modulates heteroclite black masculinity, and the narrows of the PDR credo must eschew transgression against the rules, written and unwritten alike. It must be law-abiding and mindful of racial etiquette, however retrenched, which is to say it must be self-policing, “exposed to the discipline of self-pride.” “Protest” is not in its vocabulary, nor is “disobedience,” even, or “demand,” and the pursuit of power must be pried loose from the expression of pride and put to one side. Black Power, in whatever formulation, is contiguous with, if not identical to, black criminality.24 Jim may be a badman, with a stiff spine, a sharp tongue, and a lion’s heart; but he is not a bad nigger.25 This discernment is the lesson of the three father figures that guide Jim’s journey of self-discovery in the context of disavowed political upheaval. The interracial paternal trinity consists of Coach Logan, who trains young Jimmy and both emboldens and contains his will to fight; Coach Bink, who issues the challenge to which Jim must rise; and the late Marcus Foster, in whose memory PDR’s home facility is named. Of course, the three fathers correspond with the three elementary terms of the endeavor: determination to overcome obstacles (Bink), resilience to recover from setbacks and losses (Logan), and pride to give worth and direction to the struggle (Foster).


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“. . . SOMEWHERE THE COLOR ISSUE IS STILL THERE”26 We conclude with a brief discussion of the final father, who is also the first. Midway through the film, after Elston has successfully persuaded Sue to rescind her order for closure, Jim presents his newly minted team with a policy update freighted with an existential proposition. After asking rhetorically, “Do you remember the first gift that you were given after you made it into this world? What was it?” And, again, “What’s the last thing remembered about you after you leave this world?” Jim declares, finally, that the name is the alpha and omega. He announces: “You are now the official representatives of the Marcus Foster Recreational Center.” Having established their collective namesake in this fashion, Jim draws what might seem a small detail into the story’s center of gravity. But who was Marcus Foster, and what are we to make of the enigmatic and spectral presence of his name? An alumnus of Cheyney State College like Jim Ellis, he earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Foster went on to become a local hero, a celebrated educator and administrator serving with distinction for nearly fifteen years as a teacher and, after 1968, as principal in Philadelphia’s Simon Gratz High School. He recounted that experience at length in his book, Making Schools Work: Strategies for Changing Education (Foster 1971).27 Winner of the 1968 Philadelphia Award, one of the city’s highest honors, for contributions to education and community service, Foster was eventually recruited to California and appointed in 1970 as the Superintendant of the Oakland Unified School District, the first black person to attain the position. Foster was a liberal reformer who promoted ideas of community participation in the decision making of educational bureaucracy in order to counteract what he saw as a generally dysfunctional and adversarial relation between contemporary public schools and their constituents. He spoke directly to the importance of providing quality education for all students, especially those in districts serving the poorest neighborhoods of black ghettos. Most of his measures were embraced by local residents, but what some took to be his gradualism and willingness to compromise with lawand-order tendencies in municipal government drew criticism from radical political formations like the Black Panther Party. The latter’s criticism never lost sight of the distinction between Foster and the state-authorized regulatory force of the police against which they were occasionally fighting livefire street battles. Other groups were not so circumspect. On the evening of November 6, 1973, Foster was assassinated while leaving a meeting of the Oakland school board, shot to death in the parking lot by Joseph Remiro and Russ Little. The gunmen were members of an unknown quantity called the Symbionese Liberation Army (Taylor 2002). The SLA would go on to achieve a bizarre sort of notoriety the following year when they committed the well-known but little understood kidnapping


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of Patricia Hearst, heiress of the renowned West Coast media dynasty. It was the most popular news story of the year, and much has been written since about that period.28 But while most of those born before, say, 1965 remember something of the Patty Hearst phenomenon, few know about the Foster assassination that preceded it. Nor are they aware of the fact that the SLA committed the act that would become their most infamous precisely in order to secure Remiro and Little’s release from custody. In short, without Marcus Foster, there is no Patty Hearst. The SLA’s actions were denounced nearly across the board by leftist organizations of the day. And though the outfit had fully appropriated the rhetoric and tactics of more legible revolutionary confrontations with state and capital, the SLA offered little in the way of program or platform. Even as an urban guerrilla faction, its connections, both practical and ideological, to the black liberation movement sometimes cited as impetus were tenuous at best. There were, save leader Donald DeFreeze (a.k.a. Cinque), no black members. And though they often took refuge there during the four-month period between the kidnapping and the fatal LAPD shootout, the SLA was in the ghetto but surely not of the ghetto. In Slippery Characters, literary critic Laura Browder describes the SLA membership as “ethnic impersonators” that functioned as “a parody of a black militant party.” She continues: “the SLA members embodied stereotypes in their embrace of blackness and used their excursion into black identity to liberate themselves from the inhibitions they linked to their white selves. [ . . . ] Their performance of race was a thoroughgoing, if unselfconscious, satire” (Browder 2000, p. 225). Foster, then, is killed—assassinated—by a group of whites in “postwar blackface,” whose short-lived career embodied the nightmare scenario in which black radicalism converges with black criminality at the direct expense of black morality. But if there is a more poignant example of how that convergence requires not only white psychic projection but also white political performance, I have yet to see it. Gonera awkwardly insinuates the Foster story into the film, playing fast and loose with the chronology of historical events. As noted, Ellis founded PDR Swimming in 1971, but Pride locates this founding three years later in 1974. This revision makes sense if the fictional recreation center is to be named after Foster, who is killed a year earlier. But there is an additional wrinkle. The Marcus Foster Pool in the Nicetown section of North Philly was not built and named until 1980, and it was constructed as a replacement for the failing Sayre Community Recreation Center in West Philadelphia, where Ellis had coached for almost two decades prior. So rather than depicting the Foster Pool as a site of renewal, the film transports it backward in time and introduces it as already in disrepair. Foster’s legacy is thus refurbished or resurrected in Pride rather than commemorated and continued. There is something uncanny about this faux pas, both for the


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vision of school reform championed by Foster and for the vision of sports mentoring practiced by Ellis. We recall that the feature film, bestowing upon its audience gleaming facilities and crystal-clear waters, is released in the same year that the Foster Pool, on this side of the screen, is closed indefinitely, “shut down today to a whole community.” So the image track of a decrepit recreation center cut off from the support of public revenue, that “needs two and a half million dollars worth of repairs,” is resonant with its referent (NPR 2009). This is the wretched state of affairs that the fictional Jim Ellis called “life with no hoop”: shooting baskets on a backboard with no achievable object, one’s aim is returned to its source over and over again. Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that this commercial failure was meant to serve as a financial contribution to the regional economic recovery of the locations where it was produced: Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans.

NOTES 1. The phrase is from a line spoken by the character Nana in Julie Dash’s masterful 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust. 2. Koppel, not missing a beat, retorted: “I think it may just be that they don’t have access to all the country clubs and the pools” (Johnson 2007). 3. He writes: “From the age of discovery up through the nineteenth century, the swimming and underwater diving abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants” (Dawson 2006, p. 1327). Or again: “Over more than three centuries, western travelers to West Africa reported that Africans were sound swimmers; several noted that they generally swam better than Europeans and described their use of the freestyle” (Dawson 2006, p. 1331). 4. Regarding the latter role, Dawson writes: “Most westerners, however, probably did not believe that aquatic clashes demonstrated slaves’ bravery. True, whites seemed impressed. But many presumably perceived slaves’ ability to swim with ease while overpowering dreaded creatures as proof that they were animal-like savages. [ . . . ] In short, people of African descent were typically viewed not as brave, but as ferocious” (Dawson 1343–44, emphasis added). Condescension notwithstanding, the specialized skills honed by enslaved swimmers and divers afforded them a modicum of leverage-within-circumscription: “Though the work was grueling, enslaved swimmers and divers welcomed the escape from the monotonous, backbreaking labor their enslaved brothers and sisters performed in the agricultural fields of the Americas. But slavery, no matter the occupation, was always hard work, and the privileges divers enjoyed were restricted by the fetters of bondage. Being a slave, even an enslaved diver, meant subjugation, harsh treatment, and never-ending toil. Still, enslaved swimmers and divers used skills of African origin to make slavery more bearable, sometimes winning existences of privileged exploitation” (Dawson, p. 1354, emphasis added). 5. “As Africans were taken to the New World, many of them carried swimming and underwater diving skills with them. From the early sixteenth century on, slaveholders realized that slaves’ swimming and diving abilities could be profitably


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exploited. [ . . . ] Thus swimming may have come to the New World as the corollary of skills slaveholders desired” (Dawson 2006, p. 1339). 6. Black cultural critic James Snead, former University of Pittsburgh professor of English, described racism in his Figures of Division as “a normative recipe for domination created by speakers using rhetorical tactics” (Snead 1986, p. x). 7. The lyric is from Nina Simone’s 1964 protest song, “Old Jim Crow.” 8. Wiltse’s book won the 2007 William F. “Buck” Dawson Author’s Award from the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Ellis, for his life’s work as coach and mentor to hundreds of Philadelphia-area swimmers, won the 2007 President’s Award, also from the International Swimming Hall of Fame. 9. Since the initial allegations levied in a suit filed by several campers’ parents and the U.S. Department of Justice and an investigation by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which found probable cause and issued a $50,000 fine for slurs against one child, The Valley Club has filed bankruptcy and the property has been sold at auction to the Philadelphia-based Congregation Beth Solomon Synagogue and Community Center (Nunnally 2010). Proceeds from the sale will be distributed to creditors and, potentially, to plaintiffs as damages in the event of a favorable ruling. Both the suit and the full implications of the PHRC investigation are pending as of this writing. 10. “For a lot of younger African Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle—to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream” (Bai 2008, emphasis added). 11. Noted Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron wrote about the matter on her blog, Skyline Online: “It is worth remembering why the summer camp, Creative Steps, Inc., contracted with the Huntington Valley Swim Club in the first place. The answer, of course, is that Philadelphia was only able to open a token number of its public pools this summer because of the nation’s devastating financial crisis, which has hit cities especially hard. The reduction in pool operations is just one more example of how America’s fifth biggest metropolis is unable to provide its citizens with the sort of quality-of-life amenities that suburban dwellers take for granted. Not that anyone would have ever confused Philadelphia’s no-frill public pools with those lush suburban oases like Huntington Valley, where the Olympic-size basins are surrounded by lawns and shade trees” (Saffron 2009). 12. Membership at PDR had been in decline for some time prior to its disbanding, from a peak of 175 in the early 1990s to roughly 30 in 2007. Ellis reported in a 2008 article for the London Times: “The movie came out and still no one has come forward to offer us better facilities. Why, in this day and age, should we continue to work in these poor facilities? I guess somewhere the colour issue is still there” (Slot 2008). Ellis also mentions in a 2007 article for Ebony magazine that he had been passed over for coaching positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania, despite having sent scholarship swimmers to their respective programs (John-Hall 2007). More generally, it seems in retrospect that the most extensive and critical coverage of Jim Ellis and PDR Swimming is Phillip Hoose’s 1990 New York Times Magazine article, “A New Pool of Talent.” There was another


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round of short pieces about Ellis’s life and legacy in outlets like the local Philadelphia Inquirer around the domestic release of Pride in the spring of 2007, but none had the depth, complexity, and sensitivity of the earlier feature story. 13. As part of the lead up to the domestic release of Pride in March 2007, AOL’s Black Voices ran a tribute to “blacks in non-traditional sports.” Among the featured athletes were, along with Correia, bobsledder Vonetta Flowers and speed skater Shani Davis, all recent Olympic medalists. But the inclusion in this list of tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams and golf legend Tiger Woods serves to blur the line between traditional and nontraditional sports, revealing how it is that, at one time or another and to greater or lesser degree, it was—and is—considered “nontraditional” for blacks to pursue and participate in every sport (Black Voices 2007). 14. The Make a Splash Initiative is easily the most extensive and capitalized effort of this sort, involving the national governing body for competitive swimming in the United States and a major multinational corporation regularly ranked in the Top 10 of the Fortune 500. Assuming that there are five million black children that do not swim (an extremely conservative estimate), that this number will not increase in the future (which it inevitably will), and that at least half of the 100,000 children that Make a Splash claims to service each year went on to swimming proficiency (rather than attending lessons as a one-time experience), it would still take more than a century for this national program to resolve the problem. 15. Interestingly, Michael Norment, a college superstar and one of the top breaststrokers in the world throughout the 1990s, is also the son of Temple University professor of African American Studies Nathaniel Norment Jr. (Whitten 1998). Along with Sabir Muhammad and Byron Davis, Norment was one of the “great black hopes” to break the Olympic color line in that decade. 16. A quote from swim coach Chris Martin. The relevant passage is: “‘By the force of his will, Jim Ellis has turned swimming into a normal experience for black kids in the city of Philadelphia,’ Martin said. ‘And he’s 90 percent of the way to making it normal for the people watching them at this meet. You can see it. . . . Not 100 percent, but getting there’” (Hoose 1990). 17. Fuchs, a prolific white feminist critic, is also director of Film and Media Studies and Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, Sport and American Culture, and Film and Video Studies at George Mason University. 18. Cheyney University is the oldest historically black college or university in the country. It was established in 1837 by the bequest of Richard Humphries, a Quaker philanthropist, who was prompted by an 1829 antiblack race riot in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia (one of more than a half dozen to occur there between 1820 and 1850) to create the African Institute, or Institute for Colored Youth, “to instruct the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic Arts, trades and Agriculture in order to prepare and fit and qualify them as instructors.” That is, vocational training as response to racist violence, discipline as antidote to punishment (Coppin 1913). 19. In addition to his well-known racist, homophobic, and anti-Communist positions, recently declassified documents suggest that Helms may also have been a contact for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offering the services of his station to the law enforcement agency in its counterintelligence operations against the civil rights movement (Kane and Christensen 2010).


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20. More properly phrased, Coach Logan might exclaim “Don’t YOU fight ’em, Jimmy!” or “Don’t you FIGHT ’em, Jimmy!” since the problem contained in the sentence is neither the verb (“fight”) nor the subject (“Jimmy”) in isolation but the particular combination of the two. Fighting against segregation is acceptable if it is initiated and led by a white man, on the black man’s behalf, and the black man is acceptable as long as he “works so hard to get here” into the pool and does not fight to get into the pool. This point dovetails nicely with the sage advice of that other paternalistic white man, Bink, the racist school principal and head coach of Main Line Academy Swim Team: “If you want respect in this game, then you’re gonna have to earn it! I know they taught you that at Cheyney State.” Coach Jim, now a college graduate and in charge of the PDR Swim Team, counters this imperative with recourse to the reciprocal aspect of the social bond: “If you want respect, you give it.” Bink is adamant: “You earn it.” This is the final word and lesson. The triumph of the film hinges on Jim’s ability to earn eventually the respect of this other and better white father, and he is to do so by instilling in his charges the proper desire for work. The desire for work, “the productive labor of modern subjects,” is the sine qua non of morality. In this scenario, confronting a derogation that associates blackness with amorality, “it is presupposed that authentic being derives from morality. That is, the nigger [‘a commodity-thing’] becomes the negro [‘a human identity’] through moral behavior, or good works, founded on morality as a governmental habit of thought (police as internalized control)” (Judy 1994, p. 230). More on this point below. 21. The whitewashing of Jim Ellis’s educational past, the insertion of white allies and mentors in the place where there were likely black companions and comrades is consistent with a key aspect of Gonera’s directorial vision: “‘In Africa, racism was legal for many years, so I grew up with it,’ Gonera says. ‘I married a white woman and I had to deal with racism on a very personal level—people throwing bricks through your house, things like that. So when I read the script, that element didn’t surprise me. But I was determined to be authentic and to show different sides of people. I didn’t want it to be that any white person is racist, because that’s not true’” (Archer 2007). It might seem curious that anxiety about the depiction of white personality as homogenous would arise in a film centered on the efforts of the black community to dispute its status as stereotype through internal division. However, the attempt to “set the world straight,” as the tagline reads for Josh Waletzky’s 2009 documentary Parting the Waters, and the redemption-through-differentiation of whites should be viewed as two sides of the same coin. 22. As notable as Ellis’s achievements as a coach undoubtedly are, his success as a middle school teacher of mathematics is barely understood. We know that a good number of those who have participated in PDR Swimming have gone on to undergraduate training, but we can gain no real sense of the impact that Ellis has had for the academic and intellectual development of his students in the classroom. How mathematics might also be approached as a form of community activism is exemplified well by the Algebra Project, founded in 1982 by former civil rights leader Dr. Robert P. “Bob” Moses (Moses and Cobb 2001). See also www.algebra.org/. 23. Among the various attempts to speak to this dynamic in recent black Hollywood filmmaking, David Marriott’s (2000) reading of John Singleton’s 1991 Boyz n the Hood and Wahneema Lubiano’s (1998) reading of Bill Duke’s 1992 Deep Cover


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remain among the best published thus far. A locus classicus of critical theoretical writing on the myth of the black matriarch is, of course, Spillers (2003). 24. This conflation is evident, for instance, in the scene of PDR’s first meet at the Main Line Academy. When they enter the pool, one hears a background comment from a man in the all-white audience: “Must be some kind of a protest march.” On the blocks before the final event, the 50 yard freestyle, Jake, Main Line’s star swimmer, looks over at Andre, his counterpart, and says: “Just be glad they took off the cuffs so you can swim, brother.” The two comments are understood to be seamless with the general atmosphere of hostility. 25. See Judy (1994) for a brilliant discussion of attempts in black cultural studies to distinguish between these two figures in the wake of gangster rap. Judy spends considerable time examining the work of musicologist Jon Michael Spencer (now called Yahya Jongintaba), whose “argument for the heterogeneity of the badman and bad nigger is [meant] to establish rap’s authenticity as an African American form by rescuing it from the ‘genocidal’ tendencies of the bad nigger” (Judy 1994, p. 220). For Spencer, the badman betrays a “strong sense of social propriety, [an] understanding that strict obedience to social codes is essential for collective survival. The badman is the self-consciously representative black, he is an instantiation of morality above the law” (220). He may, according to folklorist and Spencer’s fellow traveler John Roberts, challenge “the unjustness of the law of the state,” but he does so “while preserving the moral law of the community” (222). The bad nigger, by contrast, “doesn’t obey the law and take moral responsibility for his actions” (p. 228). Though a full discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this chapter, it can be said at least that the disassociation of the badman and the bad nigger is, for Judy, a decidedly postbellum project, having to do with the changed function of law in the assault on Radical Reconstruction and the formation of Jim Crow. He glosses Roberts’s claim as follows: In the postbellum period, “maintaining internal harmony and solidarity within one’s own community was a form of protection against the law of the state. In this understanding, the black community becomes the police in order to not give the police any reason or cause to violate it” (Judy 1994, p. 222). Saidiya Hartman (1997), in an unparalleled study, has nominated this “the burdened individuality of freedom,” a juridical vehicle for maintaining the “tragic continuities in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness” (Hartman 1997, p. 7). Judy is interested in understanding how black collectivities manage circumstances in which, to bend the popular saying, the more things change, the worse they seem to get. What he finds is a measure of downward continuity from the jackboot of the state-authorized armed regulatory force to the striking fist and pointing finger of the teacher/coach in state employ. This is what Judy suggests in his identification of community with police, that is, “police in the broader sense of governmentality” (Judy 1994, p. 227). 26. A quote from Jim Ellis in a recent story for the London Times: “The movie [Pride] came out and still no one has come forward to offer us better facilities. Why, in this day and age, should we continue to work in these poor facilities? I guess somewhere the colour issue is still there” (Slot 2008). 27. For more on Foster’s life and work, see McCorry (1978). See also the website of the Marcus Foster Education Fund: www.marcusfoster.org/.


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28. The popular literature on the topic is too vast to cite exhaustively, but see for example: Hearst and Moscow (1988), McLellan and Avery (1977), and Weed and Swanton (1976). For critical scholarly accounts, see Graebner (2008), Castiglia (1996), and Browder (2000). For award-winning fictional renderings of the affair, see Choi (2003) and Sorrentino (2006). See also Robert Stone’s 2004 documentary film, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.

WORKS CITED Archer, G. (2007, March). Passion behind lens in Pride. The Examiner. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.examiner.com/a-634887~Passion_behind_lens_in__Pride_ .html. Associated Press. (2008a, May 1). Nearly 60 percent of black children can’t swim. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24411271/. Associated Press. (2008b, July 4). Former Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/04/politics/main4234069.shtml. Bai, M. (2008, August 6). Is Obama the end of black politics? New York Times. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10politics-t .html. Black Voices. (2007, January 18). Blacks in non-traditional sports. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.blackvoices.com/black_sports/special/non-traditional-athletes. Borenstein, S., and Robb, S. (1990, August 21). A dual nature in a swim lane. Sun Sentinel. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1990-0821/news/9002090900_1_black-swimmer-chris-silva-princess-diana. Brennan, C. (2009, July 14). Protesters at city hall: Closing city pools is racist. Philadelphia Daily News. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.philly.com/philly/blogs/ cityhall/50732102.html. Browder, L. (2000). Slippery characters: Ethnic impersonators and American identities. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Castiglia, C. (1996). Bound and determined: Captivity, culture-crossing, and white womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Choi, S. (2003). American woman. New York: HarperCollins. Coppin, F. J. (1913) Reminiscences of school life, and hints on teaching. Philadelphia: A. M. E. Book Concern. Dawson, K. (2010, January/February). African swimmers made history. Swimmer, 50. Dawson, K. (2006, March). Enslaved swimmers and divers in the Atlantic World. Journal of American History, 1327–55. Douglass, W. (2007, January 18). Pride & prejudice: Black people can swim. AOL Black Voices. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.blackvoices.com/black_news/ headlines_features/canvas_news_articles/_a/pride-and-prejudice-black-peoplecan/20070117115409990001. Editorial Board. (1967, December 1). Essay: Black power & black pride. Time. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://205.188.238.181/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 712007-2,00.html.


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Foster, M. (1971). Making schools work: Strategies for changing education. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Fuchs, C. (2007, March 27). A person like yourself. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.popmatters.com/pm/review/pride-2007/. Graebner, W. (2008). Patty’s got a gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grant, J. K. (2010, January 22). The Valley Club of Huntingdon Valley discrimination controversy: The racial, economic, and legal implications for African-Americans and Latinos. Widener Journal of Law, Economics & Race, 1–8. Hartman, Saidiya. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford UP. Hastings, D., Zahran, S., and Cable, S. (2006, July). Drowning in inequalities: Swimming and social justice. Journal of Black Studies, 36 (6), 894–917. Hearst, P., and Moscow, A. (1988). Patty Hearst: Her own story. New York: HarperCollins. Hersh, P. (1998, December 3). Black swimmers become a growing talent pool. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://articles.chicagotribune. com/1998-12-03/sports/9812030067_1_young-swimmers-chris-silva-sabir-muhammad. Hoose, P. (1990, April 29). A new pool of talent. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.nytimes.com/1990/04/29/magazine/a-new-poolof-talent.html. Irwin, R., et al. (2008, April 1). Constraints impacting minority swimming participation. USA Swimming. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://swimfoundation.org/ Document.Doc?id=20. Jacobs, R. (2002, March 26). Justice or revenge? The SLA and the war on terrorism. Friction Magazine. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.frictionmagazine.com/ politik/current_events/sla.asp. John-Hall, A. (2007, April). At the pool with Jim Ellis. Ebony, 64–66, 69. Johnson, E. (2007, April 12). Nightline classic: Al Campanis. ABC News/Nightline. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/ESPNSports/ story?id=3034914. Judy, R. A. T. (1994). “On the question of nigga authenticity.” Boundary 2, 21:3 (Autumn): 211–30. Kane, D., and Christensen, R. (2010, May 26) FBI records indicate N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms was a “contact.” News Observer.com. Retrieved from www.newsobserver com/2010/05/26/501500/files-indicate-helms-was-contact.html. Klein, M. (2007, March 23). Tough swim coach inspires new movie Pride. Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.popmatters.com/pm/article/ tough-swim-coach-inspires-the-new-movie-pride. Lapchick, R. (2008, May 30). Tough swim through stereotypes for African-Americans. ESPN.com. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/ story?columnist=lapchick_richard&id=3417453. Lubiano, W. (1998). Black nationalism and black common sense: Policing ourselves and others. In W. Lubiano (Ed.), The house that race built (pp. 232–52). New York: Vintage. Marriott, D. (2000). Father stories. On black men. New York: Columbia University Press.


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McCorry, J. (1978). Marcus Foster and the Oakland public schools. Berkeley: University of California Press. McLellan, V., and Avery, P. (1977). The voices of guns: The definitive and dramatic story of the twenty-two month career of the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of the American left. New York: Putnam. Morris, W. (2007, March 23). As inner-city swim coach, Terrence Howard mentors black youth in Pride. Boston Globe. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.boston .com/movies/display?display=movie&id=8988. Moses, R., and Cobb, C. (2001) Radical equations: Civil rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. Boston: Beacon Press. Mullen, P. H. (2001). Gold in the water: The true story of ordinary men and their extraordinary dream of Olympic glory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. National Public Radio. (2009, July 13). Philly-area pool rejects black swimmers, stirs anger. Tell Me More. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=106538011. Nunnally, D. (2010, May 15). Synagogue to use swim club for members’ recreation. Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.philly.com/inquirer/ local/20100515_Synagogue_to_use_swim_club_for_members__recreation.html. Powell, M. (2010, May 17). Wealth, race and the great recession. New York Times. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/ wealth-race-and-the-great-recession/. Saffron, I. (2009, July 10). Out of the pool. Skyline Online. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://changingskyline.blogspot.com/2009/07/out-of-pool-its-notjust-about-race.html. Slot, O. (2008, April 22). Jim Ellis takes pride in making waves and shattering myths. Times Online. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/ more_sport/article3768649.ece. Snead, J. (1986). Figures of division: William Faulkner’s major novels. New York: Routledge. Sorrentino, C. (2006). Trance. New York: Macmillan. Spillers, H. (2003). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. In H. Spillers, Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture (pp. 203–29). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spillers, H. (1996, Autumn). All the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother: Psychoanalysis and race. Boundary 2, 23 (2), 75–141. Suellentrop, C. (2002, January 24). What is the Symbionese Liberation Army? Slate. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.slate.com/id/2061138. Sugrue, T. (2009). Sweet land of liberty: The forgotten struggle for civil rights in the north. New York: Random House. Taylor, M. (2002, November 14). Forgotten footnote: Before Hearst, SLA killed educator. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.sfgate.com/ cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/11/14/BA85190.DTL. Venable, M. (2009, April 12). Taking the plunge. Washington Post. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/ AR2009040301916.html. Weed, S., and Swanton, S. (1976). My search for Patty Hearst. New York: Crown Publishers.

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Whitten, P. (1998, April). Stormin’ Norment. Swimming World and Junior Swimmer. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3883/ is_199804/ai_n8789100/. Wiltse, J. (2007). Contested waters: A social history of swimming pools in America. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Zirin, D. (2008). A people’s history of sports in the United States: 250 years of politics, protest, people, and play. New York: The New Press.


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Postscript America’s Son? Tiger Woods as Commodification and Criminalization David L. Andrews, C. Richard King, and David J. Leonard

Tiger Woods is no longer America’s son. He has matured—married, become a father, and suffered the loss of his own father. He has had unparalleled success as a professional golfer, winning the Masters, the PGA Championship, Open Championship, and U.S. Open three times each during the past decade. More importantly, perhaps, the multiracial moment that he and his branding exemplified, and sought to capture, has conclusively subsided. Pushed aside by the geopolitical panics and racial profiling after 9/11, a growing sense among many whites that the browning of America threatened them, and a continuing war waged against the poor and marginal under the banner of security and freedom, the multicultural everyman to which we referred in this article has become a late-twentieth-century American anachronism. Indeed, as the studies in this volume attest, as Woods became postracial, so the politics of racial difference have mattered as much, if not more than, ever: black athletes have been commodified and criminalized. In other words, in media accounts, through a myriad of representations and through a hegemonic white racial frame, Tiger Woods exemplified the prospect of hypercommodification of racial difference, most often encoded and decoded in terms of blackness, for the sake of profit but in the name of ideology committed to the persistent demonization of countless black men inside and outside of sports. His meaning, both the real and imaginary, functioned as a binary, as a placeholder of meaning, as a point of departure and naturalization of black pathology. Tiger is no longer America’s son in 2010. While a postracial commodity who normalized American (white) exceptionalism and black dysfunction, Tiger 2.0 could no longer be America’s son in that now he has become the other. Moreover, in part because of his own actions—marital infidelity, 249


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purported chemical dependency, and a sense of entitlement—and media coverage—scandal, jokes about with whom and how many women he had affairs, and seemingly endless moralizing about his character, behavior, and transgressions has saturated the airwaves. The hero had fallen, brought down by his own hubris: dropped by many of his sponsors, rehab, withdrawal from the PGA Tour, and struggles in his personal life, including rumors of a pending divorce. At this writing, Woods has yet to regain his previous form, failing to play on the weekend in two straight tournaments (one he withdrew from due to a neck injury). Yet he has returned to golf, offered a public apology of sorts, and endeavored to rebrand himself via his steadfast benefactor, Nike. In the days prior to the 2010 Master’s, Nike released a television advertisement featuring an “apologetic” and serious Woods, who does not speak. Instead, Earl Woods, his late father, speaks, demanding answers and accountability. “I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are,” announces his father. More to the point, he asks the central question to the public discourse: “And, did you learn anything?” While prompting widespread debate about the appropriateness of using his father or the success of the commercial, others, like Dave Zirin, instead focused on how the paths of redemption and rehabilitation all led toward financial salvation for Woods and his corporate partners. “‘I really believed that in the wake of his Odyssey of scandal and humiliation, there would be a showdown inside Tiger’s soul between the brand and the man,’” writes Zirin. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is no man, only brand” (Zirin 2010). True enough, the efforts to redeem and reclaim the postracial Tiger or replace him with the postscandal Tiger demonstrates his power as both an ideological and economic signifier. In this, Woods was again exceptional. Public reaction and media coverage almost universally avoided engaging blackness as it has been so often deployed around the transgressions of black athletes. Typically, as noted in the introduction, sport media and fans employ a white racial frame when interpreting athletes and their actions. In this frame, blackness has overdetermined the actions of African American athletes from O. J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Barry Bonds to Ron Artest, Shani Davis, and more recently Santonio Holmes, creating a context in which interpretations and outcomes for black and white athletes vary greatly. His exceptionalism, here, raises a challenging question, seldom asked: how and why has Woods (partially) escaped the white racial frame? Is this the result of his place inside of golf, his multiracial identity or the power of his brand of postracial Americana— his antiblack athleteness? Moreover, through his career he has both denied his blackness and invented an idiosyncratic ethnic category, Cablinasian, to describe his heritage and identity. “Woods, America’s multicultural son, is a seductive el-


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ement in a national image archive figured on the paradoxical claims about the nation,” writes Cole and Andrews. “While African American basketball players are regularly charged with violating national core values, Woods has become revered for his cultural heritage and cultural literacy.” His value as a commodity transcends his successes on the golf course or even his prominence as a pitchman but is evident in his importance within the American racial landscape. In turn, Nike capitalized on this in branding Tiger, simultaneously reinforcing and interweaving the logics of multiculturalism and color blindness while affirming the centrality of these ideologies to a recast white racial frame. At the same time, his immense talent and success on the links have worked to diminish his blackness. As Wanda Sykes quips in one her routines, the greater his success as a golfer the less black he is. This is something he shares in common with other athletes and celebrities, such as O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordon, and Will Smith. Although intense celebrity has muted his blackness to a certain extent, O. J. reminds us how fragile and reversible such racial projects are. Moreover, the history of racial (and gender) segregation/exclusion within golf is important. Although cited as an example of racial progress, golf has seen a declining presence of African Americans at the professional level during the “era of Woods.” In a sense, Woods is necessary to counter the realities of the overwhelming whiteness of golf and the absence of progress that helps us understand how and why the media has represented recent events. His exotic otherness inside of golf and his place as a commodity reflects the power of the white racial frame in “coloring” particular sporting cultures. Arguably most importantly, Tiger Woods has always positioned himself as something other than black, as something more. He and his handlers have effectively worked to dissociate him from many of the key symbols of blackness, using class in many ways to eclipse race. As noted by Cole and Andrews (p. 72), Woods has consistently been imagined as “a breath of fresh of air,” a quality that exists from his juxtaposition with “African American professional basketball players who are routinely depicted in the popular media as selfish, insufferable, and morally reprehensible.” The scandal, given the power of the white racial frame, particularly in the contemporary representation of black athletes, has temporarily positioned Woods as yet more of the same. His appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair (along with a lengthy article written by Buzz Bissinger) demonstrates this transformation. Cashing in on the scandal, Vanity Fair decided to publish several year-old pictures by Annie Leibovitz, which reveal a bare-chested and muscular Woods donning a skullcap. We are lead to believe that this is a raw and truthful look at Woods, whose mediated images contradict the real Woods, who is more Artest and Owens and less America. According to


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Kevin Blackistone, the pictures in Vanity Fair represented a paradigm shift for Woods: Vanity Fair, a pillar in the virtually all-white magazine industry, refused his desire to be thought of even as Cablinasian, as he coined his mixed-race (Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian) heritage. It invalidated his white bona fides of being raised in the suburbs, mastering golf—the whitest sport of them all—and even marrying a quintessential Swedish woman, blond and blue eyed. Instead, Vanity Fair returned Tiger to his late father’s dominant race: black. How else can one explain the cover photo Vanity Fair unveiled Monday of a half-naked Tiger lifting iron with a skull cap topping his sullen mug? Tiger got O. J.-ized. (2010)

While his blackness and the signifiers associated with black bodies has certainly become visible, putting into question the carefully crafted America’s multiracial son identity, the cultural power of this image, its symbolic (and financial) value, and Tiger’s ideological importance within a post–civil rights America has contributed to the availability of a path toward redemption. We would argue that part of the fascination with Tiger and the recent scandals surrounding it has been more than his intense celebrity. In part, it derives from how the white racial frame casts interracial sexuality and seizes on black masculinity both as a specter of terror and a space of fantasy. The coverage attests to this, but not quite as vividly as other cultural conversations about Woods. For instance, jokes have been an important way that the scandal has been taken up by average Americans. Cecil Brown nicely speaks to how humor interweaves race and sexuality not only to offer critical observations but also to put black men in their place (Brown 2010). At the same time, his infidelity (as well as questions about his temper, his relationship to fans) has caused quite a media spectacle that plays upon long-standing visions of black masculinity. The Vanity Fair cover, which not only put his muscular body on display but also represents him as yet another “thuggish” black athlete, is an example. That being said, his positioning as a “model minority” within the black athletic community that focuses on his racial identity, his work ethic, his parents, his life story (and values), his sport of choice, his Stanford education, and so on, all contribute to his being able to walk a path toward redemption. We would gather that his positioning demonstrates the various ways in which the white racial frame infects blackness in a myriad of ways that is impacted by several factors. It reveals the power and heterogeneous workings of a white racial frame. In a very real way, the erasure and presence of blackness around Woods both reflect core elements of white racial framing in the twenty-first century. They have allowed white Americans to embrace Woods and tell themselves they are not racist, while amid the recent scandal reiterate the facts of blackness without sounding racist.


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A sporting white racial frame not only offers distinct narratives about American sporting cultures but also contributes to the common sense ideologies regarding whiteness and blackness. Whereas whiteness in a sporting context emerges as that of the hard-working and cerebral hero, blackness as evident in the representations of any number of black athletes exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). In this regard, scripting the black body functions “as a process within current popular media is to constitute the utopic American self in an effort to minimize the other, thus being consistent with what it means to be centralized, rather than a marginalized being,” writes Ronald Jackson. His examination of contemporary popular culture demonstrates the centrality of the black body and the impact of dominant white racial frames on the representation and directed violence against black bodies. “Black bodies that are defiant and decentralized, as in the case of some Black males, may be understood not necessarily as dystopic structures or delinquent bodies, but marginalized identities seeking agency, affirmation, conjoinment, and recognition within an unfamiliar place” (Jackson 2006, p. 55). No longer America’s son, Tiger Woods still exposes and validates the ideological workings of race and power during an era in which branding, consumption, and spectacle ease the denial of racism and reiterate the central preoccupations and anxieties of the white racial frame.

WORKS CITED Blackistone, K. (2010, January 6). As Vanity Fair cashes in, Tiger’s image gets tossed into the gutter. Retrieved June 7, 2010, from http://kevin-blackistone.fanhouse. com/2010/01/06/as-vanity-fair-cashes-in-tigers-image-crawls-into-the-gutter/. Brown, C. (2010, January 13). Knocking on Woods: What Tiger Woods jokes tell us about the American character. Retrieved May 4, 2010, from www.counterpunch. org/brown01132010.html. Cole, C. L., and Andrews D. L. (2001). America’s new son: Tiger Woods and America’s multiculturalism. In D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson (Eds.), Sports stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity (pp. 70–86). New York: Routledge. Feagin, J. R. (2010). The white racial frame: Centuries of racial framing and counterframing. New York: Routledge. Jackson, R. (2006). Scripting the black masculine body: Identity, discourse, and racial politics in popular media. New York: State University of New York Press. Williams, R. (1998). Living at the crossroads: Exploration in race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. In W. Lubiano (Ed.), The house that race built (pp. 136–56). New York: Vintage Books. Zirin, D. (2010, April 8). The Nike ad: Tiger the brand finally conquers Tiger the man. Retrieved June 7, 2010, from www.edgeofsports.com/2010-04-08-516/index.html.


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Index

Abdel-Shehid, Gamal, 187, 189, 197 Adami, Hugh, 194 Adu, Emelia, 155, 156, 157, 159 Adu, Freddy, 147–61 African National Congress, 223 Alexander, Michelle, 12 Alfredsson, Daniel, 190 Ali, Muhammed, 231 American Dream, 9–10, 127–29, 136– 37, 148, 150–54 Andrews, David L., 3, 4, 9, 14, 46 Ansell, Amy Elizabeth, 7, 167 Anthony, Carmelo, 123 Anton, Apollo, 178n1 Artest, Ron, 134, 184, 250, 251 Baldwin, James, 110 Balibar, Etienne, 97, 101, 103, 116n7 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 13, 204 Berlant, Lauren, 24, 25, 37 Bernard, Michelle, 2 Biondi, Matt, 230 Birrell, Susan, 166–67, 186 Blackistone, Kevin, 177, 213, 251–52 Blair, Bonnie, 166, 170 blackness: African immigrants contrasted with African Americans, 155–56, 158, 159; animalism, 122;

commodification, 8–10, 103, 147, 249; contrasts between Canadian and USA, 189; criminalization, 37, 114, 134, 193; demonization, 36– 37, 249; facts of, 173–75; myth of the black rapist, 99–100; pathology, 99, 102, 109–13, 116n4, 116n5 174, 204, 249; physicality, 107–8; sexuality, 37 Bonds, Barry, 250 Bondy, Filip, 212 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 168–69, 189 bootstraps. See individualism Boyd, Todd, 103, 105 branding, 26–29, 30–32, 32–35, 132, 204, 250, 251 Brown, Cecil, 252 Bruce, Toni, 4 Brunt, 197 Bryant, Kobe, 95–115, 194; blackness and style of play, 105–9; marketing, 95, 96, 107; rape trial, 98–102 Bundchen, Gisele, 122 Byears, Latasha, 203, 214, 218 Campanis, Al, 224 Campbell, Ken, 187 Carlesimo, P.J., 13, 142 255


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Carlos, John, 41, 127 Carrington, Ben, 7, 43, 48 Carter, Anson, 188 Carter, Nell, 223, 224 Chavez, Jesse, 172 citizenship, 24–26, 28, 31, 36, 38, 126, 150–54, 175 Cole, C.L., 4, 14 Collins, Patricia Hill, 8–9, 212 color blindness, 24, 32, 35, 100, 114 149, 153 168, 169, 170–71, 187; and opposition to affirmative action, 35 coming out stories, 208–11 Correia, Maritza, 230 Cosby, Bill, 9 Crain, Rance, 30 critical race theory, 44 Crittenden, Gregg, 98 Crocker, Betty, 25 Davis, Angela, 99 Davis, Cherie, 178 Davis, Shani, 165–78, 250 Denzin, Norman, 4, 47, 135 Douglas, Delia, 6–7 Duggan, Lisa, 206 Dunbar, William, 43 Duncan, Tim, 123 Easter, Dana, 99 Emery, Ray, 183–98; hair, 191; masks, 191–94; style, 188, 189–90; tattoos, 190–91 ESPN, 41, 59, 147, 209 Ervin, Anthony, 230 family, discourse of, 24–26, 37, 154– 59; black family, 111–13 Feagin, Joe, 5–6, 42, 44, 45 Feinstein, John, 30 Ferber, Abby, 4, 8, 9 Fineman, Harold, 2 Fuchs, Cynthia, 231 Garnett, Kevin, 104, 123 Garrison, Zina, 42


ghettocentric imagination, 69–89; playground ball, 104–9; black/white binary, 105 Giardina, Michael, 3 Gibson, Althea, 46, 58 Giroux, Henry, 7, 148 Glory Road, 165 Goldberg, Whoopi, 9 golf: race and whiteness, 251 Gonera, Sunu, 229 Grahame, John, 193–94 Gray, Herman, 135 Greenfield, Jeff, 105 Hagler, Marvin, 192 Hall, Stuart, 166, 167 Hardball, 2 Hasek, Dominik, 190 Heatley, Dany, 193 Hedrick, Chad, 167, 173, 176, 177 Hemphill, Essex, 10 heteronormativity, 24–26, 204, 206; and coming out in sport, 204 Hilton, Paris, 126 Hine, Darlene Clarke, 209 hip-hop, 50 hockey: African Canadians and, 188– 89; and whiteness, 196–97 Hollar, Julie, 211 Holmes, Santonio, 250 homonormativity, 206, 211–15 homophobia, 205, 207, 216 Howard, Dwight, 123 Hulbert, Mark, 98 immigration, 151–53 Imus, Don, 6 individualism, 100, 110 150, 155, 159, 171–72, 173, 177 Iverson, Allen, 104, 142 Jackson, Phil, 106 Jackson , Ronald, 253 Jackson, Steven J., 3, 187 James, Lebron, 8, 104, 121–44; compared to Michael Jordan, 137– 41; and Darfur, 123–24

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Index Jenkins, Lee, 191 Johnson, Ben, 187 Johnson, Jack, 127, 192 Jones, Cullen, 229 Jordan, Micahel, 9, 32, 47, 105, 106, 127, 128, 129–33, 166, 167, 170, 203 Kelley, Robin D.G., 8 Kellner, Douglas, 191 King, Rodney, 42 King Kong, 122 Klum, Heidi, 122 Kroft, Steve, 1 Laraque, Georges, 188 Leibovitz, Annie, 122, 251 Leonard, David, 99, 135, 137, 196 lynching, 101 MacTavish, Craig, 193 Maher, Bill, 177–78 Major League Soccer (MLS), 147 Mandela, Nelson, 223 Markovitz, Jonathan, 13 Matthews, Chris, 2 McCarthy, Cameron, 3 McDonald, Mary, 7, 9, 43, 48, 166–67, 186, 205 McNeil, Lori, 42 Ming, Yao, 123 Mooney, Paul, 224 Morris, Wesley, 231 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 112 Muckler, John, 191, 192 multiculturalism, 23–24, 33–35 Naratilova, Martina, 213 National Basketball Association (NBA), 69, 76–82, 95, 98, 108, 114, 121, 129, 189, 197n1; contrasts with National Hockey League, 189–90, 191, 196; dress code, 183–84; hiphop, 133–34, 135, 184; marketing, 133 National Football League (NFL), 69, 82–87, 189

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National Hockey League (NHL), 184, 189, 193; contrasts with National Basketball Association, 189–90, 191, 196; goaltenders, 193–94 national identity, Canada, 187; and whiteness, 195–97 Needham, Dave, 172 neoliberalism, 110, 113–15, 115n3, 149 Nesty, Anthony, 230 Niittymaki, Antero, 193 Nike, 26–29, 30, 37, 38, 95, 147, 148 204, 251 Nolan, Ted, 183 Norment, Michael, 231 Obama, Barak, 1–3, 228; basketball and, 1–3; bowling and, 2–3 O’Neal, Shaquille, 122 O’Ree, Willie, 188 Oregon State University, 1 Owens, Terrel, 251 Paige, Satchel, 127 Paikin, Steve, 188 passing, 102–4 Pele, 147 Philadelphia Department of Recreation Swim Team, 228–31 Picca, Leslie Houts, 6 Powell, Colin, 32 Pride, 231–39 Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour, 26, 27 race: history of, 43; as choice, 171; and class, 104; “playground ball,” 105–6; and sexuality, 101; and style of basketball play, 104–9; “white man’s offense,” 106–7 race card, 29–32 racelessness, 169–70 racial authenticity, 2 racial formation, 98 racial knowledge, 109–13; legal discourse, 110–11; sociological discourse, 109–10 racial stratification, 98

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Index

racism, 167–68; antiblack, 5–8; commodity, 44, 49–50, 50–55; cultural, 8, 44, 47–49, 166; democratic, 186–87; dysconscious, 44, 45; history, 43; neoliberal, 148– 50, 159–60; new, 5–8, 166, 167–69, 186–87, 196; scientific, 45–47; systematic, 5–6 Rhoden, William C., 8 Robeson, Paul, 231 Robinson, Craig, 1 Robinson, Jackie, 174 Rodman, Dennis, 189, 191, 215 Rosen, Charley, 108 Rowe, David, 3–4 Rubin, Chanda, 42 Rudolph, Wilma, 127 Scocca, Tom, 105, 108 Scott, Alisas, 207 Shakespeare, William, 121 Simpson, O.J., 167, 250, 251 “sincere fictions,” 42, 45, 178 Singh, Nikhil, 100 60 Minutes, 1–2 Sloop, John M., 194 Smith, Rusty, 178n1 Smith, Tommie, 41, 127 Spencer, Nancy, 8, 14 sport: and celebrity, 4; and race, 3–4; social significance of, 3–5 Sprewell, Latrell, 13, 142 Stern, David, 191 Stockwell, Anne, 215 Stuart, Charles, 42 swimming: drowning and, 224; history of race and, 225–32; Jim Crow and, 225, 228; myths about black inability, 223–25; segregation and, 228 Swoopes, Sheryl, 203–18 Sykes, Wanda, 251

Tyson, Mike, 185, 192–94, 198n5, 250 Van Orp, Michele, 203 Vick, Michael, 8 Wade, Dwayne, 123 Wallace, Rasheed, 104 Waltezky, Joshua, 230 Warner, Michael, 217 Warren, Ken, 188 Webb, Jason, 231 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 99 West, Cornel, 31 Whannel, Gary, 197 white heterosexual gaze, 217 whiteness: and femininity, 194; and perceived victimization, 29–32, 36; imperiled, 178 white racial frame, 5, 250, 253 white resentment, 30 Wicks, Sue, 203 Wideman, John Edgar, 107 Williams, Richard, 41–42, 58 Williams, Serena, 41–42, 46, 47–48, 49, 54, 57 Williams, Venus, 41, 47–48, 49, 57 Wilson, Brian, 196 Wiltse, Jeff, 227–28 Winfrey, Oprah, 9, 23, 24, 32, 34–35, 125–126 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), 203, 204, 211, 212 Woods, Earl, 27, 250 Woods, Tiger, 8, 23–38, 151, 249–53; blackness, 249–253; brand, 251; Cablinasian, 250, 252; marketing, 250; personal life, 249–250 Wray, Fay, 122 Wright, Richard, 109 Yousman, William, 9

tennis: history of, 42; racism and, 42 Tucker, Linda, 13


Zirin, Dave, 184, 250

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Contributors

David L. Andrews is a professor of physical cultural studies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland at College Park and an affiliate faculty member of the departments of American Studies and Sociology. He is assistant editor of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and an editorial board member of the Sociology of Sport Journal, Leisure Studies, Quest, and Sport Management Review. He has published numerous works focused on a variety of topics related to the critical and theoretically driven analysis of sport as an aspect of late capitalist culture. C. L. Cole is currently professor of gender and women’s studies, communications research, criticism and interpretive theory, and cultural studies and interpretive research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cole’s research has appeared in Critical Sociology, Cultural Studies Annual, Immigrants and Minorities, Masculinities, Sociology of Sport Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and a number of academic collections. Currently, she is completing a book that examines the relations among national culture, embodied deviance, and sport in postwar America. Lisa Guerrero is associate professor in comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University. Her areas of research include black masculinity, African American popular culture, the commodification of racialized identities, and African American literature, and she has published essays on topics including African American “Chick Lit,” the Bratz dolls, and race in the wars on terrorism and same-sex marriage. She is the editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Teachers Talk about Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards. 259


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260

Contributors

C. Richard King, professor and chair of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University and past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, has written extensively on the changing contours of race in post–civil rights America, the colonial legacies and postcolonial predicaments of American culture, and struggles over Indianness in public culture. His work has appeared a variety of journals, such as American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Public Historian, and Qualitative Inquiry. He is also the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (a CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title) and Postcolonial America. He has recently completed Native American Athletes in Sport and Society, Visual Economies of/ in Motion: Sport and Film, and from Rowman & Littlefield, Animating Difference: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children. Samantha King is associate professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queen’s University, Kingston. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural politics of sport, health, and the body. She is the author of Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (2006), which is also the subject of a forthcoming National Film Board documentary. Her current projects include a study of the widespread panic around prescription painkillers and a series of articles (with Dr. Mary McDonald) on physical activity and the U.S. presidential body. Kyle W. Kusz is an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island. His research has focused on critically examining the cultural politics of race, gender, and generation in sport formations, sport celebrity, and sportrelated films. He is the author of Revolt of the White Athlete: Race, Media and the Emergence of Extreme Athletes in America. David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University. His work, which has appeared in Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, Game and Culture, and within Colorlines Magazine, looks at the racialized representations and rhetorics of sporting cultures, video games, and popular culture as a whole. He is currently completing a monograph focused on race and the culture wars of the NBA, and another (with C. Richard King) analyzing the production and consumption of media culture within white nationalist communities. He is an editorial board member of Journal of American Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Games and Culture, and the Sociology of Sport Journal. Stacey L. Lorenz is an associate professor of physical education at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus, in Camrose, Alberta. He teaches in


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Contributors

261

the fields of sport history, sport and social issues, and sport and popular culture. His research interests include Canadian newspaper coverage of sport, media experiences of sport, sport and local and national identities, and hockey and Canadian culture. Anoop Mirpuri is originally from Los Angeles. He received his BA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD in English from the University of Washington. Mirpuri has also served as a research fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at University of Virginia. He is currently assistant professor of English at Drew University. Ronald L. Mower is a PhD student in the physical cultural studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarly interests include the racial and cultural politics of sport celebrities; late capitalist logics, and the cultural economies of postindustrial urban space; popular memory, filmic representations, and the visual uses of (sport) history in postmodern consumer culture; (trans)nationalism, global sport, and symbolic production; and more recently, the processes and forces impacting the sociospatial polarizations of ethnicity, class, and health within the revitalized entrepreneurial city. He is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork within Baltimore City to examine the contemporary structure and experience of voluntary sector provisions for health, physical activity, and sport among the city’s disadvantaged in the wake of deindustrialization, neoliberal policies, and urban decline. Rod Murray is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. Rod is currently a sessional instructor in the Department of Physical Education at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. His research explores narratives of Canadian identity found in racialized sporting discourses, especially those involving hockey and the Canadian Football League. Jared Sexton is associate professor in the program in African American studies and the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published articles in journals such as American Quarterly, Radical History Review, and Social Text, and chapters in various anthologies on contemporary politics and popular culture. He is author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008) and coeditor of Critical Sociology 36:1 (2010), a special issue on “Race and the Variations of Discipline.” Michael L. Silk is an assistant professor and a member of the Physical Cultural Studies Research Group located in the Sport Commerce and Culture Program, Department of Kinesiology, at the University of Maryland. His


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262

Contributors

work focuses on the production and consumption of sporting space and is committed to the critical, multidisciplinary, and multimethod interrogation of sporting practices, experiences, and structures. Dr. Silk and his colleagues are particularly interested in the reconfigurations of physical and imagined space and place within the machinations and operations of the contemporary sports industry. Nancy E. Spencer, teaches in the School of Human Movement, Sport, and Leisure Studies at Bowling Green State University. Past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, her research concentrates on sociocultural aspects of sport, especially sport celebrity and professional tennis. Her current work employs autoethnographic techniques to explore gender, identity, celebrity, and voice in tennis.


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