Who da' Man ?: Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures

WHO DA MAN?

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WHO DA MAN? Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures

Gamal Abdel-Shehid

Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. Toronto

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Who Da Man? Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures by Gamal Abdel-Shehid First published in 2005 by Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. 180 Bloor Street West, Suite 801 Toronto, Ontario M5S 2V6 www.cspi.org Copyright © 2005 Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., except for brief passages quoted for review purposes. In the case of photocopying, a licence may be obtained from Access Copyright: One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5, (416) 868-1620, fax (416) 868-1621, toll-free 1-800893-5777, www.accesscopyright.ca. Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. CSPI would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention. Canadian Scholars’ Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for our publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Abdel-Shehid, Gamal, 1966Who da man? : black masculinities and sporting cultures / Gamal Abdel-Shehid. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55130-261-6 1. Athletes, Black--Canada. 2. Racism in sports--Canada. 3. Racism--Canada. I. Title. GV706.5.A23 2005

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Cover design, page design and layout by Aldo Fierro 05

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To the myriads of blackness

And to my parents, for clearing some ground

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

[ix]

INTRODUCTION Black Masculinity Inside/Out:

[1]

Capital Accumulations, Diasporic Disruptions

ONE

“Race,” Nation, and Sport in Canada: Permanence, Performance, and Black Masculinity

[15]

TWO

A Theory of Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures

[41]

THREE

Running Clean: Ben Johnson and the Unmaking of Canada

[67]

FOUR

Who Got Next?: Raptor Morality and Black Public Masculinity in Toronto

[95]

FIVE

Scrambling through the Black Atlantic: Black Quarterbacks and Americanada

[119]

SIX

The Boundaries of the Closet: A Black Queer Theory of Sport and Masculinity

[139]

RELATED WEBSITES

[151]

ENDNOTES

[153]

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

[169]

INDEX

[183]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people without whom I would not have had the fortitude to continue when it seemed as if this book might not see the light of day. For telling me to keep on writing and not lose confidence, I owe a great deal to my critical “black posse”: Dionne Brand, Leslie Sanders, and Rinaldo Walcott. Merryn Edwards spent several hours (way more than I could afford) editing this book, and for that, I owe her a countless supply of jackfruit curry, buttermilk paneer, grilled kale, and other goodies in Vancouver whenever I am there. Several other friends kept me going, in various ways, during the long process of writing this book. They are Darius Zifonun, Melisa Brittain, Shani Mootoo, Debra Shogan, Dina Georgis, Tess Chakkalakal, Leleti Tamu, Mary-Jo Nadeau, Mark Driscoll,Tracey Henry, Mark Thomas, Gloria Filax, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Sarita Srivastava, Mridula Chakraborty, Trish Salah, Kasia Rukszto, Cynthia Wright, Renuka Sooknanan, Kari Dehli, Amanda Glasbeek, Cathy Van Ingen, Mark Simpson, and Becki Ross. I would also like to thank my graduate students in PERLS 582, my seminar on “The Sexual Politics of Black Masculinity” at the University of Alberta, for reading all that I asked, and “saying more” when I requested.

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WHO DA MAN?

To my friends in the Living History Group in Edmonton and from the Saddle Lake First Nation, thanks for teaching me what you know. I would also like to thank Althea Prince at Canadian Scholars’ Press for seeing the value in this project from the moment we spoke about it. Her skill and professionalism is truly exceptional. I thank Rebecca Conolly for polishing the manuscript. And to Megan Mueller and Isaac Murdoch, thanks for valuable editorial suggestions. And finally, for much needed body and soul reconstruction—sincere thanks goes to Anita Sielecki and Eileen Eng.

x

Introduction

BLACK MASCULINITY INSIDE/OUT: CAPITAL ACCUMULATIONS, DIASPORIC DISRUPTIONS I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” others have of me but of my own appearance (Frantz Fanon, 1967: 116).

INTRODUCTION he field of cultural studies of sport, in addition to many other

T

historical and sociological studies, have seen much commentary

on the confluence of sport and nationalism. Scholars have rightly

argued that sport helps nations achieve their hegemonic status and/or legitimate their political, cultural, and economic rationale. Scholars have also argued that the individual body of the athlete, usually (but not always) male, is deployed as a “hero,” who acts as a metonym for the nation. For example, a healthy athlete stands in for a healthy nation, a compassionate athlete for a compassionate one, a warring athlete for a warring one, and so on. This is true if we think about how over the past 100 years certain

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WHO DA MAN?

athletes have become “signs of nation”—Vyacheslav Tretiak and Olga Korbut in the former Soviet Union, Babe Ruth and Joe Dimaggio in the United States, Pelé in Brazil, Teofilo Stevenson and Javier Sotomayor in Cuba, Silken Laumann and Wayne Gretzky in Canada. The list goes on. The constant production of sameness in creating a nationalist consensus is mirrored by an equally constant disavowal of difference. Thus, as a matter of course national sporting cultures produce “normative” insiders and outsiders. If nationalism can address social difference, it is often only within the context of projecting difference onto the opposition: “Us” versus “them.”The opposing nation, inscribed by their “sameness,” appears to possess all of the things that “we” do not. Difference within the categories “us” and “them” is rarely acknowledged. This production of sameness exists beyond the realm of sport.The nation is constantly producing insiders and outsiders, both at the level of policy (especially pertaining to immigration, refugees, and citizenship) but also at the level of popular culture, whether in the media, film, or advertising. In the realm of Canadian popular culture, the Canadian “citizen” is constantly achieved by a variety of what Roland Barthes called “mythologies”—a poignant recent example of this is Molson’s I Am Canadian ad campaign, featuring a white “Joe” Canadian extolling the virtues of beer, hockey, and other purportedly Canadian values. At the level of public policy, Canadian national identity and the sense of belonging works only via the policing, disciplining, and regulation of those marked as outsiders, or “non-citizens.” This brutally vicious process is made all the more so in the post-9/11 context of racial profiling and Islamophobia. Speaking of the Canadian context, Nandita Rani Sharma suggests, “the notion of ‘citizen’ needs to be understood as the dominant, oppressive half of a binary code of negative dualities. The construction and reproduction of the category Canadian citizen thus activates the category ‘non-citizen’” (2000: 5). In sporting cultures, different athletes are policed in several ways. For example, they may be those who differ from the approach of the

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INTRODUCTION

coach and managers—these tend to be marked as “trouble-makers” or “lazy.” Second, they may be those marked as racially different from the dominant racial makeup of the team. This is true if we witness the constant reports about racism within the Dutch national men’s soccer team, among other examples, where “Dutch” is still seen to equal “white,” and black players are supposed to accept the hierarchy. Third, sporting outsiders may be those that disrupt the sacred gender separatism within the world of sport. On this score, think of the recent reaction by Vijay Singh, himself an outsider in the world of golf, to the attempts by Annika Sorenstam to play men’s PGA golf. In the spring of 2003, Singh (among others) argued vociferously that men’s PGA golf should remain gender-segregated. Men over here, women over there. And finally, they may be those that disrupt the heteronormativity of sporting cultures, for both men and women.To this day, in spite of many years of gay and lesbian liberation in the public sphere throughout much of the world, we have seen very few gay men or lesbians come out during their sporting careers. As such, within both nations and sporting cultures, questions of social difference, and the unethical treatment of those marked as such, is a crucial organizing factor. Social difference haunts these institutions, given that social difference (along with alternative and ethical ways of conceptualising it) often threatens to undo the cohesion of nations and sporting cultures at every turn.1 The fact that nations and sporting cultures are structurally homologous is crucial to understanding the ready co-existence between nations and sporting cultures, a feature that has thus far escaped many critics working in this area. One of the central claims of this book is that both structures, by virtue of their overdetermining and repressive demand for sameness, are troubled or “haunted” by the reality and complexity of social difference. As such, nations and sporting cultures by and large act as repressive or normalizing structures that, by virtue of an inability to tolerate discord, constantly attempt to produce conformity and sameness, and disavow difference and inequality.2

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The repressive nature of sporting cultures and nationalism result in the need for social difference to be constantly managed. Those marked as “different” are encouraged or rather expected to, assimilate or fit in to the existing frameworks of team or nation. In sport gay male athletes usually remain closeted, while women athletes playing on men’s teams must constantly reiterate that “they are just one of the guys.” Athletes from other parts of the world constantly emphasize their unyielding devotion to their new place of residence. Black male athletes in Canada, like their black counterparts elsewhere in the Canadian public sphere, are expected to pledge unequivocal allegiance to the nation. Perhaps the most poignant example here concerns the efforts of Daniel Igali at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Igali, the Canadian 69 kilogram wrestler, won Canada’s first-ever gold medal in wrestling on the last day of the competition. His victory was welcomed with much excitement by the press and general public, who until that point had been distressed by a lacklustre Canadian performance. However, what was most disturbing was Igali’s neurotic approach to being a “grateful Canadian.” He sang the merits of Canada at every opportunity, including kneeling and kissing the Canadian flag after his victory. As he told the Globe and Mail afterwards, “I come from a place that is so impoverished I actually find a lot of good in Canada. I’m really proud. I couldn’t have wished to be in a better country” (2 Oct. 2000: O2). Igali’s actions demonstrate my point: as a result of the inability to deal with social difference ethically, the framework of inclusion, or tolerance, is the dominant mode in nationalism and sporting cultures. Igali will therefore be tolerated to the point that he appears grateful for Canada, and other athletes, often black, will be excoriated if they behave differently.3 Igali clearly understood the language of inclusion and gratefulness that is expected of those marked as “outsiders” within Canada. His comments therefore reflect this reality, and another—the brutal and tragic price of global capitalism in the post-colonial present, and the persistence of the “underdevelopment of Africa”4 via the WTO,

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INTRODUCTION

the corruption of national governments in collusion with the World Bank and the IMF (and now NEPAD). Yet its representation in the West, as the familiar capitalist and racist narrative of uplift, is another matter entirely. While no one would doubt the economic and political desperation going on in much of the global South, and its impact on individuals and their psyches, this information is often under-reported and decontextualized to produce the familiar neo-colonialist trope of good folks in the West allowing poor folks (in this case Africans) a chance to better their lives.5 To suit its imperative for sameness, the repressive apparatus of the nation finds expressions such as those of Igali extremely useful. Other forms of expression by black athletes are much more threatening to myths of multicultural harmony and white benevolence: for example, Donovan Bailey’s assertion before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that Canada is racist, 6 The point I am making is not simply my own. Dionne Brand’s work has helped to illustrate this. One important concept in Brand’s critique of nationalism (Canadian and otherwise) is to uncover the way that loss and forgetting are represented in Canadian cultural politics. Brand has discussed how, for immigrants, adopting a Canadian identity is contingent upon a loss of memory and a denial of history. Loss of memory, or forgetting, is crucial to the repressive and normalizing processes of making insiders and outsiders—both within sporting cultures and nationalisms. Brand argues that Canadian identity involves forgetting one’s pre-Canadian identity, be that Portuguese, Rwandan, Somali, etc.: All immigration is seen as fleeing a horrible past/place and arriving gratefully at an unblemished present/place. So Canada presents itself as an alluring historyless place, at least not a place charged with a similarly hostile history, even as one is persuaded later that it isn’t, as one is presented with the pristine documents of its not-where-you-come-from-but-better morality (1998: 138).

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A study of sport and popular culture in Canada needs to explain, much as Brand has done, how Canadian nationalism and the sporting cultures within Canada produce sameness and disavow difference as part of their organizing logic. To do otherwise would be to trade in fictions and deny the reality of racism, and other forms of social inequality, as historical and contemporary logics that structure Canada at every moment. Thus, to write critically about these issues means that we need to eschew the nation as an interpretive framework for thinking through sport and nationalism. Given the homogenizing impulse as it relates to black masculinity, I argue that sport and cultural studies should employ the concept of “diaspora” as a crucial analytic concept. Many scholars and critics have developed this concept. This mapping of patchwork, and the instability of nation—as well as being central to Brand’s work—has been a central topic in much of black cultural studies. Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy emphasize movement as a key cultural constituent and effective mode for thinking through the patchwork nature of the nation. Gilroy’s seminal notion of the “black Atlantic” (1994) takes us beyond the CanadaUnited States binary that otherwise removes Canada from its place within a world-system and a history of imperialist and capitalist relations. The concept of a black Atlantic, and its emphasis on black performance, movement, and permanence both inside and outside national frameworks, helps us understand sport in Canada much more thoroughly. Within the cultural studies of sport, diaspora is a term that has rarely been used to this point, in Canada or elsewhere. If we avoid the category diaspora, the nation’s other, we then can only write about black male athletes within the “Manichean” terms that the nation sets out; that is, simply in terms of either inclusion or exclusion. Our story remains incomplete and, as such, overdetermined. Simply writing about inclusion, as we saw with Igali, re-enacts the denial of racism in Canada, which, as we know, is so typically Canadian.

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INTRODUCTION

On the other hand, simply reading blackness outside of nation, as has often been done with respect to Donovan Bailey and, more typically, Ben Johnson, only tells part of the story. It once again reduces the complexity of black life, and black male participation within the Canadian sporting sphere, to a Manichean good versus evil mindset rooted in colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, such a positioning once again reads blackness from the outside, or from where Fanon called an “overdetermining” space, thereby neglecting the performative and life-sustaining ways in which life is lived inside of “race”7 by those marginalized by its discourses. In other words, it does not allow us to hear the complexity of black voices here in Canada and their engagements with other parts of the world. The limits of the concept of “nation,” and the uses of the concept of “diaspora” are further evident if we look at what we know about the Canadian men’s sporting sphere. The Canadian sporting sphere (black and otherwise), like all elements of Canadian popular culture, is profoundly located outside the geographical boundaries of the Canadian nation-state.8 A brief look at the genealogy of Canada’s men’s sporting cultures suggests that many athletes in Canada have histories and attachments located outside the geopolitical space defined by Canada. In fact, the genealogy of the Canadian sporting populace is increasingly global. A rough map looks something like this: sprinters from the Caribbean; hockey players from Eastern Europe; boxers and wrestlers from West Africa, the Caribbean, and Italy; football players and basketball players from the United States, baseballers from Latin America, cricketers from the Caribbean, England, and South Asia; lacrosse players from First Nations and black communities in Canada. The category of “nation,” therefore, is not capable of containing and explicating this genealogy. As opposed to unanimism, “diaspora” and “cacophony” (a multiplicity of voices) become the reality here, there, and elsewhere. And, given the homogenizing and repressive nature of nations, diaspora becomes a useful political and intellectual tool. I want to be clear, however, to suggest

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that resistance is a political choice, and that of course, many black athletes would not want to see themselves in such terms within such a fashion. Nations and sporting cultures, as well as being homogenizing, are incredibly seductive things, as Daniel Igali’s actions attest to. Given the fact that recognizing diaspora is a political and intellectual choice, I will deploy the concept of diaspora throughout the book in order to help write black masculinity from the inside, or against (overdetermi)nation. Writing black masculinity from the inside also involves a serious interrogation of the making and unmaking of normative notions of gender and sexuality. As I show throughout this book, masculinity is an incredibly overdetermining structure, and black masculinity is no exception. Black masculinity is included within these discourses of national sporting cultures from the overdetermining point of view of exteriority that reads black men as hypermasculine and necessarily heterosexual. The projection of a number of heterosexual fantasies (such as penis size and violent libidinal and social behaviour) onto black male athletes is typical of the racist homophobia of sporting cultures in general, and the Canadian context is no different. While there are many reasons for this, what is clear is that this situation persists because both sporting cultures and nationalisms have not yet come to terms with the historical and contemporary intersections of the sexual politics of “race.” In other words, sport and nation survive by rendering these discussions taboo. Thus, if we look at black masculinity in sporting contexts, we see it as heterosexual at minimum, and misogynist and hypermacho at maximum. To date, no black athlete has felt safe enough to come out of the closet in Canada or elsewhere during his or her career. In this regard, a black queer feminist diasporic theory needs to address what it is about sporting cultures that prevents this possibility. In this regard, I find the work of Michele Wallace, particularly her notion of “the problem of celebrity,” to be extremely useful.Wallace suggests that “a crucial problem for black political and cultural life is the problem we all share: the problem of celebrity” (1995: 301). Wallace’s difficulty with the problem of celebrity is

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INTRODUCTION

that it exists as one side of a binary, where the other extreme is invisibility, rendering ordinary black men, or the ordinariness of black masculinity, invisible. The problem of celebrity is not simply a problem in the United States, nor is it simply a problem only for black folks, which is where I would differ with Wallace. The problem of black celebrity is an increasingly global phenomenon in the context of racisms past and present and, as such, is a form of overdetermination that prevents other forms of black existence from being seen and/or being known. This brings me to another point concerning issues of capital and colonialist accumulation. In this regard, overdetermination works on three levels to facilitate accumulation. The first is the level of images; the second is the level of labour; and the third is the level of ideology. In terms of the first level, I find Guy Debord’s aphoristic Society of the Spectacle useful. Debord underlines the ways that the spectacle, or the regime of the visual, works to reproduce dominant relations of production. Further, he suggests that spectacle becomes the means by which contemporary capitalism secures and reproduces itself. Debord writes, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images .... the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production” (1994: 12). If we read Debord in line with Michele Wallace, it becomes clear that black masculinity in sporting cultures is crucial to the reproduction of relations of production, and that the problem of celebrity could not exist outside the society of the spectacle. The spectacularization of black athletic masculinity is a form of commodity fetishism that, like all forms of commodity fetishism, renders invisible (overdetermines) the labour of black athletes so they may simply be read as specimens, a typically anthropological approach.9 In addition to this consideration, I want to suggest, borrowing on Harry Edwards’s argument in Revolt of the Black Athlete, that sport remains a realm of extreme commodification and exploitation of black athletes owing to the intersection of racism and class oppression both

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past and present. While I agree with Edwards, it is important also to call attention to the fact that sport’s inability to deal with social difference reproduces this commodification. Thus, in building on Edwards’s work and adapting it to the present, I would suggest that sport’s inability to ethically deal with social difference facilitates exploitation and accumulation. This process is accomplished by cementing notions of black masculinity as largely labouring and therefore not “thinking” bodies, a fantasy borne out by the persistence of “racial stacking,” sport’s racialized division of labour. As such, the homogenizing and repressive qualities of sporting cultures, as well as the exploitation of black athletes, are crucial to what Marx once called “the velocity of capital,” or the rate at which capital can accumulate. Concerning the relation between nationalism and capitalism, I suggest that there is a synergy between nationalism and capital accumulation; each serves the purposes of the other. This brings me to the third aspect I wish to discuss: ideology. Nations continue to work as important ideological and economic conduits for the movement of capital across borders. For example, in my chapter on basketball in Toronto, I discuss the ideology of the “Hoop Dream” as an important narrative in establishing what I call “Raptor Morality.” This morality, which I argue is very inflected within a United States-centred version of blackness, is a narrative of uplift that plays a major role in helping to suggest to young black men the “positive” merits of capitalist social relations of individualism and heterosexuality. Moreover, such images allow for the increased sale of goods (e.g., shirts, shoes, the NBA itself) whose companies are headquartered in the United States.

This Book In light of these opening comments, I would now like briefly to outline the structure of the book. I begin by paying attention to how the concept of “movement” has been used in black cultural studies and post-colonial

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INTRODUCTION

studies. In the first chapter of the book, I discuss recent reinterpretations of C.L.R. James as a way to rethink conventional approaches to “race” and sport that too often read sport as a hermetic sphere, capable of containment within national discourses. In addition, I link James’s work with that of Harry Edwards, in order to draw out similarities between James’s emphasis on movement and the more rooted arguments of Edwards. I begin this way in order to carve out a post-Manichean space in black cultural studies in sport, given that the work of James and Edwards are often read as incompatible. Here I pay attention to how we might deploy the work of both to simultaneously root and route black masculinity in sport. As the recent renaissance of work on C.L.R. James has shown, James’s writings often foregrounded movement, yet it is no accident that it was firmly rooted outside Enlightenment/colonialist understandings of different cultural spheres as being discrete and unconnected to one another.10 James’s emphasis on movement, if read in tandem with Edwards’s work, offers a way to re-think static theories of sports, culture, and identity. Moreover, it allows for a constant focus on the historical and thus anti-essentialist element in the making of class, “race,” and history.11 My interest in movement is not aimed at proving that blackness is constantly in flux, although this may appear to be the case. In fact, in the following chapter I try to nuance the discussion of blackness in sport by trying to suture movement and stasis as concepts that are equally relevant to black popular culture. My simultaneous reading of Edwards and James means that I will be running away from static theories of blackness to the extent that such theories help to produce certain absolutisms of blackness that are easily Nike-fied and put forward as the only possible black identity. My focus on Edwards will offer a meditation on a kind of black rootedness that may not be so easily commodifiable. My distrust of commodified absolutism comes from the realization that such absolutisms can become brutally patriarchal in the context of masculinity. Absolutist currents within black popular culture are

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reproduced within some circles of sociology of sport, and thus read “race” as equivalent to blackness, and also as fixed and only intelligible vis-à-vis whiteness. Thus, in chapter two, I develop a feminist and queer critique of black sporting masculinities in Canada. I study black masculinity with an awareness that popular cultural representations of black masculinity can (at different times) work to reinforce or undermine patriarchy and heterosexism in all of its guises. In addition, the chapter contains a critique of the compulsory heterosexuality of sporting cultures in general, and black sporting cultures in particular. For example, in this chapter and throughout, I examine how the commodification of black masculinity works to reinforce heterosexuality. The remainder of the book is organized as follows. There are three sport-specific chapters that analyze how certain sports work in Canada in light of the new theoretical framework. In addition to noting the presence of racism in shaping versions of blackness in Canada (and to some extent the United States), all of these chapters point to the pernicious nature of static deployments of black masculinity and how these play out in popular culture. In chapter three, I discuss how Ben Johnson serves as the symbol for the nation’s worst nightmare, while at the same time noting how Donovan Bailey reproduces racist nationalism to secure his own insecure status as a black Canadian hero. In chapter four, I look at how the NBA has travelled across the border into Toronto and discuss what kinds of blackness results from such movements. In chapter five, I discuss the question of black masculinities through the figure of the black quarterback, and argue that thinking about black quarterbacks is incomplete without considering black quarterbacking presences in Canada. Moreover, I suggest that the different forms of style and masculinity that black Canadian quarterbacks offer counter the Nike-fied presentations of black NFL quarterbacks such as Kordell Stewart and, more recently, Steve McNair and Donovan McNabb. In my conclusion, I change direction, picking up some nascent threads within the book to deal with questions of erotics and pleasure

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INTRODUCTION

within black sporting cultures. I do this to imagine sport and black masculinity beyond the confines of its usual (often heteronormative) address, which is often melancholy and absent. In other words, my goal here is to write black masculinity outside of the solely negative, sociological trope of the problem-victim dichotomy. Clearly, if the project is to address black permanence in Canada, and my method engages black feminism and black queer theory, then we must turn to questions of possibility, fantasy, and desire in order to tell another side of the story. Possibility, fantasy, and desire are in many respects what sport is (supposed to be) about, especially given its homosocial and (homo)erotic foundations; and it is upon these foundations that I conclude.

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chapter

1

“RACE,” NATION, AND SPORT IN CANADA: PERMANENCE, PERFORMANCE, AND BLACK MASCULINITY

INTRODUCTION: Critical Foundations of Movement and Permanence suggested in the introduction that there was a need to be able to hold

I

“routes” and “roots” in tension as a way of helping us think about black masculinity and sport in Canada. In contemporary cultural

studies, the importance of routes—forms of human and cultural movement—as a hermeneutic to move us away from positions of fixity is well

established. While many have articulated this (some of the more well known include Edward Sa’id and James Clifford), what has not been so easy to establish in contemporary cultural studies is the equal importance of roots as a hermeneutic with which to view the contemporary world, and especially black life within it.This is partly due to the fact that, much of the time, the attempts to establish roots end up doing so, in polemical fashion, against those who give priority to routes. In this case, I am thinking of the work of people such as Lewis Gordon, Aijaz Ahmad, and Anne

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McClintoch.1 However, what is lacking in this debate is an ability to go beyond an either/or position on the question of movement and permanence to articulate a both/and position that would hold the two in tension. While I could write a considerable amount on the above debate and its impacts on the related fields of post-colonial and cultural studies, my aim here is more local. I simply introduce these works to argue for a both/and position with respect to roots and routes in black cultural studies of sport. Moreover, I want to suggest that an examination of sport and black masculinity in contemporary Canada needs to pay attention to roots (attempts to establish permanence) and routes (where we are travelling). In order to establish this, I will pay attention to Paul Gilroy’s injunction to move toward an understanding of “outernational” desires on the part of those in the black Atlantic; however, here I would like to depart from, and—at the same time—ground, Gilroy’s oft-quoted injunction “it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re going.” I take issue with this quote because it doesn’t tell the complete story of black life in the New World, and it seems to be prioritizing movement over other ways of conceptualizing black life. I will show throughout the chapter that where you’re going is often directly related to where you’re from. To paraphrase Karl Marx, people make history, but not of circumstances entirely of their choosing. Therefore, human movement, whether physical, spiritual, or otherwise, is not made entirely of our choosing either. In other words, I would like to ground Gilroy’s assertions, which can be read as voluntaristic at times, and offer a way of thinking about black life that pays attention to how the past marks the present, or how roots affect routes. Within the field of black cultural studies of sport, I believe that a both/and position in the early and seminal work is crucial. While my focus is not necessarily on movement (routes) and permanence (roots) per se in this section, it is relevant to the questions I raise above, since I am here moving away from an either/or position to a both/and one, in order to show the critical possibilities that such a move engenders. I

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take as my starting point two books, which regrettably have not been addressed simultaneously (much less discussed) to date, but which are of foundational importance to the questions I am posing about the project of black cultural studies of sport. I will read them together in order to show how each one informs and complements the other. The two books I am referring to are Harry Edwards’s The Revolt of the Black Athlete, (1970) and C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963).2 The books are very different both in form and content. However, as I will show, there are some interesting similarities. Beyond a Boundary is a quasi-autobiographical, almost meditative discussion of the importance of the game of cricket to the life of the author, James, and the life of the Anglophone Caribbean as a whole. It is, for all intents and purposes, a book set in the Caribbean. James offers a lucid style and breathtaking prose that became in many respects his signature. The treatment of “race” and racism in Beyond a Boundary is often addressed opaquely. James acknowledges the presence of racism as a factor in his childhood in Trinidad, but he is often quick not to afford it an allencompassing importance. In other words, James, who is clear as to the existence of racism, is determined not to let its existence get in the way of what he sees as the larger question of the growth of cricket in the Caribbean. The following passage is revealing: [T]here was racialism in cricket, there is racialism in cricket, there always will be racialism in cricket. But there ought not to be. I am, as I have said, quite convinced that the racialism I have described was in its time and place a natural social response to local social conditions, did very little harm and sharpened up the game (58). Harry Edwards’s work, by contrast to James’s, does not emerge out of the post-colonial context in the Anglophone Caribbean. Rather, it emerges from the anger and militancy of the Black Power era of the late

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1960s and early 1970s. It is thus a resolutely African-American text of its time. Although the text mentions international struggles such as Vietnam and South Africa, it is bounded by its location in the United States. The text teems with urgency, bravado, and Manicheist discussions of white folks and black folks. It offers a manifesto with a clear and stated action plan: how to reform both sport and society. In that sense, the text resonates with other angry and deeply impassioned books of the moment, such as Black Power, written by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Revolt is absolutely unapologetic about racism and, unlike James, sees no developmental advantage to the existence of racism in sport. In addition to its strident anti-racism, the text resonates with Marxist and Third Worldist work of the period and contains a stunning yet basic premise, which is what makes The Revolt of the Black Athlete a significant work, even today, some thirty years after its publication. This premise is that sport in capitalism is a form of labour, and thus, like all forms of labour in capitalism, it is alienated. More specifically, in the context of the racialized capitalism that grew out of plantation slavery in the United States, the book suggests that black participation in sport is doubly alienated and undervalued.3 This premise informed both Edwards’s writing and the movement that made his writing possible, which was known as the Olympic Committee for Human Rights (OCHR). The OCHR was a group of largely male black athletes and their supporters who used their notoriety and power as athletes to fight a series of struggles against injustice both inside and outside the sporting world. These struggles included such things as racism in the United States, apartheid in South Africa, and the involvement of United States troops in the colonial war in Vietnam. Within the sporting world the group was concerned with toppling the extremely hierarchical racialized division of labour that existed at the time (and continues to the present in too many spheres). For example, the group agitated for more hiring of black coaches and administrators at both the professional and

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collegiate ranks, and argued for an end to “Mickey Mouse” courses so that male black student-athletes could get a quality education. A number of notable athletes lent their time and energy to the cause— among whom were Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, Lew Alcindor (who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabaar), and Jim Brown.4 While I have given fairly brief summaries of these books, I hope it will become clear here why I argue that these texts need to be read in tandem. If read simultaneously, the work of Edwards and James offers an indispensable place from which to think about black athletic participation in sport within a neo-colonialist and capitalist worldsystem, such as the one we live in today. This is so for the following reasons. First, these are the two foundational texts to deal with black male athletic participation in the Anglophone Americas. Second, the questions they address continue to be important. We are still searching for the answers to some of them: for example, how can we think about athletes as labourers?; how can we eradicate racism in the

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world of sport?; and how can we conceive of athletes as political agents, and not as simply victims of larger processes? Third, I read these texts simultaneously in order to move beyond the creative impasse that exists on scholarship on Edwards and James. Much of the work on these two have not been able to move past their critical insights and, as such, can offer only a constrained reading of contemporary events.5 This is especially true of the work on black male athletes and sport in the United States, which—perhaps as a result of Edwards’s canonical standing in the field—has not moved beyond his original formulations.6 Most succinctly, this is seen by the fact that the literature on “race in sport” remains a discussion of racism facing black male athletes, without attention to more complex questions central to the topic, such as the construction of “race,” hybridity, sexuality, black female athletes, and diaspora.7 Moreover, in addition to rarely referencing the world outside the United States, much of the work on black male athletes largely neglects black masculine performativity and complicity within other systems of domination, and (beyond Manicheism) has little to say on pressing and complex questions such as the O.J. Simpson affair, or the career and escapades of Mike Tyson, for example. Thus, in this chapter, I read James’s work as a way to help supplement what I see to be a form of stasis in the literature on “race” and sport, and vice versa. Second, I will argue in the next section that James’s emphasis on movement, particularly in his discussion of art, is crucial in mitigating against this stagnation. Third, I will suggest that such a reading offers a way to think through black athletic production in sport as both art and labour. Such a tension is foundational to black cultural studies of sport, and will provide us with a critical foundation from which to consider pressing questions of social difference—gender, sexuality, and hybridity—that have been on the table in social and cultural theory for some time, and which neither James nor Edwards significantly addressed.

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Beyond a Boundary: C.L.R. James and Black Cultural Studies In this section, I offer a reading of Beyond a Boundary that traces the importance of the concept of movement in James’s thought. It is fair to say—if only by way of crude summary—that dialectics and movement were defining features in the life and work of C.L.R. James. Throughout his life, James published widely and on several topics germane to social justice in his time, and was not in any way bound to one discipline or another. Nor was the question of a single location from which to write about and within which to live an issue for James. James was also peripatetic at the level of form. In addition to Beyond a Boundary, he is perhaps best known for his history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, and an early novel, Minty Alley. Many scholars have correctly pointed out that James’s work allows us to move past the binary preoccupations of the colonialist knowledge structures of the Enlightenment. Sylvia Wynter notes that James “disturbed the governing categories of the colonial bourgeois cultural model, the categories of head/body, reason/instinct” (1992: 65). In addition, Grant Farred notes that Beyond a Boundary was “a hybrid form,” which allowed James to borrow heavily from history, autobiography, literature, and politics (1996: 174). However, in addition to his distrust of binary logics (which he saw as emerging out of colonial power relations), James also held firm to a dialectical conception of the world, which, as we will see, makes for an interesting parallel with Harry Edwards’s insights into sport and labour. In discussing James’s dialectical theory of movement, Aldon Nielsen’s work is instructive. In C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, he writes: In the end, it is that self-movement that James defines as life itself. Cricket was dying in England, he believed, because in the welfare state the dream of the free movement of the people had been replaced by the security of the capitalist bureaucracy, and

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the people who thought they knew cricket best did not know what to do about its decline (1997: 185; emphasis added). In other words, for James, dialectical movement is a key hermeneutic within which to understand the human condition. For example, in Beyond a Boundary, James argues that a nation’s success in cricket should be measured by the level of newness it displays; and this newness is wrapped up with transgressing and surpassing. The emphasis on movement can be seen in the following passage: Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there (1993; 113; emphasis added). In addition to an insistence on the importance of a dialectical theory of movement, another of James’s crucial (and related) insights is to draw out a connection between sport and art that he summarizes in the chapter “What is Art?” in Beyond a Boundary. James’s discussion of sport is a form of art, as well as bearing an affinity to Edwards’s argument that sport is a form of labour, is instructive, given that he makes a crucial connection here between art and movement. Making this connection allows James to argue that sport should be included in the group of human activities that are typically called “art,” such as dance and theatre. “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance” (1993: 196). The emphasis on the artistic quality of human movement is indeed revolutionary, and continues to be to this day, when a split between sport and art is always rigidly policed and disciplined.

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Moreover, in his formulations, James also linked sport to art that is not mobile, as it were, such as sculpture and painting. He writes: We may someday be able to answer Tolstoy’s exasperated and exasperating question:What is art?—but only when we learn to integrate our vision of (Clyde) Walcott on the back foot through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo (1993: 198). The “integration of vision” James refers to in the above quote, as well as prefiguring cultural studies’ major epistemological thrust of rejecting a division between high art and people’s art, also performs a crucially anti-colonialist and anti-racist gesture, which is to suggest that black participation in sport is both a physical and a rational act. Regrettably, reading sport as an instantiation of biology continues in racist culture, informing much of the popular conceptions about black athletes. In addition, James’s understanding of sport as art helps us understand that sport is a form of artistic production. As I mentioned earlier, this form of historical materialism, which stresses production, links James to Edwards. It also explains why in much of the chapter “What Is Art?” James notes that art, typically understood as painting, drama, etc., is seen as inanimate, and the art on the cricket field is constantly moving as a result, always producing the new.8 James argues that the desire for movement, or “the perfect flow of motion,” is a universal desire that shapes all societies, and that, “the eye for the line which is today one of the marks of ultimate aesthetic refinement is not new. It is old. The artists of the caves of Altamira had it. So did the bushmen” (1993: 208). James continues: “That flow, however, men since they have been men have always sought and always will. It is an unspeakable impertinence to arrogate the term ‘fine art’ to one small section of this quest and declare it to be culture” (1993: 209). Thus, James’s emphasis on the movement of “the line” suggests that

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black cultural production in the sporting world is constantly changing, and is therefore deeply contingent upon, and produced within, a historical and social milieu. Clearly, James is arguing that the eye for the line is universal and transhistorical, but he also seems to be saying that each rendition of art is dependent upon time and place. James is suggesting that we need to constantly ground black cultural production, and not in any way accept it as pre-given. In other words, he is suggesting that black cultural production is a form of human movement, and in this case, it is both labour and (given its aesthetic quality) art. My reading of James, informed by Edwards’s insistence on sport as labour, helps us to move closer to a both/and position and away from an either/or one in conceptualizing black cultural production in the world of sport. In sum, I am suggesting that sport is both art and labour, and in racialized capitalism, if it is waged, it is alienated. Further, if we were to return to the opening discussion of roots and routes, this makes sport simultaneously a rooted and routed activity. Such a reading is possible since labour always has to be rooted at some point and that art, given James’s arguments, is often routed, if only dialectically. Thus, there is a connection between Edwards and James in terms of what they had to say about black athletic participation and, more to the point, it helps to establish the importance of both permanence and performativity in black cultural production.

Permanence, Performativity, and the Outernational In this section, I would like to outline some of the historical and political constraints that affect black masculinity and sporting activity. In other words, while it is clear that sport is both labour and art, it is also worth stressing that it is produced not only in a racialized capitalism (and heteronormative patriarchy, which I address in the following chapter) but also that it is produced within the context of geopolitically delimited nation-states. Several commentators have shown the

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importance of sport to nationalist projects, and here I build on that work to apply it to a discussion of black masculinity and sport within the geopolitical nation-state and colonialist settler colony we call Canada. I will discuss this via a discussion of two of the major thinkers in contemporary cultural studies on the questions of “race” and nation—Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha. My discussion of Gilroy and Bhabha will work in tandem with the previous one, and will be followed by a more explicit discussion of Canada, black masculinities, sport, and the cultural politics of nation. I begin with Paul Gilroy. Both in “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” and The Black Atlantic, Gilroy foregrounds movement as a key constituent of New World black identities. More to the point, Gilroy sees movement, which he defines in all its forms—cultural, physical, geographical, and psycho-spiritual—as a crucial antidote to two countervailing ways of understanding blackness in the current period—Afrocentrism and “race”-relations sociology.9 Both of these positions, Gilroy notes, perform reifications of blackness and read it as a set of pre-ordained cultural attributes, existing outside of history, culture, and politics. In the case of Afrocentrism, the problem is a mythical reading of blackness and a mythical reading of Africa; in the case of the sociology of “race” relations, the problem is reading blacks solely as being on either side of the victims/problem binary.10

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As a critical antidote to the sociology of “race” relations, Gilroy offers two alternatives. Borrowing from James, he sees popular culture, or black expressive culture, as a crucial site of investigation and transformation. Gilroy argues that paying closer to attention to black popular culture (e.g., dance and music) allows us to make more sense of blackness in its historical perspective, and therefore think about black life outside of sociology. Second, he flags diaspora as a useful metaphor in thinking about black expressive cultures. He writes that “[i]t bears repetition that race, ethnicity, nation and culture are not interchangeable terms. The cultural forms discussed below cannot be neatly contained within a nation-state. Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora” (1991: 154). There are two things worth noting here about Gilroy’s formulation. First is his emphasis on the connection between aesthetics and politics. In addition to being reminiscent of James’s linking of sport and art, this formulation also allows us to read black cultural production as a performative gesture that may be influenced by racism, but also by other factors. Second, Gilroy’s doubled use of the idea of movement—he uses it to describe both corporeal movement and geographical movement—allows us see that nation is not the only category within which to read blackness, and that forms of exclusion in nations often prompts an understanding among New World black peoples of the presence of a diaspora. Gilroy’s diasporic leanings do not come out of a vacuum. In addition to his critique of “race”-relations sociology and Afrocentrism, Gilroy’s work is unapologetic about the horrifying effects of anti-black racism in Britain and how these racist myths were deployed. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” notes that nationalist discourses in Britain deployed a certain version of blackness to reproduce their own projects. In addition, Gilroy shows how British nationalist discourse of the post-World War II period relied upon a putatively universal notion of Englishness as a set of attributes defining itself in oppo-

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sition to blackness, which was understood to be criminal, violent, selfish, and immoral. This is apparent by noticing the historical connection between the introductions of black settlement (understood as “invasion” in Britain) with a concomitant paranoia of “national decline.” Gilroy’s formulation helps us think about and appreciate the hybrid formations of nations. Moreover, it illustrates how internal national differences are exploited and/or suppressed to serve the ends of capitalist and neo-fascist projects. As such, Gilroy’s work is a call to antiracists to stray from reading blackness as it is represented through the practices of a racist nation-state, in his case Britain, which, he argues, is the fault of “race”-relations sociology. Gilroy does not underestimate the importance of discourses of crime in the construction of blackness, yet he also suggests that this is not the only story of blacks in Britain. In other words, he is mindful of reading both racism and resistance in black life, which allows him to emphasize performance and diaspora. The work of Homi Bhabha, in particular his writing on nations and nationalism, is analogous to that of Gilroy in many important respects. I am specifically thinking of his discussion of how modern or bourgeois nations are possible only via the construction of an other. In order to explicate this process, Bhabha, a literary critic, likens nations to narratives. Bhabha argues that nations and nationalist discourses are constructed through metaphoricity. Moreover, like all narratives, they work in a context, and rituals of nationalism are similar to everyday intersubjective speech acts that contain both a pedagogic and a performative element. Discourses of nation, Bhabha argues, are possible only through the pedagogical instruction to “be a national citizen.” This pedagogic address automatically produces an outside, a space of potential resistance as it were, which Bhabha calls the performative element of nationalism. He outlines the scenario in the following quote:

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In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation (1994: 145–6; emphasis added). Therefore, Bhabha argues that the inherently unstable foundations of nationalism are secured largely through the pedagogical repetition of the rituals of nationalism. The pedagogical element of the nation is the address that the nation-state and its ideological institutions demand of its citizens. In other words, it is what you must do to be a good citizen. In Canada, given its bourgeois and racist/imperialist history, it contains what we might call “benign” elements—salute the flag, watch hockey, cheer for the national team—and not-so-benign elements that include reading black folks as criminal and carrying out genocide against indigenous peoples.The performative element for Bhabha is thus inherently unstable. The subject may or may not repeat the demands of nation. Bhabha refers to the space between these two positionalities (pedagogic and performative) as producing the ambivalence of nations and nationalism (1990: 1; emphasis added): It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the “origins” of nation as a sign of the “modernity” of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.11 Here, we can draw out similarities in the work of Bhabha and Gilroy. First, both suggest that the modern nation needs to produce an outside and outsider in the attempt to secure itself. Second, both stress a performative element that exists outside of official discourses of national-

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ism, which critics of “race” and nation must consider. Third, both emphasize, in one way or another, the disciplinary and unanimist imperative at work in the production of nation-states. Such insights help to explain not only how nations work, but why, within the context of racism, discourses of nationalism are so preoccupied with things such as law, order, and cleanliness. More specifically, if we read Gilroy’s observation about discourses of crime in light of Bhabha’s claims that nations are narratives, we can see the extent to which the pedagogic element of nationalism in Britain (and, as we will see, Canada) involves naming black masculinity as the nation’s criminal other or outside. Finally, it is worth stressing the insistence on performance in the work of both Gilroy and Bhabha as well as in the work of Edwards and James, with which I began the chapter. Such an emphasis allows us to see that, for example, the labour and art of black male athletes exists within a national narrative, but it remains quite unstable.

“Race,” Nation, and Blackness in Canada The ambivalence of nationalism is crucial to thinking about sport and black masculinities in Canada. First, it means paying attention to the historical linking of blackness to crime, a recurring modernist, nationalist, and imperialist fascination that circulates as much in sport as in other cultural spheres. Second, the “process of splitting” can allow us to read black masculinities and sporting cultures in Canada outside of the disempowering sociological frame and the attendant victim/problem binary. In other words, such a framework allows us to note that while the racist marginalization of non-white peoples and the expropriation of the land and cultural practices of indigenous peoples is a fact of Canada’s existence (both past and present), the reality is that many of those same people have built a counternarrative within and outside this reality. Bhabha’s work points us to the somewhat paradoxical reality that the racism of Enlightenment/colonialism actually

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helps to establish the possibility that there will be another time of nation, as expressed in the political and economic resistances of some of its citizens. For example, when black folks refuse to read themselves as criminal, the nation’s borders are revealed, and new cultural possibilities are engendered. Much of the work in black Canadian cultural studies pays attention to the simultaneous processes of exclusion, permanence, and performativity as strategies for black existence and resistance in Canada. These insights are central to the work of two figures in the field—Dionne Brand and Rinaldo Walcott. Both have stressed the fact that, in spite of the permanent and longstanding existence of black people and settlements on the land upon which the nation-state of Canada is located, black presences in this country are often made to appear itinerant, fleeting, or unexpected. Brand suggests that the silence surrounding the existence of black peoples, whose presence “predate the English and the French,” creates an emptiness at the core of Canadian identity. This emptiness marks what she calls an “absent presence,” which is official Canadian nationalism’s inability to deal with longstanding and sometimes contradictory social difference. She writes, “This absent presence is at the core of Canadian identity, a whole set of people relegated to a present past. An emptying out of the past, then, both physical and mental, seems to be crucial to the concept” (1998: 139; emphasis added). Walcott’s Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada also delineates some of the tensions of black existence in Canada, and argues that they are a result of a number of often contradictory imperatives. Walcott’s work points to the ways in which blackness in Canada is constructed via three related processes: first, the nation-state’s imperative to understand blackness as itinerant and unstable; second, the emergence of “outernational” desires among black Canadians, both physically and psychically, to find other, “greener” pastures, as it were; and third, in spite of the often literal attempts at marginalization and expulsion as a result of the racist practices of the Canadian nation-state, the dogged

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insistence among many black Canadians to put down roots and contribute to the cultural, political, and economic life here. These three related processes of black Canadian existence are encapsulated in the following quote by Walcott (1996: 51): The authorities who sanction the racialized space and place of Canada will continue to have to face and come to terms with the exiles and refugees in their midst.The struggle of diasporic blacks for space in Canada has a long genealogy, and a trajectory that will continue to cause reverberations across all aspects of the national body .... Black Canadian literature’s unruly bodies will continue to insist upon a space where justice and freedom are possible. In Canada, like in Britain, one of the principal devices used to expel blackness to the nation’s margins and render it itinerant is via a discursive linking of blackness, specifically black masculinity, to criminality. In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, black masculinity has come to equal crime in the national imaginary in Canada. This has a long history, although its recent manifestations are particularly obsessive (see chapter three, below). In other words, Canadian preoccupations with law and order have historically meant preoccupations with whatever the Canadian nation-state has deemed to be the “immigrant” population, almost always coded as non-white. One of the ways that racist discourses of law and order in Canada work is by trying to position black bodies outside of Canada, with the signifiers “Jamaican” and “American.” This not only positions blackness outside the nation but also, given the linking of outside with crime, as criminal. The following example illustrates my case. Consider the way that Lawrence Brown, one of the accused killers of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis was described in the Just Desserts case.12 As Walcott (1996: 36) rightly notes:

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When Lawrence Brown surrendered to the police, The Toronto Star wrote: “Brown was dressed casually in a purple and white shirt. He wore a purple bandanna.” The attention to and description of Brown’s clothing suggests that a leak had occurred that “Canadian” could not deal with or would have to curb as soon as possible—it was blackness leaking from South (the U.S.) to the North (Canada). In this instance, Walcott is pointing to the fact that there are numerous methods by which to designate black masculinity as being outside of the Canadian nation-state. In this case it is through a reading of clothing. In this semiology, black men can be read as “gangstas” who disrupt Canadian notions of “cleanliness, “decorum,” and “order,” all of which are coded, both historically and currently, as white. This semiotic (and often literal) movement of blackness to the nation’s margins is crucial to a discussion of black masculinity and sport in Canada. This is so for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the modern connection between sport, nation, and narratives of morality. In this case, the black male athlete always occupies an ambiguous position given that “sport” has historically been counterposed to “crime” as the activity of choice that young men should be involved in. Therefore, the discourse of black male criminality is antithetical to, or always in tension with, a discourse of sport and morality, and given the hegemony of the former, acts to structure and overdetermine the existence of black male athletes in sport. Fanon’s use of the concept refers to the way that racialized subjects in a racist society become hostage to others’ ideas and misconceptions of them, in this case the myths of racism. In his autobiographical style, he writes, “I am overdetermined from outside. I am ... the slave ... of my appearance.”13 In other words, these ideas, in this case ideas about black male criminality, exist independently of the actions of those affected by them, in this case black male athletes.

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We can argue that sport exists as both a form of moral regulation and as a colonial project, both of which are heavily racialized processes. In addition, given the way that sport is seen as a space to make young men and women moral, the young black male is often seen as the direct recipients of these projects.This formulation explains why police forces across North America in cities with large black populations have resorted to playing basketball in urban centres in an attempt to reduce crime.Thus, given sport’s historical positioning as the colonial antidote to crime, and given black men’s overdetermination from the outside as criminal, the space of black masculinity in sport becomes a very narrow and highly policed space. In fact, it is worth adding that sport, as well as being narrated as a tale of morality, is often narrated in a Manichean fashion, often with both good and bad guys in every story.14 As a result, while this kind of narration has inscribed most athletes, black athletes have especially been represented in this way throughout the course of the twentieth century, owing to the limits of a racist imaginary that is unable to think of blackness as anything other than a two-sided phenomenon. This tradition of a Manichean representation of black athletes largely begins with the African-American boxer Jack Johnson in the early 1900s, and has continued until the present.15 As such, when these boundaries (of crime, nation, and morality) are crossed, national outrage results; moreover, simplistic Manichean narratives often stand in for analysis. In Canada, the policing of national boundaries, both literally and figuratively, explains the paranoiac reaction to Ben Johnson’s positive drug test in Seoul in 1988 (I discuss this later in the book). This example shows the extent to which black masculinity in sport is often intelligible only as one side of a Manicheism; the flip side of black sporting criminality is imagined as a pure, wholesome sporting masculinity. Moreover, it makes one wonder to what extent the performance of a “proper” black Canadian masculinity is predicated on a repudiation of discourses of criminality and laziness—witness Donovan Bailey’s rejection of Ben Johnson and his 1996 relay teammate Robert

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Esmie; or in the case of Daniel Igali’s self-presentation, witness his neurotic devotion to the nation-state (see Introduction).

Blackness, Authenticity, and the “Centre” of Diaspora As a result of racist overdetermination, this process of marginalization happens not only to those deemed as “law-breakers,” but also even those who play “by the rules.” Overdetermination significantly shapes the cultural politics of black male athletes and other cultural producers. But in addition to being deemed as “criminal,” there is a related process that emerges in Canada that affects black male athletes, which is simply ignorance and denial. Black cultural producers are often seen as “unCanadian,” and therefore not accepted within the society as a whole; this is part of what Dionne Brand has called “erasure.” Historically, black Canadian cultural producers—artists, film-makers, athletes, and writers—have been ignored by local audiences as well as local funding boards, etc. In the realm of sport, one of the more significant examples is that of Lennox Lewis, former world heavyweight boxing champion; after winning a gold medal for Canada in the Seoul Olympics in 1988, he left Canada to reside in England after receiving what he felt to be insufficient support from Canada and Canadians. There are, in addition to Lewis, a number of black athletes such as young track stars and Hoop Dreamers, male and female, who leave Canada to train in the United States (including both Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin). Thus, an outernational consciousness can be seen as part of a threefold process of black masculinity in Canada. First, black folks, and more specifically black men, are read as criminal within the national imaginary and are both figuratively and literally placed at the nation’s margins. Second, the accomplishments of black Canadians are, as a result of a denial of black presences, largely ignored in the media and in general. Third, the black men themselves move to other parts of the black Atlantic in order to receive the support they feel they need.

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However, it is worth noting that these outernational desires are not fashioned necessarily within a context of equality. Rather, they are dependent upon, and differ as a result of, one’s location within the black Atlantic. Walcott (1996) notes that black diaspora discourses that begin with a centre in this case the United States and read other places as diasporic to them, are fundamentally unequal. What makes these relations primarily unequal has to do with the way that blackness in the United States is culturally produced as being more “authentic” than forms of blackness produced elsewhere, such as Canada, the Caribbean, and France. As such, the black United States, by virtue of processes of commodification (which I discuss throughout this book), is often seen as the “home” of blackness in the world, rather than simply as one place in a diaspora. It is worth noting that in addition to being related to forms of commodification, the dominance of American versions of blackness is also related to the overall Americanization of global popular culture. This process has intensified in the post-Civil Rights period, and is largely legible through the hegemonic status of African-American athletes such as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.16 There is a rather paradoxical underside to the process of a hegemonic site of black popular culture being located in the United States and an invisible Canadian blackness. What happens as a result of this is that forms of blackness that are “experimental” or forbidden can be explored in Canada more readily than they can be explored in the United States. Two of the most significant examples are the fact that Jackie Robinson played in Montreal before going to Brooklyn, and the fact that there have been black head coaches and quarterbacks in the Canadian Football League long before they existed in the National Football League, a discussion I take up in much greater detail in chapter five of this book. As such, given the constant pressure to displace black masculinity to the nation’s margins in Canada, it is no wonder that the United States,

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both as an imagined and actual space, occupies such an important cultural space in the world of black masculinity and sport in Canada. In addition to the claim that blackness must be read outside of national boundaries, it is important to read Canadian blackness as a kind of “farm league” blackness; in addition to earlier discussions here, this involves thinking about Canada’s secondary status in terms of its relation to the United States. Thus, thinking about black sporting masculinities in Canada means paying attention to the ways that these larger discourses work to shape masculinity from the outside, and to what extent young black men reproduce these at the subjective level. It also involves scrutinizing the role of media, schools, and sporting institutions in reproducing or resisting these processes. Moreover, it means understanding political choices and passions, and how they correspond to or disrupt the narratives of official Canadian nationalism, which rarely has space for the lived experience of blackness. Finally, it is important to examine to what extent these productions of masculinity are involved in the production of other forms of blackness, across time and place, and outside of these constraints. In sum, legitimate outernational desires among black men, as a result of exclusion from the Canadian public sphere, are very likely to be turned into colonizing gestures as they adopt and mimic United States forms of speech and style with the intention of attaining an authentic masculine selfhood. I offer the following as a particularly poignant way to demonstrate the ways that black masculinity and sporting cultures in Canada is constructed in a tenuous dialogue with US forms of blackness, often assumed to be authentic. Consider the events that emerged at the 1996 Olympics and the debate that ensued over who indeed was the world’s fastest man. In Atlanta, Canadian Donovan Bailey, and his 4 x 100 teammates (Robert Esmie, Bruny Surin, and Glenroy Gilbert), dominated the men’s sprinting events. Bailey won the 100 metres in a world record time of 9.84 seconds, and the Canadian relay team handily defeated the rest of the field. By doing the unprecedented (it was the first time that

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the US men’s team did not win a gold medal in the men’s 4 x 100 relay), the all-black Canadian relay team signalled a postmodern moment in Olympic sports, as well as in the discourse of blackness and diaspora. The US media’s failures to acknowledge the monumental success of the Canadian relay team (and Bailey specifically), pointed to the limit of blackness. Despite Bailey’s success in the 100 metres, he was denied the title “World’s Fastest Man” by the United States media, who bestowed the title on American Michael Johnson (Johnson won the 200 metres and 400 metres). As Walcott has suggested, “The insistence by Michael Johnson ... that he is the fastest man in the world ... attenuates the limits of diasporic discourses. As Donovan Bailey recently stated, ‘the claim is from Michael Johnson, and he’s not even the fastest man in Texas ... ’” (1997: 30). Michael Johnson’s response, and that of the media in the United States, is symptomatic of the limits of reading blackness as solely national, in this case located in the United States. It is only because of an imperialist attempt to centre blackness in the United States that the debate over who is the world’s fastest man is at one and the same time a debate about the authenticity of blackness. In other words, Johnson, who seems to be unconsciously deploying sociobiology to shore up his argument, seems to be saying: if Bailey isn’t really black by virtue of his being a Canadian, how can he lay claim to being the fastest man in the world, given that we know African-Americans are always the world’s fastest men? Michael Johnson’s sentiments are indicative of the way that blackness, speed, and the black United States are often conflated to mean the same thing. In this example, the cultural weight of the fictive category AfricanAmerican, coupled with the way that blackness has come to equal sports within common-sense thinking on “race” and sport, has meant that an identification with Bailey could be read as an inauthentic and, within the terms of Manichean logic, a “white” gesture. This skirmish over the boundaries of speed is evidence of the fact that one of the ways in which

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blackness, and “race” more generally, is deployed is to produce neat and tidy boundaries that often serve as myths of nation. In this case, a myth of blackness is assumed to originate in the United States, and it is also assumed to equal speed and athletic prowess. By contrast, a concept of diaspora that has no centre always already suggests a place “after” nation, which is a crucial corrective to these formulations.

Conclusion The notion of diaspora is thus a key insight in black cultural studies in Canada and has important bearing on how we think about black masculinity and sport in this country, as well as throughout the black Atlantic. The works I discuss above argue very strongly that blackness is illegible if read solely within the frame of national boundaries. In their own ways, they have suggested thinking about blackness differently, paying attention to its leaky and unstable qualities as a useful counter-narrative to conservative positions. Regrettably, these continue to reappear in much of the literature on black athletes in sport. These conservative positions tend to reinforce the reality of nations and nation-states as opposed to problematizing them with the view to imagining them differently, something that Bhabha, in his discussion of splitting, invites us to do. As a result, a diasporic or outernational reading of blackness is one hermeneutic necessary to discuss blackness in Canada and sport, given that its desires and fantasies are both conditioned by and conditioning of similar desires across the black Atlantic—in Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and a host of other places. In part, this is what I hoped to accomplish by reading James and Edwards simultaneously at the beginning of the chapter. Not only does my reading offer a way to think about performance in black masculine sporting activity (and by extension, all sporting activity), it also provides something else. My reading shows the different and similar ways that

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blackness is understood or overdetermined within a colonialist and racist global capitalism. Moreover, I have demonstrated that responses to racism need not be unitary; rather, they should pay attention to the reality that culture is produced by people. Hence, thinking of sport, as James and Edwards do, as art and labour respectively moves us away from taking it for granted. Their work, especially that of Edwards, focuses on the continuing brutal realities of the exploitation of sporting labour, and the often marginalized place from where black male athletes play, a point that needs careful underlining. Thus, my use of James’s and Edwards’s work will hopefully remind us that all cultural practice takes place within a historical and political context. I have outlined here a framework for reading blackness, nation, and sport to better enable us to rethink the way Canada is both imagined and lived. The constellations for a re-reading involve a discussion of blackness as more than simply located in the United States, as well as involving a discussion of how forms of blackness cross borders, from the United States to Canada, the Caribbean to Canada, to parts of Africa, and from different locations within Canada. Paying attention to movement, the structuring of discourses of law and order, and the performative elements of nationalism are places to begin. But we need to go further. Specifically, we need also to pay attention to how black masculinities are made and unmade within these processes, a process overlooked by both James and Edwards. We must note that all of these processes are under-written (over-written?) by gender, sexuality, and the sexual politics of “race.” In fact, the dominant reproduction of black sporting masculinities in Canada can be said to mirror the production of masculine heterosexuality in the same way as it does in the United States. In this case, we must add, a US version of hardness gets coded as both masculine and heterosexual. As I hope to show in the next chapter, there is a relation between celebrity, the sublimation of the homoerotic text in sport, and the production of a certain kind of black manliness, which is often defined through hardness.

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As a result, black queer presences in Canada become even harder to imagine in the public sphere inside of sport. In the case of basketball, the quest for hardness as a sign of authenticity in relation to the NBA is central to the performance of black masculinities in Toronto. In the case of track and field, the marker “Jamaican,” often used as a marker of resistance, is also often a marker for a certain kind of macho heterosexuality. These processes act to limit and circumscribe the kinds of black masculinity that are available to us in Canada. Thus, a feminist and queer critique of black sporting masculinities in Canada can and must make sense of these constituents in ways that help alleviate some of the more deleterious effects, both for individuals and the society at large. Such constituents might include: the ubiquitous conflation of black masculinity with hardness, the problem of celebrity, and the reduction of black masculinity to heterosexuality. I explore these issues in the following chapter.

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A THEORY OF BLACK MASCULINITIES AND SPORTING CULTURE

INTRODUCTION: Spectacle of Black Masculinity would now like to turn to a more detailed examination of construc-

I

tions and interpretations of black sporting masculinities. Such an

investigation rests at the core of questions about nation, diaspora,

blackness, and sport that I have been asking. Moreover, a theoretical grounding in this area is made all the more important given that

recently, questions of black masculinity, nation, celebrity, and spectacle have become topics of considerable debate, both in popular culture and the academy. This attention, as I will show below, is in large part due to several public spectacles of black masculinity that have gripped the United States and Canada in the last fifteen years. Such spectacles require more elaboration and sustained discussion than I can fully provide here. However, I will briefly outline several of those that have had monumental impact, in order to provide a backdrop

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to my theorizing of black sporting masculinities in North America. First, recall the Ben Johnson affair that emerged during the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Johnson, a Canadian sprinter, tested positive for stanazolol, an illegal performance-enhancing drug, after winning the gold medal in the men’s 100 metres and setting a world record. This series of events launched a national inquiry into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport (the Dubin Inquiry). Moreover, Johnson was pilloried by mainstream Canada and, as a result, virtually banished from the imaginary of Canadian sporting luminaries.1 Second, recall the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings of 1991 that involved sexual harassment charges laid by Hill (a black woman and former aide) against Thomas during his nomination to the United States Supreme Court as an associate justice. The Thomas/Hill hearings were, in Manning Marable’s words, “the first decisive national debate in the post-civil rights” United States (1992: 61), and brought to light a series of issues that had been raised for some time by black feminists, among others, about the constituents of black masculinity. Third, the vicious beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles Police Department officers after King violated a traffic bylaw: the acquittal of the four officers by a Los Angeles jury in the spring of 1991 sparked the Los Angeles rebellion. Fourth, the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995, where he was accused (and eventually acquitted) of murdering his ex-lover, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman. The media attention in the United States and beyond that followed was indeed monumental. These spectacles underline the need for careful theoretical elaboration of the ways that black masculinity is represented culturally and politically in the North American context. In addition, these spectacles pose challenges to contemporary notions of black masculinity and make black feminist and queer concerns voiced by such people as bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde all the more pressing. Moreover, evident in all these spectacles were often vast and fundamental misunderstandings of the constituents of black masculinity; the closest some

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commentators could come to critical analysis was the resurrection of stereotypes that had been in place since plantation slavery. For example, in the case of the O.J. Simpson trial, the harrowing spectre of the black rapist, a deep and foundational mythology in both Canada and the United States, was raised again and again by both prosecutors and mainstream media alike.2 Partly in response to these crises, the mid-1990s was also the site of another very public spectacle of black masculinity. This spectacle was different from the others: it was authorized as a black masculine response to dominant constructions of black masculinity, instead of being a chain of events where black men were the unwitting centre (such as the Rodney King incident or the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings). I am thinking here of the “Million Man March” organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in the fall of 1995.3 The march brought together over a million black men (and a few black women, who were largely excluded from the events), mostly from the United States, who marched on Washington, D.C., in order to affirm and confirm their “manhood,” and to request forgiveness for their sins in “a day of atonement.” The organizers of the march proposed that if black men were to atone for their sins, things would once again be right for them, and, by virtue of a misogynist logic, all black folks entirely. Farrakhan’s position in, and organization of, the march must be seen as a response to two prevailing currents. First, the march was an attempt to make sense of the category of black masculinity in the postCivil Rights United States, given that what were once thought of as stable and secure discourses of black masculinity had been severely shaken by the events of the past decade. Second, the march must be seen as typical of the “masculinity movement” as a whole. Another wellknown actor in this movement being the “Promise Keepers,” a group of largely white straight men who, while also deeply religious, gained notoriety in the mid-1990s for large gatherings in sporting stadiums across the United States. Claiming that they had “failed” as “men,” at

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these gatherings, the men asked for forgiveness and sought atonement for their sins, which included being unfaithful to their wives, neglecting their children, etc. It is important to place the Million Man March in its historical context given that it has helped fundamentally to shape and reshape common-sense notions of “race” and masculinity in the last decade. As Robert Reid-Pharr noted in his essay “It’s Raining Men,” the march “actually worked to reinforce the racial common-sense of the [United States]” (1996: 36). In other words, the marchers could be read as a black version of the Promise Keepers (or vice versa) given that it also sought to reduce larger social problems to a series of crises occurring in individual black men. Reid-Pharr claims that Farrakhan’s populism succeeds via offering an individual solution to genuine social feelings of alienation. In other words, instead of imagining a larger, collective, and activist way to think about these problems, something handed down to us both by black feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, and the US Civil Rights movement, the solution was individual and, perhaps not coincidentally, religious. Reid-Pharr writes, “In the face of shrinking public resources and an evangelical zeal to ‘reinvent’ (read: dismantle) government, African Americans were once again advised that self-help is the best medicine” (1996: 36). What is also worth noting is the extremely incongruous coexistence of a putatively “feminist” set of politics on the one hand (i.e., the remaking of masculinity), coupled with an intense gynophobia that actually excluded women from this project. This incongruity is possible only, as Reid-Pharr argues, via a recourse to a mythical masculinity that is and was impossible to achieve for almost all black men. Regarding this mythical masculinity, Reid-Pharr notes that: the black man was instructed to ... access his inner manhood, that great and mysterious wellspring of masculinity deep within his psyche, waiting to be harnessed to the project of a beauti-

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ful black tomorrow. This all-powerful masculinity was offered as the solution to, and compensation for, the stark curtailments of resources and opportunities that confront African American men (and everyone else) (1996: 36). Thus, instead of deconstructing masculinity in order to move beyond it, the Million Man March, like the Promise Keepers, sought to reify (perhaps in order to retool) historically patriarchal forms of masculinity. As such, we should be extremely cautious of labelling these movements “feminist,” even though on the surface, by virtue of the refashioning of masculinity, they aimed to be “pro-woman.” In light of the Farrakhanist position, it is crucial to offer an alternative reading of black masculinity in general, and its relation to sport and Canada in particular. This alternative reading must be grounded in feminism and queer theory, and as such will help us examine how black masculinity in sport (and otherwise) might be understood beyond individualism, myth, and the stereotypical knowledges that continually circumscribe it. In other words, such an understanding of black masculinity, while perhaps motivated from a similar place as those involved in the Million Man March, departs from these concerns given that it attempts to unpack the category “black masculinity” with the aim of moving beyond the strictures of “race,” gender, and heteronormativity. My departure here from the Farrakhanist response lies in a distrust of the category “black male”; because it exists as a category, it can be reified and therefore deployed to reproduce homophobic and patriarchal (not to mention individualist) aims. In other words, the singularity of the category “black male” implicitly calls all men who are black to move into that category unproblematically, a process whose normalizing and naturalizing consequences could be devastating, particularly if one does not fit the prescribed norms.4 The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. First, I suggest the need to take stock of the dominant theorizing of sport and

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masculinity, considering its limited ability to conceptualize “race,” and specifically blackness. In doing so, I offer a reading of the major school of thought in the literature of sport and masculinity, what I call “Good Boy Feminism.” Here, I trace its racialized foundations via its use of the Enlightenment/colonialist trope of the “state of nature” to explore its largely negative structuring of black masculinity. Second, I offer a feminist and queer modification of C.L.R. James’s crucial insights about the relation of sport and community in black popular culture. Third, I engage with the work of black feminist and queer discussions of black masculinity (including the work of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, and Philip Brian Harper) to offer a potentially more inclusive reading of black masculinity and sport. In doing so, I offer a critique of how visibility and celebrity work in the making of black masculinities, and assess the extent to which these features either help or undermine a queer/feminist critique and reconstruction of black sporting masculinities.

Sports, Blackness, and the State of Nature To begin, it is important to underline the typical or “common-sense” way that sport works in the popular imagination. Generally speaking, sport is understood in the following two ways: first, it is seen as a mythical sphere unto itself; second, and relatedly, it is relegated to the realm of nature, opposed to and outside of cultural, political, and historical constraints. The following example will help illustrate my point. Throughout the mid- to late 1990s in Ontario, there were a number of strikes and work- to- rule campaigns by teachers’ unions in response to financial cutbacks to the education system by Mike Harris’s neo-liberal Conservative government. Invariably, whenever these strikes or job actions occurred, articles appeared in newspapers and in the broadcast stream, canvassing the opinion of coaches and players involved in high school athletics. By and large, the respondents were represented as opposing the strike actions because, they claimed, “politics” should not

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interfere or “corrupt” the world of sports. They wished that these disputes would remain outside of what was understood to be a pristine world, governed largely by innocence, and the mere “rules of the game.” In addition to circumscribing sport outside of politics, another result of this thinking is that it confines sports to the physical realm, separate from the presumably mental world of politics and culture.This conception of sport makes it difficult to discuss “social problems” in sports except as external or aberrant, and not in an ongoing or systematic fashion. As many have argued, imputing categories with essential and pure characteristics—claiming, for example, that the “different spheres” of sport and politics should not mix—is a foundational principle of Enlightenment/colonialist knowledge production. One of the chief ways that this works is via the construction of a state of nature. The notion of an asocial or pre-social state of nature, where passions ruled and Reason held no sway, has been a foundational principle within Enlightenment/colonialist social and political thought for some time. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, lamented the loss of the state of nature in the move to civilization that he characterized as “imprisoning Man.” As such, the trope of nature and, by extension sport, is seen to stand in for social equality. It can thus be used as an ideological support for a whole host of foundational myths of contemporary racialized and patriarchal capitalism. These myths deny the presence of inequalities based on social difference in favour of a discourse of equal opportunity, “the goodness of the state,” racial harmony, gender equality, and so on.This vision of sport as a relatively benign state of nature is not merely the preserve of those on the right of the political spectrum. For example, consider the following quote by Nelson Mandela: “Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, colour, and wealth are irrelevant. When you are circling your opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his colour or social status” (as quoted in Marqusee, 1995: 4).While Mandela may be right about boxing, my difficulty here is with his blurring of the line

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between the game as it is played and the game as it is narrated. It is when the notion of “life as a game” becomes hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense, that there is cause for concern.5 Reading, or narrating sports as a bourgeois category (one devoid of history, politics, contradiction, etc.), is reliant on invoking two related concepts: (1) that sport is a state of nature, and (2) that this state of nature is an apolitical, egalitarian space that can only be disrupted from an “outside.” In conjunction, and as a result of the affirmation of bourgeois values, such a construction has significant repercussions for the contemporary understandings of blackness.

Blackness and the State of Nature Valentin Mudimbe, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin are among those who have argued that blackness works within bourgeois social and political constructions of the state of nature to sustain and reify the category of “whiteness.” Within this construct, blackness becomes synonymous with physicality and acts as the opposite side, or “other” that illuminates, constructs, and highlights whiteness, which itself becomes synonymous with rationality. Black bodies are seen as primitive, hypersexualised, and licentious; moreover, white bodies in the state of nature are not represented as organic—they are assumed to have both outgrown the state of nature and achieved rationality.6 As such, Enlightenment/colonialist ideas of the state of nature are racialized from the outset. Therefore, as much as the state of nature connotes a presumably equal terrain or level playing field, it also has a doubled resonance: it narrates the intellectual sphere as “white” and the physical sphere as “black.” In sport, this dichotomy is mapped onto black and white bodies such that black bodies are seen as athletically superior and therefore less rational. Consider the following quote from a white male professional on gender equality: “A woman can do the same job as I can do—maybe even be my boss. But I’ll be damned if she can go out on the football

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field and take a hit from Ronnie Lott” (Messner, as quoted in Disch and Kane, 1996: 284). Ronnie Lott was, according to Disch and Kane, “a black NFL player celebrated for making aggressive tackles.” The white deployment of blackness, or specifically white macho deployments of black masculinity as the embodiment or essence of masculine aggression, can be traced to Enlightenment/colonialist notions that read Africa as a place of unbridled strength, sexuality, and aggression. The confluence of racist ideas about black masculinity, sport, and sexuality is captured by Frantz Fanon, who describes the responses to a survey he gave to white French people about their opinions of blackness: “Negro brought forth biology, penis, strong, athletic, potent, boxer, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Senegalese troops, savage, animal, devil, sin” (1967: 166). The concept of the state of nature admits a racist biology that prioritizes and racializes strength and power, and suggests, “we all know that blacks are the superior athletes.” In that sense, the state of nature is rife with a series of hierarchies, and it works to carnivalize and anthropologize black masculinity by inscribing it as pre-modern and therefore more “naturally” inclined to sporting cultures.

Good Boy Feminism Unfortunately, the predominant understanding of sport and masculinity, both in Canada and elsewhere, rests on these Enlightenment/colonialist foundations of both gender and “race.” Thus, the predominant understanding cannot help us think through either the way that masculinity is racialized, or, subsequently, the way that black masculinities are represented and constituted in contemporary society. This lacunae persists in spite of the fact that work on sports and masculinity is now sizeable and covers approximately twenty years.7 The basic premise of the dominant literature on sport and masculinity, what I call “Good Boy Feminism,” is that sports and patriarchy are intrinsically related; and that, in effect, one begets the other. I call this school “Good Boy Feminism” because it con-

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tains Puritan undertones that, as I will show below, presume men to be essentially patriarchal and in need of salvation (presumably from women), in order to be ordained as “good” and therefore feminist.

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These sentiments run throughout the literature, and are perhaps best captured in the words of Michael Messner, who argues that “organized sports have been a school of patriarchy for boys” (1994: 199). Sport is seen as a realm where men go to distinguish themselves from women. The Good Boy Feminist mode of analysis specifically targets American football. In the eyes of the Good Boy Feminist, football is a metaphor of militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and other repressive forms of social injustice. James McBride, author of War, Battering and Other Sports, argues that there is an intrinsic link between football, war, and domestic abuse. He refers to both football and war as “male territorial games” and suggests that football is much more than just a game: “[a]s a ritual of American masculinity, football is a gender performance in which athletes attempt to demonstrate in their practice that they are men, that is to say, not women” (1995: 86). By extension, male bodies engaged in the practice of playing or watching football are seen as “weapons” betraying an inherent war-like violence. According to Trujillo, “[i]n all sports, the body is an instrument

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of production. In American football, that instrument is a weapon, and its production is a reproduction of war” (1995: 110). Trujillo reads the act of men lunging into one another as de facto gestures of war, and this weapon-like character of football players means that football is a patriarchal activity de facto. In light of what it sees as the essential patriarchal nature of male sports, Good Boy Feminism puts forward a series of recommendations. These recommendations are made with the aim of making sport less “manly” for men. For example, McBride arrives at the incongruous conclusion that men (who, as we will see, he clearly imagines as heterosexual) should stop watching football and engage in childcare with their wives as the response to male violence. He writes: “‘[M]ale mothering’ may unwrite the text of male hysteria that is played out metaphorically in male territorial games and physically in the abuse, torment, and sometimes murder of women” (1995: 208). Other authors have called for the inclusion of women within men’s sports. Sabo suggests that “Granting boys and girls equal opportunity to play sports will help undermine the sexist ideology that reinforces gender inequities in society” (in Messner and Sabo, 1994: 201).

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In and of themselves, these remedies are not necessarily undesirable; any feminist would be happy to reform men’s sport to reduce its machismo, aggression, and misogyny.8 However, the difficulty with these particular remedies is twofold. First, they reinforce the longstanding

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Enlightenment/colonialist notion that sports, as opposed to forms of “high” culture, are located within an unruly, irrational, and pre-social “state of nature” and are therefore in need of taming or domesticating from the outside. It is worth underlining that this pre-social space is coded as “hypermasculine,” which necessitates the need for “feminizing” sports.The complexities of patriarchy and homophobia in sporting cultures are thus cast aside in favour of a Manichean reading of sports as evil and largely responsible for the reproduction of patriarchy in society. But more significantly for this project, these remedies, by invoking a pre-social hypermasculine “state of nature” as real, automatically invoke both an essential “woman” and a discourse of “race” and sexuality. More specifically these remedies, and the project of Good Boy Feminism in general, implicitly invoke a racist and heterosexist discourse about Africa and blackness. Thus, the invocation of a state of nature, by racializing the terrain, especially that of masculinity, inaugurates a hierarchy of manliness whereby men “closest” to the natural state are understood as most manly. This, I suggest, is the logical extension of a Manichean mapping of “race” (which implies notions of nature and civilization), onto male bodies. Many have documented the pervasiveness of twentieth-century beliefs that sport makes men “more manly” (e.g., Bederman, 1995) as motivating the historical connection between manliness, “race,” and discourses of civilization. Bederman’s work, and that of Angela Davis (1983), illustrate the racist and primitivist foundations in discourses of masculinity in the post-Civil War United States. During the period after the Civil War, up until the early part of the twentieth century, black male bodies were retroactively and ahistorically constructed as threats to white womanhood and, by extension, white civilization. Within this logic, black men become the antithesis of a “civilized,” Puritan whiteness. While Good Boy Feminism does not explicitly employ a racist logic, its use of primitivist notions of masculinity are the same as those that upheld the post-US Civil War discourses on masculinity.

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Both presume not only of a hierarchy of manliness, but also a belief in an innate masculine essence. This innate masculine essence, I argue, is racialized.Thus, perhaps the most disturbing implication in the context of the Good Boy Feminist project is that black men are written out of the text of male participation in feminism by virtue of their placement within the “state of nature.” Were they to participate in feminism, it would seem that they would have to do so apologetically and never fully, always from the outside. James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” while written in another era (1968), helps us cut through the foundational assumptions about black masculinity that underpin Good Boy Feminism. This often-cited essay, critical of the depictions of the character Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), is a seminal piece in rethinking representations of black masculinity. While not an avowedly feminist text, the essay is a call for complexity and humanity within representations of black masculinity over and above what he sees as caricatures that, he argues, are common to both Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He suggests that both texts deploy a simplistic and dehumanized portrait of black masculinity that makes them incapable of autonomous salvation or redemption. As such, in both texts, they are rendered passive, in order to allow for their redemption to be fostered by external (white) agents: “This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro in America. Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white” (1968: 16). The Christian overtones Baldwin points to are worth underlining here, given the religious and specifically Puritanical way that Good Boy Feminism calls for the cleansing of an essential patriarchal male self. For black men, therefore, who are labelled intrinsically impure, this is an impossible task. Therefore, the Good Boy Feminist exists outside the body, as it were.

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But it is only his implied whiteness that makes the claim of a renunciation of the male body more “conceivable.” Good Boy Feminism argues for a renunciation of the body (and, by extension, desire) as the main plank of its politics, but can do so only because of the inherent assumptions about whiteness and white masculinity guiding the project. Therefore, as an anti-racist feminist strategy for social change, it is wholly insufficient, and in fact reproduces the very categories that motivate patriarchy, homophobia, and racism. Good Boy Feminism cannot understand, by virtue of its ahistorical and racist approach, that hegemonic sporting masculinities are made and unmade in ways that are far more complex than a retreat to Enlightenment/colonialist mythology. Thus, Good Boy Feminism’s inability to deal meaningfully with the complexities of masculinity and the politics of desire, and the ways in which these are racialized, is indeed a grave weakness.9 In addition, and perhaps as a result of unself-consciously relying on these Puritan assumptions, Good Boy Feminism’s reliance on the “state of nature” as its organizing concept is also flawed for its extremely limited conception of sexuality. Specifically, Good Boy Feminism’s inability to theorize desire (e.g., sexual, social, and political) makes it in essence a heterosexist as well as a racist paradigm. Good Boy Feminism’s argument equating sport and patriarchy and its subsequent recommendation that male sporting impulses must be repressed or curtailed for men means that there is no understanding of how desire works for men in the making and unmaking of masculinities. It seems men, by virtue of their essential maleness, can only be either masculine or emasculated. Thus, if it conceives of it at all, Good Boy Feminism can conceive of desire only as something that leads to patriarchal behaviour, and that therefore must be excised or disciplined, or strictly confined to the heteronormative sphere of marriage/reproduction. We must be very wary of the oppressive heterosexist potential of this assumption, particularly when black men are

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coded as hypermasculine within this discourse. Thus, the invocation of an essential black hypermasculinity is a construct aimed at policing desire both along lines of “race” and sexuality, a move that is regrettably repeated by Louis Farrakhan. As such, it is crucial here to underline the connection between Good Boy Feminism, the Nation of Islam, and the Promise Keepers.10 All three positions fail to deconstruct the category of masculinity by virtue of their shared commitment to Puritan politics. While the Farrakhanist position does not code blackness as hypermasculine per se, it definitely codes it as heterosexual. This is evident in many places, not the least of which is the call for return to “black family values.” In addition to the absent and subservient role for women within this politic, Reid-Pharr notes the precarious place that gay black men occupy within the framework of the Million Man March. He suggests: ... if the definition of blackness hinges on heterosexuality, then either blackness or homosexuality are incommensurable (and black gays are not really black) or the notion of blackness is untenable, as witnessed by the undeniable existence of large numbers of black gay men (at the March) (1996: 39). Thus, only one version of black masculinity can be imagined, owing to the suffocating space of the political terrain, which is significantly motivated by what Baldwin called “the terror of damnation.” Specifically, a heterosexist version of masculinity is the mode of establishing the unambiguity of the black male self. It is worth repeating Reid-Pharr’s observation (cited earlier), which stresses that the success of the Million Man March in 1996 (and Farrakhanist politics more generally) is possible only if genuine black feelings of alienation, loss, and disempowerment can be channelled into a narrative of individualism. This individualism, as we have seen, relies on an essential masculinity, the sublimation of the unruliness of desire, and the assumption of heterosexuality.

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Sport, Masculinity, and Community Given the limitations of both the Good Boy Feminist project and the Farrakhanist one, the project of articulating a black feminist and queer theory of black masculinity in sporting cultures remains incomplete. In trying to articulate such a critique, I suggest that it is worthwhile to think about some of the work in black cultural studies, outlined in the previous chapter, such as that of C.L.R. James. As many, including James himself, have noted, sport can often serve as a place to make political sense of the world around us. James’s emphasis on the importance of sport to marginalized communities is of particular interest to me. Specifically, I am thinking of two of the foundational claims he makes in Beyond a Boundary. The first is the claim that sport is art and the second is that sport is foundational to creating Caribbean communities of resistance in anti-colonial struggles. However, while these insights are worth retaining, what is required in terms of rethinking black masculinity is an examination of how racialized discourses of community and art can reproduce misogyny and homophobia, even for those whose goal is ostensibly to build notions of community and sporting excellence. While James’s work is exemplary in detailing the political and historical relevance of cricket to the lives and work of many involved in anti-colonial struggles in the Caribbean, the question of the making of black masculinity was left out of his text. In other words, while James recognizes the way that “race” can become a factor in an insurgent political consciousness, he cannot do the same for gender, which, in the case of black masculinity, makes him unable to understand how these very discourses of independence and anti-colonialism often reproduce gendered hierarchies. In other words, we are left asking questions both about the black women in James’s text (what of their political journeys?), as well as the fashioning of the men’s masculinity. Thus, in spite of the book’s appeal as a “popular aesthetic,” to quote Sylvia Wynter (1992), the reality of a masculinist framework leaves James’s

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writing in need of a feminist rethinking in order to read sport, community, and black masculinity more comprehensively. Hazel Carby, in her book Race Men, offers one of the only feminist interpretations of James’s work. She makes the important insight that James could construct his world of Caribbean cricket as synonymous or allegorical to the world of politics only because that world was previously figured as all male. Carby argues that for James, the common denominator of sport and politics was the male body: The cricket pitch was where and how the colonial relations of class and color were fought, a field in which men struggled against men, defending wickets, hurling fast balls, body to body and bowlers to batters, in a confrontation that rendered invisible the politics of gender which shaped the practices and ideologies of the sporting institution (1998: 126). Moreover, Carby has suggested that James’s insights involving sport and art are also possible only within the masculinist and homosocial framework of Beyond a Boundary (as well as elsewhere in his writings). Carby argues: “To [James] the male body on the cricket field was a work of art—not an art that needed to be interpreted or translated by an intellectual, but an aesthetic experience of the body that could be grasped immediately by the spectators themselves” (1998: 116). Carby’s argument is that James conceives of sport in the same manner as he conceives of politics: as a terrain that reproduces itself via sameness or the presence of other male bodies surrounding it. In fact, the masculinized world of the cricket pitch that James narrates is akin to representations of the “state of nature” as that “all male” place whereby men can really be men. Carby’s work, while in need of more substantial elaboration, offers something important for my purposes: the suggestion that, as feminists, it is not possible to read James’s insights into sport, art, and community as unproblematic. They suggest

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the necessity for a further unravelling of the concept of black sporting masculinity if we are to make sense of it.

Post-Celebrity?: Black Feminist and Queer Remakings of Masculinity In building upon Carby’s critique and working past the foundations of Good Boy Feminism and the Million Man March, we need to look at the interiority of black masculinities.What are they? How are they deployed? Who authorizes them? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed. In addition, such a general investigation must also be updated to eventually discuss how black masculinity operates within contemporary sporting cultures. A hermeneutic and historicist approach such as I am offering is implicitly more useful than the essentialism and ahistoricism that underpins both Good Boy Feminism and the Farrakhanist position. One element to consider when we attempt to unravel black masculinity is the question of heroism. It is not surprising that the quest for heroes and the desire for a heroic black masculinity, particularly in athletics, has been a constant in black popular culture throughout the twentieth century. Often black sporting heroes have represented the wishes of entire populations who have been marginalized both politically and economically. As William Van Deburg writes in Black Camelot: “Black sports heroes brought hope to the discouraged and, as dynamic role models, helped motivate those with low self-esteem” (1997: 126). The emphasis on black sporting heroes has perhaps been most acute since the mid-1960s, the era that Harry Edwards refers to as “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” This era also coincided with both the rise of televised sports and the large-scale participation of black athletes in big-time sport.11 In some senses, we could call this the apogee of the black athlete given that it helped to cement contemporary common-sense notions of black masculinity.

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Moreover, it is not surprising that the need for black heroes works to buttress conceptions of masculinity in James’s work as well as that of Harry Edwards—two people whose work represent foundational texts, not only for thinking about sport and blackness (one in the context of the Caribbean, the other in the context of the United States) but also the study of sport, culture, and politics in general. Both of these thinkers articulate visions of freedom as articulated through heroic bodies of black male athletes. As I outlined in the previous chapter, Edwards’s work is focused on the struggle of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights (OCHR), which was a movement that emerged in the mid-1960s and attempted to use black prowess in athletics to achieve progress in the larger social arena. Revolt of the Black Athlete is a testament to that movement, both its successes and failures. It was written, undoubtedly in the spirit of its times, as a manifesto. And more to the point, it works within a masculinist discourse of heroism that was de rigeur in that moment of revolutionary politics.12 However, in the present moment, after the crisis of black masculinity (described above), and the post-Civil Rights context generally, the necessity to historicize black athletic heroism is imperative. In other words, if the foundations of black popular culture have changed considerably in the past forty years owing to a series of social and political upheavals, to what extent can we rely on a frame that was built prior to many of these changes? Whereas many black male sports heroes of the sixties and seventies were overtly political and helped to change sporting culture permanently, this is not the case today, as the overwhelming popularity and conservative politics of Michael Jordan, O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods, and Mike Tyson attests. In other words, while claiming sport as a political act was a recuperative gesture in the context of the anti-colonial project of the sixties throughout the black Atlantic, these same assumptions cannot be made categorically in the current context. One of the most insightful critics to address this shift is bell hooks. In a consideration of the politics of visual culture, she suggests that

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political and economic changes—specifically commodifications of blackness—result in the image of the black athletic hero no longer holding the same meaning and subversive potential. She argues: Conservative change in the politicized visual representation of the black male body began to occur in the late seventies with the commodification of blackness, particularly the use of the black male body, mainly that of sports figures, in television commercials to sell products (1994: 133; emphasis added). hooks goes on to emphasize that these contemporary representations of black male athletes tend to rely upon a nostalgia for the late 1960s and early 1970s, but that these images are simply clichéd and hollowedout caricatures of an original. More to the point, she suggests that the commodification of blackness means that it impacts negatively upon many athletes, who in turn become invested in putting forward a hypermasculine version of themselves that is deeply rooted in homophobia and patriarchy. Of Mike Tyson, she writes: To counter the “soft” image created by subjugation via commodification, the black male body must re-figure its hardness. For a hypermasculine athlete like Mike Tyson, that refiguring must be played out both in the boxing arena and via the assertion of sexual dominance over the female, even if that means one must rape (1994: 135). Politically, Tyson’s hypermasculinity places primacy on an unimaginative mimicry of the dominant heterosexual gender values in men’s sporting cultures, whereby all forms of “softness” are read as queer and must therefore be disavowed and/or violently punished. In other words, this is a nostalgic pose that mimics a “Black Power” version of masculinity and offers nothing else. Some could say that it takes the

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worst of this moment and glorifies it by evacuating all of the political meaning that existed, albeit problematically, in the first instance. hooks insightfully suggests that as a result of what we may read as the unchecked and unproblematized masculinist foundations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a ghost of Black Power masculinity has emerged. Although this contemporary version is a copy of the original, hooks argues that it offers nothing in the way of political change, and is in fact reactionary. She argues that “Black male capitulation to a neocolonial white supremacist patriarchal commodification signals the loss of agency, the absence of radical politics” (1994: 133; emphasis added). Thus, as a result of commodification and, I might add, the shifting ground of black liberation struggles across the world, black male athletic excellence has been delinked from its political foundations. And as a result—and this is implicit in hooks’s work—there is a need for a new semiotics with which to read these performances. hooks’s call, not surprisingly, pays attention to feminist and queer concerns about humanizing black masculinity. This is so for a number of reasons, not the least because the commodified version of black masculinity, much like the Farrakhanist version, aims to police and survey dissonant forms of black masculinity at the level of gender and sexuality.13 In addition to hooks and Carby, Michelle Wallace has made important insights into the feminist reconstruction of black masculinity. Her particular contribution lies in highlighting what she calls “the problem of celebrity” in black life. In her essay “Masculinity in Black Popular Culture: Could It Be That Political Correctness Is the Problem?” Wallace speaks harshly about technology and processes of commodification. She notes, “Within the dynamic of an increasingly technologized, computerized, and consumer-oriented dominant culture, the black body is frequently fetishized in increasingly disturbing ways” (1995: 301). For Wallace, like hooks, the fetishization of the black body is heavily linked to commodification. In other words, black bodies are becoming increasingly relied upon to sell products and to act synecdochically for

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all kinds of consumerist fantasies, whether it be strength, speed, sex, etc. This process means that it is almost impossible to read black masculinity outside of this frame, in other words, unmediated by commodification. Thus, as black bodies increasingly become vessels for fame and celebrity, thinking “blackness” at the level of everyday life becomes almost unintelligible to many of us.Wallace’s work adresses the political stakes of this reality. Specifically, there is a need for black feminist and queer liberationist politics to develop countervailing strategies of representing and imagining black masculinity, given its over-representation and mythical portrayal in the mainstream media.14 Thus, for Wallace, re-imagining black life involves a deep scepticism of sport and the production of black celebrity. More specifically, her work demands that we pay attention to the “binary appeal of fetishization” (1995: 301) that makes a person a hero one moment and a public enemy the next. In the interest of moving away from celebrity, Wallace points our attention to the everyday nature of black life as a lesson for black men, an approach she shares with hooks. Given her scepticism toward celebrity, it is not surprising that Wallace invokes Ralph Ellison’s resourceful novel Invisible Man as a strategy for navigating the conundrum. She writes: “In fact, as the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man taught us, intellectual and/or cultural productivity among blacks requires that they seek out and explore complicated strategies of visibility and invisibility” (1995: 302; emphasis added). As an antidote to celebrity, Wallace calls for a “new” relation to visibility, something that makes the novel Invisible Man so central to her project. As one may recall, Ellison’s protagonist was suspicious of all narratives that sought to reify blackness and thus disauthenticate it. To some extent, Invisible Man suggests, in a somewhat existential vein, that all forms of blackness and black masculinity are reifications. While one may not want to take Ellison’s conclusions to their limit (recall that Ellison himself chooses not to end his novel with another reification of black masculinity), we can say that Ellison’s warning

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about the importance of thinking about in/visibility are worth heeding, especially in a consideration of how questions of gender and sexuality are shaped by celebrity. While Wallace’s essay does not stress this (nor does Ellison), one of the central components in the construction of visibility or invisibility in black popular culture is sexuality. As I discuss above, there are many rigid versions of black masculinity (witness Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan) circulating in popular culture.This is not an accident, and I want to suggest, building on the work of Philip Brian Harper, that the visibility of one form of black hypermasculinity (established to police male homosexuality as well as to reinforce misogynist practices by black men) is predicated on the invisibility of other forms of black masculinity. In fact, Harper’s introductory essay to the book Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity is a discussion of the different public treatment involving the death of ABC news anchor Max Robinson of AIDS-related illnesses, and that surrounding hoop star Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was retiring from NBA basketball as a result of his contraction of HIV. Harper’s essay pays attention to these two interrelated silences: the first is how Robinson’s status as a gay man was hushed up in post-mortem discussions of his life, and the second is the emphatic declaration of Magic Johnson’s heterosexuality in the face of persistent rumours about his sexual orientation at a time when HIV/AIDS was seen as a gay men’s disease. Harper’s essay illustrates the relation between sexuality and visibility in black popular culture. Specifically, it may be possible, in light of Harper’s contributions, to suggest that the “problem of celebrity” is at the same time the production of the “closet.” This connection helps to account for the limited sphere of imagination in terms of black masculinity, both in sport and elsewhere. In other words, the production of black celebrity as resolutely heterosexual within the context of black sporting cultures creates a silence, a silence that takes the form of a closet. Contemporary sporting culture is built upon these silences, in

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spite of the fact, as Brian Pronger suggests, “a homo-erotic text can be gleaned from [its] common discourse” (quoted in Harper, 1999: 23). Thus, echoing Robert Reid-Pharr’s analysis of Farrakhanist politics, Harper argues that gay men and their presences are disavowed from the category of black masculinity as it is presently understood. Thus, the categories men and heterosexual become equated. In fact, Harper notes that this pressure, exerted by other players in the league, ultimately forced Magic Johnson from the NBA after his comeback.

Conclusion The disavowal of the possibility of black gay men in sport, as well as the silencing of black homoerotic desire in sport (which I am arguing is crucially enabled by the “problem of celebrity”), constructs black masculinity in the following two ways. First it moves it in the direction of unanimity, the notion that there can be only one version of black masculinity, with internal difference being both intolerable and unknowable. Second, and relatedly, the one version of black masculinity on offer is the one that glamorizes the aesthetics of hardness, individualism, and heteronormativity. At the local level, the equation of black men’s participation in sports with heterosexuality produces a constant ambivalence that is experienced by black gay men and those outside the confines of hypermasculinity. We must note that this ambivalence often occurs, as Wallace suggests, far from the glamour and spotlight of big-time sports.This ambivalence is a result of the way that heterosexuality and celebrity work to create a form of alienation for black males who refuse the all-encompassing grammar of masculine hardness (and even perhaps for those who accept it). In the recent anthology of writing by black gay men Fighting Words, Kevin McGruder explains how pressures of heterosexual manliness (and implicitly, celebrity) worked at the level of playground basketball. In his essay, “I Hate Basketball,” McGruder notes that “[M]y dislike for playing basket-

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ball is not an irrational hatred, and it goes beyond my fear of having my ineptitude exposed. My dislike can be traced to a collision of the ‘honeyed lies of youth’ with the bitter experiences of childhood” (1999: 54). McGruder’s frustration surrounding his alienation has major implications for rethinking black masculinities in sport. We might read the “collision” he is referring to as his disinterest with the dominant regimes of black masculinity. In McGruder’s case his comments attest to the ways that the larger discourses of fame and sporting excellence work at the psychic level for black men and the uneasy ways in which gay men interact with images of black hypermasculinity on offer in contemporary sporting cultures. Thus, coming to terms with black masculinity involves something other than a retreat to Good Boy Feminism and Farrakhanism. More specifically, it involves paying attention to what Michele Wallace calls the “problem of celebrity” and its relation to (compulsory) heterosexuality and the role of visual culture in the making of contemporary sporting life. These questions, as I have argued, are all the more pressing given the exceedingly public manner in which spectacles of black masculinity have been displayed in the last fifteen years, not the least of which are the Million Man March and the Magic Johnson incident. These and other incidences suggest that in the context of post-Civil Rights United States, and in the wake of black feminism and black queer theory, new forms of understanding black masculinity are necessary. I hope I have outlined some guidelines as to how this project may begin to be undertaken.

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3

RUNNING CLEAN: BEN JOHNSON AND THE UNMAKING OF CANADA

INTRODUCTION As an apparatus of symbolic power, (the nation) produces a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or “cultural difference” in the act of writing the nation (Homi Bhabha, 1994: 140). e can now begin to explore these processes in recent events

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in black sporting cultures in Canada. I will begin with a discussion of track and field, a sport in which Canada is

rapidly becoming an important world player. The rise to prominence of Canadian track athletes presents a challenge to conventional ways of representing Canada. As we will see, the kinds of narratives used to represent hockey (and Canada by extension) are quite different than those in track and field, with perhaps the greatest difference in the representations of temporality in the two sports. For example, while hockey is

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represented as timelessly Canadian, track and field is inflected with an itinerant temporality. In addition to this difference, the demographic nature of the two sports is worth noting. Here, the difference between track and field and hockey is great: the second part of this chapter will explore how forms of blackness are split and often used to police or expurgate other ones. In this chapter, I suggest that Canadian multiculturalism relies on racialized tropes of cleanliness and uncleanliness that are mapped onto bodies. Specifically, I argue that in sports, the body of Ben Johnson is a place where these practices achieve very poignant meaning in the national imaginary. I suggest that one of the reasons why Johnson’s body is so evocative is via a linking of his black body to steroid use, crime, and uncleanliness. Moreover, there is a parallel between the negative treatment of black bodies in nation-state practices (such as immigration and citizenship) and political economy (such as providing a cheap and flexible labour supply), and the treatment of these same bodies as dispensable within sport, as in Johnson’s case. In other words, Canadian nationalist practices of representing, and more often exploiting, non-white and First Nations peoples reverberate in the realms of political economy, cultural production, and sports. In addition, I suggest that representations of Ben Johnson can be read as elements of a national tragedy: we will see the key role played by “race” in the construction of this narrative.

Racism and State Practices In thinking about how blackness works in the national imaginary, we must contextualize the role that the state plays in reproducing racist and capitalist agendas. Without trying to suggest a one-to-one connection between state practices and the nationalist imaginary, the parallels are worth underlining. One way to think about this connection is through the slogan that I hear (and chant myself) at demonstrations in

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support of undocumented immigrant workers in Canada: “Good enough to work, good enough to stay.”This slogan highlights how a significant number of people of colour come to Canada from other countries as a cheap and flexible labour source. In turn, the slogan highlights the role of the state in often deeming this labour as being at once unnecessary and disposable. Li and Singh Bolaria (1988: 14) suggest that “[t]he oppression of racial groups is by no means a historical accident, but is rooted in the social and economic development of Canadian society.” The authors suggest that economic racism is a feature of colonialism in the Americas, and point to the historical example of plantation slavery as evidence: “Theories that attempt to account for racial domination have to begin with how an apparently irrational concept such as ‘race’ becomes rational in the process of reproducing cheap labour” (ibid.: 27). This argument is compelling if somewhat limited. In what follows I will accept its major tenets with a few qualifications. The first is that this argument does not account for other forms of identity such as sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. For example, “race” and racism also act as a form of sexual subjugation, as well as acting as the marker that makes certain bodies deemed more sexually available than others.1 In addition, this argument pays little attention to black and non-white performances in the field of politics and semiotics, which alter the basic script of racism (as I discussed previously). These interventions do not mean that racism’s overall framework recedes; they do, however, suggest that victims of racism have a role to play in either resisting or perpetuating it. Singh Bolaria and Li offer a way to think about how the iconography of blackness, crime, and nation in Canada are not random or even merely rhetorical. Media representations of the Dubin Inquiry, Ben Johnson, and Donovan Bailey must be seen in line with other circumscriptions of non-white identities as an imperative of the racist/colonialist foundations of the Canadian State. These circumscriptions are particularly

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useful in upholding a discursive entity called “Canada,” defined in opposition to First Nations, black, etc. For example, the inability to “forget” Ben Johnson, which I discuss below, can be contextualized if we look at two recent historical phenomena that underline the role of the state in reproducing racism. This latest manifestation of intense anti-immigrant racism emerges out of the late 1980s in Canada and corresponds to an economic crisis precipitated by globalization; severe economic dislocation due to the North American Free Trade Agreement; and increased neo-liberal attempts by governments both federal and provincial in Canada to “attack the deficit.” This has caused a shift in the political language in Canada that is becoming increasingly anti-immigrant, evident in the re-emergence of neo-Nazi hate groups like the Heritage Front, and the rise of the far-right Reform (now Alliance) Party. For example, antiimmigrant racism made up one of the strongest planks of the Reform Party, as well as that of the Liberal and Progressive Conservative Parties throughout the 1990s. This is seen through some of the comments of Reform’s one time immigration critic, MP Art Hanger, who has “made a national name for himself” by attacking federal immigration policies as being lenient (Globe and Mail, 31 Oct. 1994: A1). Throughout the 1990s, Reform Party policy explicitly linked immigrants with economic impoverishment of the nation. The party’s policy on immigration held that the rate of new immigrants should be cut to 150,000 per year as long as the unemployment rate is above 10 per cent (ibid.). This logic implies that capitalist economic crises such as unemployment can be solved by reducing the number of immigrants. This perpetuates the racist stereotype, contrary to documented evidence (see Noorani and Wright, 1995) that maintains that immigrants are a “drain” on the national economy; they come here and take “our” jobs, and rip off welfare. Another example of this paranoia is seen in the “McLeod Report.” This report, written by a federal immigration intelligence officer, was

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apparently commissioned in 1993 by then Ontario Liberal Party Leader, and Leader of the Opposition of the Ontario Legislature, Lyn McLeod. The report called Somalis “masters of deceit and corruption” and stated that “Our Western and primarily Christian based way of life has little meaning or relevance to these people” (Share, 18 Nov. 1993; emphasis added). These events support Singh Bolaria and Li’s argument that capitalist crises demand a kind of scapegoating of immigrants or those marked as such. This logic equates immigrants and refugees with crime, evident in calls for strict changes to the immigration regulations in 1994 by the Federal Government with the scaling down of the number of immigrants to 200,000 from 250,000 per year (Globe and Mail, 31 Oct. 1994: A1). Within this context emerges the criminalization of black masculinity as a response to national “crisis.” The criminalization of black masculinity as a response to economic crisis has been demonstrated by Stuart Hall et al. in Policing the Crisis, as well as more recently in the work of Tricia Rose (1994).2 While Hall et al. discuss Britain, and Rose discusses the United States, Canadian racism is no better. It deploys tropes of black masculine criminality in similar ways. In other words, Canadian preoccupations with law and order have historically meant preoccupations with whatever the Canadian nation-state has deemed to be the “immigrant” or “native population.”3 This criminalization is exemplified in the recent paranoia over the deportation of two young black criminals. The first is O’Neil Grant, who, along with Gary Francis and Lawrence Brown (both of whom are also black), was charged with the murder of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis in the “Just Desserts” robbery. The second is Clinton Gayle, who was recently convicted to two life sentences for shooting and killing Todd Baylis, a Metro police officer. There are a few important points worth noting here. The first is that both incidents occurred in 1994, and were followed by extreme paranoia, whipped up by the mainstream media, the government, and the Metro police. The fact that both men were of

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Jamaican origin and had previous criminal records only heightened the hysteria.There was a rise in calls for a “crackdown” on deportations and a rise in the rhetoric of immigrants as criminals. For example, Sergio Marchi, then federal immigration minister, claimed in the aftermath of the Baylis killing (August 1994) that it was time that the government improved its enforcement of deportation orders of suspected criminals (Calgary Herald, 25 Aug. 1994: A14). These incidents provide a sense of the political and economic context of Canada in the late 1980s and 1990s and will inform both this discussion and that of the following chapter. These factors provide some explanation for how and why Ben Johnson becomes the nation’s “ghost” in media representations. In short, the primarily “itinerant” presence of black bodies in Canada—often felt to have been brought here as disposable labour—means that their right to be Canadian is always in question. Therefore, calls for deportation are often the first response to a whole series of factors that may or may not involve wrongdoing by black folks. In that sense, the reading of black masculinity as disposable and itinerant is indispensable to an understanding of Ben Johnson’s place in the national imaginary.

Can’t Forget Ben Until his positive test for the use of anabolic steroids (stanozolol) in September 1988, a performance-enhancing substance banned by the International Track and Field Association, Ben Johnson was the most successful track athlete in Canadian history, and one of the most successful in the world in recent history. He had established several world records, both for indoor and outdoor competitions, and had established a worldwide persona that was reflected by his sizable endorsement contracts with several companies based in Western Europe, Japan, and North America. Johnson achieved his ultimate success at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. There, in front of

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over seventy thousand fans and a worldwide television audience in the billions, Johnson ran the 100-metre sprint in a world record time of 9.79 seconds, beating his competitor and American rival Carl Lewis by 13/100ths of a second, an unprecedented margin of victory (Montreal Gazette, 24 Sept. 1988: A1, 2). This victory, Canada’s first Olympic sprinting gold medal since the 1930s, was met with euphoria by many Canadians at the time. This euphoria was shattered when, two days later, it was revealed that Johnson tested positive in a compulsory urine test after the race for stanazolol (Montreal Gazette, 27 Sept. 1988: A1, 2). Afterwards, according to the Montreal Gazette, “retribution was swift and severe.” This included the retraction of the gold medal and a statement by Jean Charest, then Canada’s sports minister, that Johnson would never be able to compete for Canada again. In addition, Johnson’s world record was stricken from the record books. Third, there was a statement from then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney acknowledging that this was “a moment of great sorrow for all Canadians” (Montreal Gazette, 27 Sept. 1988: A1, 2). But perhaps the most lasting and insidious form of “retribution” regarded Johnson’s “citizenship.” In what became known as a national infamy, there was a progression in the representation of Ben Johnson from one of a “Canadian hero” in victory to one of a “Jamaican” after disqualification.This process was encapsulated by the editorial cartoon of 13 October 1988, in the Globe and Mail, which featured three identical images of Ben Johnson but a different subtitle under each one. The first read: “Canadian Wins Gold Medal”; the second read “JamaicanCanadian Accused of Steroid Use”; and the third read “Jamaican Stripped of Gold Medal” (A7). This cartoon reflected how Johnson’s Jamaican heritage had not been mentioned until he tested positive for steroid use. In coverage afterwards, Johnson becomes progressively less Canadian as his status as a “lawbreaker” is revealed. The following passage from the Globe and Mail also reveals the change in attitudes toward Johnson following his disqualification:

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Angella Issajenko, an Olympic (black Canadian) sprinter from Mr. Johnson’s home club, Mazda Optimists, told reporters in Seoul, “A white (Canadian) team member came up to where the Jamaicans were sitting and said, ‘You can have Ben back now, he is not Canadian now’” (Globe and Mail, 13 Oct. 1988: A7). This movement, or the discursive passage of Johnson’s body from “our own” to “Jamaican,” mirrors the kind of troubles that black folks often receive in relation to the Canadian nation-state, whether in the form of harassment at borders, police harassment, or in employment situations. This context is central to understanding the portrayal of Donovan Bailey’s 100-metre sprint victory at the World Championships of Track and Field, in August 1995. Moreover, another incident of drugs and sport, specifically those of Ross Rebagliati, is also impossible to think about without referencing what happened to Ben Johnson, as I discuss below.

Tragedy, Sports Writing, and Nation While narratives of cleanliness and purity are indispensable to understanding the place Ben Johnson occupies in the national imaginary, the role of tragedy in such narratives is also crucial. It helps here to consider the nature of tragedy, and how it works through the representations of nationalism in sports. Before considering tragedy specifically, it is helpful to consider the role of sports writers within such a constellation, given that sports writing is highly influential to how we think about sport. While no major study exists on sports writing per se, it is important to make some preliminary claims about how it operates as a genre and what that means for understanding “race,” sport, and nation. Sports writing within the print media is highly hyperbolic. It attempts to make human beings larger than life, with a tendency toward extreme

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opinions and high drama. Moreover, sports writing often promotes a very Manichean view of the world, with clear demarcations between good and evil, rich and poor, and so on. Another important point is that the biggest stories are the ones about big games, but also the ones that are controversial. An example of this is how immediately following his failed drug test, Ben Johnson left Seoul to return to his home in Toronto, via New York’s La Guardia Airport. A security officer, who had worked at the airport for over thirty years, swore that he had never seen such a massive throng of reporters and onlookers as had gathered for Johnson’s arrival in New York. As a figure involved in a major sporting controversy, Johnson’s appeal was larger than that of such major world figures as Mikhail Gorbachev, Fidel Castro, etc. While it is true that this interest was to some extent organic to the events, we cannot overlook the role that sports writers played in hyping this event. Often, the kinds of stories sports writers attempt to represent, in addition to those that grip the sporting public, are those containing the most pathos and drama. One of the most common of these stories is tragedy. Lewis Gordon summarizes the relation between the tragic protagonist and the community as follows: For the community’s demands to emerge, the kind of rightful action that must emerge is the reconstitution of justice. In other words, regardless of the characters’ points of view, the world must be restored to a certain order. The tragedy in tragedies is therefore that the “innocence” of the characters who occupy a wrongful place in the drama is ultimately irrelevant. Thus, the tragic protagonist finds himself [sic] guilty by virtue of deed and circumstance, not intent, and finds himself [sic] suffering, ironically, for the sake of justice. The tragic drama cleanses the community of its own evasions. Justice is tragically restored (1996: 302; emphasis added).

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Gordon’s reflections are helpful in thinking about how Ben Johnson was initially received and treated. In fact, this description almost literally explains what happened to him: although he clearly did commit a “transgression,” as we know, he was not alone. However, it was Johnson who became the scapegoat, not his coaches, etc. What is important to stress here is how the components of tragedy are racialized, i.e., what are the meanings of “justice” and “guilt” within a racist culture4 that ultimately makes these categories illegible or highly distorted? For example, the community’s demand for justice, as well as the desire to turn the hero or heroine into a scapegoat, have a double resonance in relation to blackness, whereby black folks are always already read as guilty. In that sense, recalling the racialized foundations of tragedy helps us make sense of the gravity of what happened to Johnson. This backdrop is important to remember when we consider how Johnson’s name appears in nationalist discourses after Seoul. For while the immediacy of the event has waned, there remains a persistent desire to raise Johnson’s name as a “ghost” that haunts the nation, as we will see.

Ben Johnson and the Boundaries of Canada In the wake of Ross Rebagliati’s recent positive test for marijuana use at the Nagano Olympics, Canadian Olympic Association (COA) officials were bombarded with questions about drug use, role models, and the possible appeal of the decision to strip Rebagliati of his gold medal. One of the more prominent questions was: “Is this incident comparable to Ben Johnson?” In other words, was Rebagliati’s transgression in 1998 linked to Johnson’s a decade earlier?5 The answer that came from various COA brass and from former Olympians such as Silken Laumann (athletes asked for their opinions by sports reporters) was an emphatic “No.” Richard (Dick) Pound, the Canadian representative on the International Olympic Committee, looked incredulously at media types who dared to

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suggest a connection. Toronto Star columnist Dave Perkins wrote, “This isn’t steroids.This isn’t cheating.This wasn’t Ben Johnson—although the initial punishment pending appeal, medal stripped and banishment from the Olympics—is the same” (Toronto Star, 11 Feb. 1998: C1). Federal sports officials ruled out a link between the two events and in fact lobbied to have Rebagliati’s gold medal reinstated. Reaction in the federal Parliament was the same.While in 1988, as we saw above,“retribution was swift and severe” for Ben, Rebagliati received different treatment.6 In fact, he was defended by prominent MPs like Sheila Copps, who in effect argued that smoking a little pot was not so bad (Toronto Star, 12 Feb. 1998: A6). While the double standard meted out to Rebagliati and Johnson is worth noting, there is something else at play that betrays something far more pernicious about Canadian nationalism. In addition to the bizarre way that Liberal cabinet ministers defended, or even trivialized pot smoking, another interesting facet of this event comes to mind that suggests something crucial about Canadian identity. It points to the role that invoking Ben Johnson, or rather the “affair” of Ben Johnson, plays in constructing a Canadian identity. In other words, it shows the importance of the construction of the “other” as necessary to make Canada one. Both the questions asked by reporters and the responses, all of which were negative, are an exercise in how to construct a “proper” Canadian identity. These examples suggest how important invoking negative invocations of Ben Johnson are to the construction of the interior of Canada. Thus, this strategic use of Ben Johnson may point to the marker or limit of what is “Canada” and “Canadian.”

Canada and Its Ghosts In the Rebagliati case, invoking Ben Johnson negatively is what makes “us” Canadian; Johnson’s body is the black backdrop against which

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other athletes often get illuminated. Bhabha suggests that in constructing the nation, the nation constructs its double, or its ghost.7 While Bhabha does not emphasize the pun, I cannot help but think of the historical confluence between black folks and ghosts in the Enlightenment/colonialist imagination. In the Canadian context, the ghost is often First Nations peoples or non-white Canadians. In Canadian sport and popular discourse, this process, I want to argue, is mapped onto Ben Johnson’s body. Much like the racist assaults on immigrants as the cause of all social ills, this doubling or ghost-making process shows what has to be kept out of bounds in order to keep Canada “clean.” In the questions surrounding Rebagliati, Johnson’s name is a flashpoint of memory. It is brought up, then summarily dropped. All comparisons between Johnson and Rebagliati were dismissed out of hand. Dick Pound’s response suggests a process of writing the nation that has no room for “ghosts” and/or “cheaters.” In other words, Pound’s reaction may be evidence of the threat that Johnson’s name poses if it is allowed to stick around. The demand to distance oneself from Ben Johnson is proof of the performative acts required in the drawing of Canadian boundaries to exclude the “outsider” or minority. This example suggests a paradox of Canadian myth-making. He is not forgotten as such, but rather what happens, in addition to his body being marked as exterior, is a forgetful remembering. Johnson is only remembered enough to be forgotten, or displaced to the border or beyond.8 Forgetful remembering cannot be read in isolation against other readings of black masculinity, such as that of O’Neil Grant and Clinton Gayle. Locating this process together within the current crisis of Canadian nationalism offers clues to discerning how racist nationalism works in the aftermath of post-colonial shifts. In addition, it is indispensable to thinking about representations of Donovan Bailey.

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Donovan Bailey, Ben Johnson, and Forgetful Remembering Since 1995, when he won the World Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Göteborg, Sweden, Bailey has been hounded by reporters wanting to compare/link him to Johnson.9 The following quotes come from the August 1995 media coverage of Bailey’s 100-metre sprint victory. There are three features to this coverage. First, Bailey is not understood by himself, but represented vis-à-vis the “forgetting” of Johnson; second, Bailey and Johnson are represented as oppositional; third, this opposition is framed within a Manichean rhetoric of cleanliness, whereby Bailey is represented as “clean,” to Johnson, who is represented as “unclean.” Throughout the coverage, Donovan Bailey, the gold medal winner, is unable to stand alone in the representation; he is rhetorically linked to Ben Johnson. The fact that Johnson’s career had been over for quite some time at that point (he retired in 1993) is somehow not enough to remove him from the representations. Moreover, in reading the headlines and the quotations below, it is important to keep in mind Bhabha’s discussion of the ghost of nationalism. The spectral quality of the representations is shocking. Major headlines from Toronto dailies represented Bailey and his vic-

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tory in relation to Johnson. The Toronto Star headline on the cover of the sports page reads: “Canada’s Bailey outruns world” yet the subtitle of the headline reads: “But fastest human still can’t escape Johnson’s shadow” (Toronto Star, 7 Aug. 1995: B1; emphasis added).The Toronto Sun cover headline reads: “Canada Can Finally Forget Ben Johnson” (Toronto Sun, 7 Aug. 1995; emphasis added). In the first page of the sports section of the same newspaper, the headline reads: “1-2 punch to Ben’s legacy” (ibid.; emphasis added). An article in the Globe and Mail is entitled: “Echo from past chases new heroes” (Globe and Mail, 7 Aug. 1995: D1; emphasis added). Moreover, only in the Toronto Star sports page is Bailey’s name part of the headline, yet even there, Johnson’s name is mentioned in the subtitle. Second, Bailey and Johnson are represented oppositionally. In one instance, Bailey is upheld as a more amicable athlete than Johnson.The Toronto Sun reports, “Bailey, like the disgraced Johnson, was born in Jamaica. Like Johnson, he is big, strong, and muscular. But in contrast to the sullen Johnson, Bailey is personable” (Toronto Sun, 7 Aug. 1995: Sports section; emphasis added). The Globe and Mail piece establishes the opposition in a rhetoric of sprinting styles: “His [Bailey’s] race at the world championships in Göteborg, Sweden, was in many ways the polar opposite of that other fellow’s [Johnson], he of the famous flying start (Globe and Mail, 7 Aug. 1995: D1; emphasis added). The Toronto Star piece does not explicitly position the sprinters as oppositional, but it does establish throughout that Bailey is tired of the constant comparisons with Johnson: “The question about Johnson’s legacy delivered to Bailey at the post-race news conference, in Göteborg, Sweden, won’t be the last” (Toronto Star, 7 Aug. 1995: B1). Randy Starkman’s comment in the Toronto Star illustrates the process of forgetful remembering. In contrast to Rebagliati, and due to a racist imaginary that links all black bodies, Bailey is consistently linked to Johnson. Starkman’s quote, in an ironic note of self-fulfilling prophecy, asserts that these questions will never go away. In some

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respects, it can be read as a warning to Bailey that, in fact, the nation will constantly invoke Ben’s name as a racist attempt to denigrate or expel him. Oppositional positioning and the inability to mention Bailey unto himself leads to a third feature of the reporting. This is that the texts rely on a narrative of redemption and a rhetoric of cleanliness. The desire to link blacks to uncleanliness is a longstanding figure of colonial discourse, or representing blackness in colonialism. Frantz Fanon’s work has been very influential10: In Europe the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul. In the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis, the Negro—or, if one prefers, the color black—symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine (1967: 191; emphasis added). Print media usage of this discourse is what helps to establish Ben Johnson as the epitome of evil and uncleanliness. The effect of such devices renders Bailey’s body as not that of a sprinter but rather one frozen within the category of eraser or cleansing agent. His victory is understood as “erasing the shame” of the “tarnished” image of Canadian sprinting and, by extension, Canada. This is done through language that links Johnson to the Seoul Olympics and drug use. Starkman stresses that Bailey is a clean runner, quoting Bailey’s manager (not Bailey, incidentally): “‘He has to run clean and he does run clean,’ [Bailey Manager Adrian] Keith said. ‘He’s probably facing more [drug] testing than anyone because of Ben Johnson’” (Toronto Star, 7 Aug. 1995: B1). In the Toronto Sun, Bailey’s victory is described as “erasing the bitter aftertaste of Johnson’s steroid-tainted run at Seoul in 1988” (Toronto Sun, 7 Aug. 1995: Sports section; emphasis added). The Globe and Mail piece achieves the linking of Johnson with drug use by neologistic means: “Mention that other fellow [Johnson], he whose

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name will not appear in this column, and they know instantly as well. It has become like one long word that turns up in every language: Canadadrugcheatben.” (Globe and Mail, 7 Aug. 1995: D1). If Bailey’s body is an eraser, by contrast, Johnson’s body and legacy are an impurity. Johnson is that which must be forgotten or disavowed; he is referred to as “shame,” a “spectre,” and a “long, dark shadow.”11 In addition, this myth-making process is not merely the preserve of print media reporters.Witness the following definition of Ben Johnson in a recent article by Steven Jackson: Furthermore, the tarnished legacy of Ben Johnson continues to influence the lives of Canadians, especially those black athletes who are following in the former sprinter’s footsteps .... It would appear that, despite all the attempts at damage control including the Dubin inquiry, Canada continues to be haunted by the Ben Johnson saga (1998: 23; emphasis added).

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In sum, linking Johnson’s body to impurity, or ghostliness, is necessary in order to establish the nation’s interior, or “Canada,” as clean. It is a necessary outcome of the whitening of the nation.12 As cited above, this practice accords with linking blackness to uncleanliness in the

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racist imaginary and, moreover, such a myth betrays the extent to which notions of Canadian nationalism are linked to white supremacy. Furthermore, given the oppositional way that Bailey’s body is represented, it illustrates the colonialist practice of using some black bodies to discipline other ones. In addition, it is worthwhile to consider how the concept of cleanliness is linked to drugs, “race,” and crime.

Commissioning Canada: The Dubin Inquiry, Innocence, and “Race”

I still get asked in interviews, “Is there racism in this country?” Unlike the United States, where there is at least an admission of the fact that racism exists and has a history, in this country one is faced with a stupefying innocence (1994: 178; empasis added). The above quote from Dionne Brand links notions of innocence, racism, and whiteness in Canada. It allows us to think about how a racialized concept of innocence is used in addition to forgetful remembering as a device for nation-making in Canada. In what we could call “exhibit A” to Brand’s quote, I offer the following quote by Stephen Brunt of the Globe and Mail on the morning after Bailey’s 1995 victory at Göteborg: “But what happened seven years ago [the Johnson disqualification] was like the unbearding of Santa Claus.Try as hard as you can to make it the way it was, and it’s still impossible to reclaim innocence” (Globe and Mail, 7 Aug. 1995: D1; emphasis added). I offer Brunt’s quote as “exhibit A” in support of Brand’s comments because Brunt’s deployment of “Canadian innocence” works the same way as denials of racism. Brand’s quote shows to what extent a constructed notion of innocence, or innocence as a form of identity, is a hallmark of Canadiana.13 In order to sustain Canadian nationalism, there must be an innocence about racism in this country, an innocence about its horrors, foundations, and legacies.

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Brand notes how Canadian “innocence” is built in contrast to the comparative “guilt” of the United States. Brunt’s quotation is an example of how the projection of guilt works in Canada. However, here the guilty party is not the United States but Ben Johnson, or in Brunt’s words, “that other fellow.” Such a move enables “Canada” to equal pure, pristine, etc. By extension then, the non-innocent, or guilty ones, exist outside of “Canada,” i.e., outside of the law. This is clearly how Brunt imagines Ben Johnson—as an outlaw, i.e., someone who has transgressed and impurified the Canadian body politic. Thus, Brunt’s linking of Johnson’s body to the fictional end of innocence for Canada remaps racism onto the bodies of its victims. Moreover, there is a temporal element as well that involves the claim that the period before 1988, before stanazolol, was the Golden Age of Canadian sport, or track and field specifically. It allows for an erasure of histories of racism and their replacement by mythologies of black invasions.14 In addition, there is a gendered element to the construction of innocence that is central to the nation-making project. Brunt’s highly sexualized rhetoric and his linking of Johnson to defilement help to name Johnson as an example of what Davis (1983) calls “the black rapist.” However, unlike Davis, Brunt is unaware of the mythical quality of this designation, which was the claim that black rapists were an invention of white racists in the United States as a response to a loss of political and economic power.15 This pattern continues if we briefly consider the Dubin Inquiry into steroid use among athletes in Canada that was convened after Johnson’s positive drug test in Seoul in 1988. I suggest we read the Dubin Inquiry as an exercise in contemporary re-drawings of nation in Canada to discipline immigrant bodies and to construct Canada as an innocent, crime-free zone. While little scholarly work has been done on the Dubin Inquiry, John McAloon’s (1990) work provides a place to begin. McAloon argues that the Dubin Inquiry, while not being a court of law per se, had the

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effect of “trying” certain individuals and “passing judgment” upon them in the realm of popular culture. McAloon also claims that such an organization had the effect of making steroid use in Canadian amateur sport a problem of certain incorrigible individuals, as opposed to being the systemic problem that it is. He notes that the focus on individuals is worth stressing given that it established the innocence of larger sports institutions, such as the federal Sports Ministry and SportCanada. Such institutions, which should have taken their fair share of the apportioned blame, emerged as “innocent” given the Dubin Inquiry’s character as a “Real Life Soap Opera” (1990: 59) and its personalizing of systematic crises. Further, McAloon argues that the Dubin Inquiry was an exercise in the production of melodrama as a device to achieve this: ... the Dubin Inquiry created and offered the public an eagerly consumed melodrama .... Rather than some straightforward exercise of unequal power relations by political authorities anxious to protect themselves, ... melodramatization as a specific process and effect is here claimed to be the crucial means by which the state went free (1990: 43). McAloon correctly points out that this is not merely a trial about individuals; it is more precisely about an individual. Despite all the hype, pomp, and circumstance, the Dubin Inquiry was a public way of making Ben Johnson accountable for his “sins.” He writes: The frame of the judicial trial insisted that there yet be one principal defendant and no matter how long he was held offstage, no matter how many times it was insisted that Johnson was not the sole target, no matter how much more dramatic other stories turned out to be, the public and the media would not let him abandon his central role (1990: 53).

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Once again, there is another paradox at work here involving Johnson, blackness, and the Canadian “public.”16 Similar to the process of forgetful remembering, this paradox involves the Dubin Inquiry. In spite of its official narration as an inquiry into the use of performanceenhancing drugs, that is not what it was. This spectacle is about Ben Johnson. McAloon’s analysis of the Dubin Inquiry reflects the obsession many Canadians had with with Ben Johnson. While McAloon’s argument is sound, he does not consider the question of “race” and how it works in the making of Canada’s self-image. Without a discussion of “race,” McAloon’s analysis is guilty of the same shortcomings that he correctly attributes to the Dubin Inquiry: it prioritizes individuals as opposed to systems and structures in describing the Johnson phenomenon. Moreover, the obsession with Ben Johnson, and why he appears as the nation’s ghost, has no systematic theory, and it makes us unable historically and politically to locate why the Dubin Inquiry took the form that it did. In contrast, my reading of the Dubin Inquiry suggests that it was a place not only to let the state appear blameless, but it was possible only through the construction of Johnson as a black man who was guilty of failing to live up to his role as either a “Canadian role model” or “law abiding immigrant.” My claim that the Dubin Inquiry was more about policing black bodies than about the question of steroid use is backed up by the Inquiry’s redundancy. The reason I call the Dubin Inquiry redundant is because the only proof revealed in the Inquiry was the fact of rampant steroid use among athletes in highlevel athletics. However, this is not news. For years, many sporting insiders, athletes, and coaches have claimed that at high levels of competition, all athletes are on a regimen of performance-enhancing drugs of different kinds. These performance-enhancing drugs are often illegal. While this knowledge has existed mostly as rumours circulating among people “in the know,” there are plenty of instances where hardcore “evidence” was presented.

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One such example noted in the Dubin Inquiry was the testimony by Desai Williams. Williams, a former Canadian Olympian who ran with Ben Johnson at the Mazda Optimist Track Club and who trained under the same coach, Charlie Francis, admitted during the Inquiry to using steroids. Williams’s justification was that steroid use was/is a regular component of world-class track and field (Toronto Star, 13 Apr. 1989: A17). In addition to Williams, Francis and Johnson, among others, testified something to the effect that “everybody” was doing it, and the only way for Canadian athletes to be competitive internationally was to “join the club.”17 What is interesting and telling about the Inquiry’s role in the production of Canada, and the production of innocence as a form of Canadian identity, is that in spite of testimony from people like Williams and others, there remains a persistent belief that world-class athletes can run clean and win, which helped to establish the supposed “necessity” of the Inquiry. In other words, the legitimacy of the Dubin Inquiry relied on a forgetting of the fact that it is almost impossible to run clean and win at world-class levels and, moreover, that Canadian athletes are not alone in taking steroids.18 Such a wilful denial of contemporary realities is seen in the testimony provided by Abbie Hoffman. At the time of the Inquiry, Hoffman was the director of SportCanada, the body overseeing amateur athletics in Canada. Responding to questions about the use of drugs among worldclass athletes, Hoffman stated that “[p]eople are too quick to condemn athletes as steroid users when hard work and training might account for size gains and performance improvements” (McAloon, 1990: 58). Hoffman’s naivete, or should we say innocence, in the face of the preponderance of steroids in international track and field is astonishing.19 Hoffman’s insistence on innocence has little meaning outside of the larger politics of “race” and nation in Canada. In her statements to the inquiry, she noted that officials at SportCanada were “only vaguely aware of rampant rumours of steroid use among Canadian athletes”

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(McAloon, 1990: 58). Whether her ignorance is feigned or not, her comments are crucial here. If the official position is that you can run clean and win, in spite of evidence to the contrary, then the Dubin Inquiry can have only one conclusion: punish the “cheaters.” The “innocence” of Hoffman, Charest, and others establishes the frame of the Inquiry and its ultimate cultural meaning. What this amounts to is the redundancy of the Dubin Inquiry. More to the point, given that the Inquiry told us little that we did not know, we are left with no option but to conclude that the Dubin Inquiry was designed for nothing else but the following: to name Johnson as a “scapegoat.” Thus, the Dubin Inquiry is an important marker in the history of “race” and nation in Canada. Its effect on the national imaginary is to once again name the “immigrant” (in this case, black masculinity) as being outside the law. Within the current context of racism in Canada, the Dubin Inquiry helps institutionalize a discourse of the cheating immigrant, more specifically the cheating Jamaican, in sporting cultures and beyond. Given how Ben Johnson has become the “ghost” of the paranoid nationalist, the Inquiry marks the institutional and archival justification for the tropes of spectrality that have come to define Ben Johnson: “shame,” “spectre,” “ghost,” etc. It acts to reinforce longstanding beliefs that immigrants haunt and pollute the body politic and it acts to inform the work of media and, as we will see, other athletes. Thus, the Inquiry institutionalizes another temporality of nation that the figure of Johnson represents. The threat of this temporality is what must be kept in mind as we move to the next section, since it is here that I discuss Donovan Bailey’s role within this particular iconography. In other words, how is Donovan Bailey, represented as he has been, performatively dealing with these representations? For while it is true that the media have a great deal of power in shaping the discourse of nation, the fact is that this is not a hermetic process. In fact, what Bhabha would call performative re-mappings of nation can come from a number of sources: one of these sources is the people on the ground. But superstars

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like Bailey also have an impact with his popularity as well as the predominance of sports media within popular culture more generally. The following section deals with these issues and tries to suggest what it means to the performance of black masculinities in Canada.

Bailey’s Performance in Making (Other) Canadas Not surprisingly, these actions, and the use of Johnson as a negative image against which to write the nation, are not limited to white folks. In this sense whiteness becomes an identity—which is to say, it is not reducible to skin colour. Whiteness, as many have argued, is a set of cultural practices designed to reproduce racist notions of superiority and inferiority. This is seen if we take a look at Donovan Bailey’s subjective actions regarding media positioning of Ben Johnson and Bailey’s own status as a hero. What I will show in this section is that Bailey himself appears to be performing this Canadian racism in order to secure his own identity. Bailey’s performance tells us about the ability of Canadian racism to inscribe itself on black and white subjects and the way that construction of a kind of macho Canadian identity is predicated on beating up on black folks. Bailey’s post-Atlanta performance suggests a partial desire to distance himself from Johnson and, in turn, the limits of the nation. Bailey’s original attitude when asked repeatedly about Ben was often solidarity toward him and a defiant Jamaican pride (which took some of us back to another era). For example, immediately after winning the gold medal in the men’s 100-metre sprint in Atlanta in 1996, Bailey spoke live to National Broadcasting Corporation reporters and reminded everyone that he was a Jamaican and proud of it. Further, when asked about how he identifies nationally by the Toronto Star immediately after the victory, his response was: “‘I’m Jamaican, man,’ said Bailey in a post-race press conference. ‘I’m Jamaican first. You’ve got to understand that. That’s where I was born. That’s home. You can’t take

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that away from me. I’m a Jamaican-born Canadian sprinter’” (28 July 1996: D1). In addition to this exuberance, recall that in the lead-up to the Atlanta Games, in a Sports Illustrated article by Michael Farber, Bailey openly criticized Canadian racism and defended Ben Johnson by claiming that Canada was “as blatantly racist as the United States” (Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1996). Bailey’s post-race performance is a significant moment in Canadian track and field and in the history of post-colonial Canada. His proud display of Jamaican identity and his insistence on being “Jamaican first” shows the extent to which Bailey was, in fact, identifying with Ben Johnson in opposition to the racist press, government, and public who scapegoated Johnson. Moreover, his final sentence, as reported in the Toronto Star, suggests he is signifyin(g)20 on the racism meted out to Johnson and the illusion of citizenship and heroic status that was bestowed upon Johnson. Recall that in the aftermath of Ben Johnson’s positive drug test in Seoul, his identity moved from being “Canadian” to “Jamaican-Canadian” to “Jamaican-born.”21 Bailey’s dis-identification—a reclaiming of the pejorative term “Jamaican-born”—is a gesture aimed at solidarity between himself and Ben Johnson.22 Moreover, it is a way of taking power away from state officials to name and identify blackness at their whims. However, in the aftermath of such strident anti-racism, it appears that Bailey may have changed his tune. At the Canadian outdoor track and field championships in Vancouver in 1997, Bailey responded to questions about Johnson’s possible return to track with a dismissal of his countryman. Bailey told a news conference: “Ben should just get a real job.” Such a response differs from the previous gestures of solidarity or of the gestures of ambivalence regarding Johnson, which Bailey felt were necessary in order to stake out his name to a media and public continually linking him to Johnson. In the post-race news conference at Atlanta, Bailey noted, “I did it for myself, for my family, for my country—so I wouldn’t say it was just to revoke the past” (Toronto Star, 28 July 1996: D1).

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In addition to disparaging Johnson, Bailey has been wont to express brash anti-American sentiments toward his rivals. After losing the 100meter sprint in the World Championship in Athens to American Maurice Greene in the summer of 1998, Bailey was far from gracious in defeat. According to news reports, Bailey rolled his eyes at Maurice Greene’s repeated gestures to thank God for his victory. And when it was Bailey’s turn to speak, he mocked Greene and told reporters that he was thankful to God for being allowed the opportunity to answer questions. What is noteworthy about Bailey’s shift is that it betrays the traces of a classic Canadian nationalism—bashing Americans and bashing immigrants (or those who “look” like them). Far from being different, what is disappointing in Bailey’s case is that what seemed like a possible “multiculturalist” masculinity, where he rejected the terms of official Canadian nationalism and tried to do something different, has given way to the same old clichés. Bailey’s quasi-secure status as a Canadian hero has translated into distancing himself from Ben (or just dissing Ben), and a crass and superficial anti-Americanism (which may be read as anti-black as well). What is instructive here is that Bailey seems to be responding to the fear that occurs if Ben’s name sticks around. If Ben’s name sticks, you may become less “Canadian.” Ironically, or perhaps not, Bailey is responding to the same panic that motivates conservative nationalists such as Dick Pound and others.

Conclusion Racism continues to inscribe itself in the national sporting imaginary. In track and field, where many big stars are black and male, the way that track is represented is very different from hockey. Whereas hockey is represented as the timeless and essentially Canadian core, track and field suggests a different temporality. This temporality is influenced by a number of factors, not the least of which is the influence of nationstate practices on blackness and its demand that it exist as a flexible

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labour supply, as well as on Canadian fantasies of cleanliness, as witnessed through the analysis of the Dubin Inquiry. These discourses manifest themselves in a continued (re)making of Ben Johnson as the “ghost” that haunts the nation. The inability to forget Ben, or the injunction to forgetfully remember him, marks the limits of the nation. Remembering/forgetting Ben marks the nation’s boundaries and separates good from evil, pure from impure, “Canada” from “immigrant.” Donovan Bailey’s performance is therefore a very important piece of the puzzle. Bailey’s performance does not mitigate the racism of the press and public, nor does it in any way lessen Ben Johnson’s status as a “ghost.” In fact, Bailey’s dissing of Ben is what reproduces a Manicheism between a good blackness and an unCanadian one. Once again there is an attempt to incorporate blackness into the nation or the national landscape, if you will. However, what happens is that one kind of blackness becomes Canadian at the same time as another is pushed to the border, deported. Injunctions by black Canadian sprinters to run clean are a gesture at erasing Ben Johnson. Donovan Bailey’s performance is evidence that to be Canadian is to diss Ben or to forget him. In a sense, forgetting Ben is similar to forgetting social problems and the possibility of resistance. But from an anti-racist perspective, this does not have to be the way it goes.To begin, one way to resist racism is to remember Ben differently; that is, to remember the hypocrisy and maliciousness of state officials. In addition, this would also entail a refusal of the racist demand to diss Ben in order to be granted citizenship or rights to the nation. Refusing to invoke Ben in such a fashion opens the door to imagining Canada differently, as was witnessed by Bailey’s brief period of solidarity. Such an imagination opens the door to a sustained critique of Canadian racism and capitalism. Moreover, such an imagination offers the chance to develop creative spaces from where we can understand blackness differently, which is the second point in my anti-racist cri-

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tique. In other words, it must allow us to develop strategies that continually resist the conflation of all black bodies into one—in this case the conflation of Bailey into Johnson and vice versa.Writing the nation differently means developing a way of conceiving and figuring blackness, or black subjectivity, which would resist monosyllabic or Manichean versions of blackness. Resisting Manicheism, the good-evil dichotomy, is crucial, since the demand to be Canadian often rests on such binaries in order to secure itself.

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chapter

4

WHO GOT NEXT?: RAPTOR MORALITY AND BLACK PUBLIC MASCULINITY IN TORONTO1

INTRODUCTION: Raptorspace

The end of the essential black subject also entails a recognition that the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed and re-crossed by the categories of class, gender and ethnicity (Stuart Hall, 1988: 28). n this chapter, I develop previous themes with a focus on basket-

I

ball. There are a couple of key areas in which this chapter differs from the previous one. First, the shift from discussing track and

field to basketball involves considering primarily individual sports to team sports. In addition, it involves considering differences in the

corporate character of both sports. At the highest level in track and field,

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the emphasis is not on leagues and teams so much as it is on individual stars and national teams. In basketball, like other high-profile team sports such as hockey and football, the emphasis instead is on leagues and teams. While these two differences are more generic, the following are particularly important in terms of the study of black masculinities in Canada. First, the kind of blackness at work in track and field is a largely Caribbean-inflected blackness. Moreover, it is safe to say that a Caribbean presence in track and field is, in spite of the media’s discourses (see previous chapter), a more home-grown sport than many think.2 This presence seems to meet the nation head on, and from there, there are attempts through the media and certain state officials to circumscribe and Canadian-ize these identities. The case of basketball is somewhat different: basketball’s imagined home is among black populations in the United States. What this means is that a discussion of basketball must consider how blackness has been received in relation to official nation-state practices in Canada. These practices are similar to those we see in track and field, but equally important are the discussions of hybridity within blackness as the aesthetic and politics of a blackness that is highly mediated by the National Basketball Association migrate northwards.These movements have profound consequences for understanding the role of black masculinities in (re)colouring the national landscape.3 As a way to begin a discussion on this (re)colouring of Canada, I want to draw attention to two phenomena in the recent history of basketball in Toronto. This first phenomena, which we may call a “vignette,” is a page that appeared in the Toronto Star on 6 December 1995. The page featured two stories wherein black men figure as the main characters. However, their realities, we are told, could not have been more different. On the top part of the page is a picture of Clinton Gayle, who—as we saw in the previous chapter—was convicted of shooting and killing Metropolitan Toronto Police Constable Todd Baylis.The story was about

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the previous day’s trial hearing, which featured the Metro Police Officer Michele Leone, Baylis’s partner the night he was killed, pointing his finger at Gayle and positively identifying him as Baylis’s murderer. The Toronto Star noted that Leone’s arm “shook” and his “finger quivered” as he pointed to Gayle and identified him. Moreover, during the moment that Leone identified Gayle, “the accused [Gayle] sat impassive in the prisoner’s dock” (6 Dec. 1995: A6). Beneath this story is another picture of a black man. It is that of Sheldon Aberdeen, who died at his Toronto high school in Toronto4 of “an apparent heart condition” after a basketball practice.The Aberdeen story describes the funeral held the day before. Moreover, the writer notes how, at the funeral, Aberdeen had been named an honourary member of the city’s new National Basketball Association (NBA) team, the Toronto Raptors.5 James Williams, co-ordinator of the Raptors’ community outreach, presented Aberdeen’s family with a letter detailing such. In addition, the story noted that Aberdeen’s family was presented with “an official basketball, signed by all Raptor players” (ibid.). The second phenomena has been discussed recently by Andrew Thornton,6 and involves a curious dialogue between geography, politics, blackness, and history. Thornton pointed out the irony in the fact that the site of the annual Raptorfest (a 3-on-3 tournament, hosted by the Raptors, which is largely becoming one of the most important [black] sports spectacles in Toronto) on University Avenue is in front of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). This is the same stretch of turf that saw massive anti-racist resistance by members of Toronto’s black community against the ROM’s 1991 staging of the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit.This protest went on for several days and culminated in the violent arrests of eleven protesters, all of whom were black.7 In beginning with these vignettes, I do not wish to speculate on the intentions of either the Raptors or the designers at the Toronto Star who placed the two articles so close together. Instead, I want to use these examples as illustrative of a process. This process exemplifies the

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struggle over the representation of a black public masculinity in Toronto. I want to suggest that both phenomena point to the place, and prominence, of the colour purple8 in the (re)colouring of Toronto’s landscape of blackness. In so doing, I hope to show how public forms of racialized masculinity are tied to questions of capital accumulation, globalization, and the quest for markets; and what this tells us about the limits, or borders, of the relations between Canadian nationalism, gender, and blackness. Moreover, I want to make a political argument for a necessary suspicion and activism against certain versions of US imperial masculinity, regardless of colour.

Basketball As a Sport of Difference in Canada It is important to locate the place into which the Raptors “rumbled” when they played their first basketball game in Toronto, at the SkyDome, in November, 1995. Such an analysis may help give a background to how and why the Raptors market themselves in the way that they do. It is fair to say that, from the moment of their first game, the Raptors were not the most welcome bunch in town. Despite the myth of origins that has basketball being invented by Canadian Dr. James Naismith, basketball was seen by Toronto’s sporting establishment as a sport of difference in a “hockeytown.” There are other “important” Canadian sports, such as rowing, lacrosse, and curling. But these are second in popularity to hockey. There is, if you will, a third place (space?) of sports (basketball, track and field, boxing) in Canada. These sports, it could be argued, have only recently been on the medal podium in Canada because of their “colour.” These “black” sports, by virtue of the fact that they are played by immigrants or by people who “look like” immigrants, have largely been narrated as un-Canadian sports. By extension, its participants have not been narrated within the national sporting iconography. What this means is that athletes who are successful in these sports

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are often seen as a threat to our Canadianness instead of reaffirming our Canadianness. Otherwise, their accomplishments are largely ignored. Two examples demonstrate this reality. First, members of Canada’s Olympic gold medal-winning 4 x 100 men’s relay team of 1996 complained that in spite of winning the gold medal, the team received hardly any advertising revenue. Second, the continuous migration of black athletes, which mirrors the migration of other black Canadian cultural producers to the United States and/or England in search of more support and recognition.9 In addition to such athletes being simply ignored, there is another familiar pattern: these same athletes are seen as threats and potentially disruptive of the national sporting fabric. This is seen if we take a look at the “common-sense racist”10 understandings of basketball in recent years. In conjunction to basketball’s recent boom in popularity, there have been corresponding attempts to demonize it, both officially and unofficially. First, at the high school level, the meteoric rise in popularity of hoops in Toronto has been met with attempts to repress it. For example, several school basketball programs have been shut down as principals cite basketball as a sport that is ungovernable. In addition are the creation of “violence in sports workshops” that attempt to “tame” basketball’s “attitude.” These workshops are all the more bizarre given the fact that hockey, with its legendary violence, has historically merited no such conferences. In addition, in 1995, the Toronto Board of Basketball officials passed a series of restrictive rules governing the conduct and dress of ballplayers, including such absurd regulations as prohibiting players from wearing cut-off T-shirts to games and preventing players from bumping chests after a basket.11 In addition, some high schools prevent the attendance of fans at basketball games owing to two incidents at high school games in the city.12 In another example at the media level, there have been several articles on violence in basketball. Articles cite the rise of the NBA and the antics of superstars like Dennis Rodman as a bad influence on young boys.13 In other cases,

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authors reminisce about the “good old days,” when basketball was safe and friendly, before “West Indians” began playing in Toronto.14 Finally, at the level of the Canadian National Basketball team, Basketball Canada, in the winter of 1994, issued a report exonerating Ken Shields of charges of racism. In its justification, the authors of the report explained that the lack of black ballplayers in Canada’s national program was not due to racism, but rather the result of black “inner-city” ballplayers’ inability to adapt to “Canadian” standards of basketball.15 In sum, these instances point to a general attempt by Toronto’s sporting establishment to narrate basketball as a sport of both difference and a potential source of trouble within Canada’s sporting cultures. It is interesting to consider the “surveillance” of basketball that in itself demonstrates the extent to which racist fears and fantasies about blackness as trouble structure basketball’s operating space in Toronto. As Judith Butler suggests, these sentiments are deeply structured processes. Borrowing from the early work of Fanon, Butler (1993) names this psychic structure “white paranoia.” Butler’s speculations can be applied to the context of basketball’s reception in Toronto in order to help contextualize some of these more extreme reactions. These sentiments are worth underlining as we look at the kind of morality that the NBA and specifically the Raptors seek to promote.

Negotiating Difference: Introducing ... Your Toronto Raptors! However, as we are all aware, these efforts have not deterred ballplayers, young and old, male and female, black, white, and other, from looking for the next run. Far from being a marginal or subaltern sport, basketball is leaping forward as the leading sport in a cosmopolitan and multi-sport city. It is now a hugely popular and big-time sport in both Toronto and in its suburbs. The popularity of hoop cultural styles worn by young men and women, regardless of colour, is evidence of this growth. It is hard not to see young people wearing Nike, Reebok, and

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other paraphernalia that signify basketball culture.16 The popularity of basketball, as against historically dominant sports like hockey or baseball, is also evident in the fact that Toronto’s largest sporting spectacle of 1996 was not a hockey or baseball game: it was the Toronto RaptorsChicago Bulls game on 10 December 1996 at Skydome. Third, Toronto is gaining notoriety on the world basketball map, as seen in the signing of Torontonian Jamaal Magliore to the high-profile University of Kentucky basketball program; the staging of the World Championship of Basketball in Toronto in 1994; and the first Nike “Exposure Camp,” recently held in Scarborough.17 As a long-time basketball fan, these changes are exciting and inspiring, yet this growth is not without its tensions. Primarily, there is a tension around what kinds of black public masculinity are possible in Toronto. Part of this tension is informed by “white paranoia.”There has been a price to pay for the rise of popularity of hoops in Toronto. This price is a result of the negotiation of difference that informs basketball’s movement from a sport of difference to the “coolest game on the block.” What I mean is that at the same time as the sport of basketball has taken off and is enjoying immense popularity in Toronto and beyond, we have seen a new discourse emerging around basketball and black public masculinities that have replaced, or overdetermined, previously existing forms of representation. This new discourse is what I am calling Raptor Morality—recall the two vignettes with which I opened this section. This is, in large part, a morality rooted in ritualistic, African American bourgeois aesthetics and politics; moreover, it represents a hardening or petrification of the political possibilities of black public masculinity.

“This Is a Public Service Announcement, Paid for by the NBA ... ” In these vignettes, what is crucial about the Raptor is that it acts as the neighbour, or border, to conventional representations of blackness as

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trouble; in both cases, the Raptor can be seen as allaying or responding to racist fears about “violent” black masculinities. The public positioning of the Raptor as a border is revealing since it accords with historical practices of simultaneously narrating black subjects as both “noble savage and vengeful warrior” (Hall, 1988). Aberdeen’s appearance on the same page as the pervasive face of the “cop-killer”18 is suggestive of this bordering. In contrast to Gayle, Aberdeen is narrated as the good kid who worked hard. It is for this reason that the Raptors choose to immortalize him. The placement of Aberdeen into the Raptor “family,” by virtue of making him an honorary Raptor (the first and only such designation to my knowledge), is typified by comments made at his funeral. According to the Toronto Star, “Williams said the teen’s life mirrored his own and that of Raptor general manager Isiah Thomas, who both came from poor families in Chicago, but through their dreams and aspirations overcame their hardships.” The story continues to quote Williams, who said of Aberdeen that “his spirit and what he exemplified in his character are examples of what we want the team to be.” In addition to the words of Williams, Aberdeen’s teacher, Neil Langley, is quoted as saying that Aberdeen was “generous and honourable and cared about others.” In this case, the symbolic linking of Aberdeen, hard work, and basketball is symptomatic of a Raptor Morality in the making (imagine the Raptors’ community outreach co-ordinator attending the Gayle hearing!). The positioning of the Raptors at Aberdeen’s funeral attests to the fact that in order to establish themselves, there is a certain kind of community they have in mind. This community is not simply “black,” but rather it is community of hard workers and good students who are black.19 The Raptors’ presence at the Aberdeen funeral tells us something about the kind of black public masculinity that they feel will fit within their project. In the second case, the dialogue between the Raptorfest and the protests by the Coalition for the Truth about Africa (CFTA) against the

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ROM can be seen as a metaphor of the struggle of what public displays of black masculinity are possible. The Raptorfest—replete with blowup Raptors and booths selling products made by Nike, KFC, and Gatorade—is a two-day advertising carnival for the Raptors. This past year, over 600 teams participated, which equates to almost 2000 players, mostly black and male. The games, especially the better ones, were very well attended, as were such events like the slam-dunk competition and the three-point shootout. Whether the choice of venue on the part of Raptors was conscious or not, the fact is that the steps of the ROM are familiar terrain to many anti-racist activists in the city. Moreover, the ironic fact that the turf in front of the ROM saw both one of the most charged anti-racists protests the city has seen, as well as the most vulgar displays of “black” capitalism, underscore the tension I described earlier and stress, with incredible gravity, how important the next run is.20 In the case of the Raptors, it seems they are only willing to sponsor black runs buttressed by corporate heavyweights and without the slightest hint of an anti-racist or anti-capitalist sensibility. In some respects, Raptor Morality is not new. It is a fairly longstanding way of representing black masculinity within capitalist sporting cultures, especially those south of the border. Specifically, Raptor Morality is an example of an aesthetic of black masculinity popularized recently in the documentary Hoop Dreams and in fictional films such as White Men Can’t Jump. This aesthetic ties together notions of capitalism, black masculinity, a failed nuclear family, basketball, and a mythologized “inner city.”21 The kind of black man the Hoop Dreams aesthetic puts forth is a determined one who is fiercely individualistic and committed to the dream of “making it” through the brutal channels of professional sport. Regarding Hoop Dreams, bell hooks argues that “[u]ltimately, Hoop Dreams offers a conservative vision of the conditions of ‘making it’ in the United States” (1995: 23).

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In addition, what centres or grounds this aesthetic is the belief in the redemptive values of competitive individualism. hooks goes on to say, in describing the attitudes of one of the main characters in the documentary: “An almost religious belief in the power of competition to bring success permeates American life. The ethic of competition is so passionately upheld and valued in [Arthur] Agee’s family that it intensifies the schism between him and his dad” (1995: 23). Thus, in place of a collective struggle to combat the nightmares of racism, police brutality, and class exploitation, the Raptors offer a Hoop Dream. This Morality is oriented to individualistic and liberal-humanist ideals of community.

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Moreover, Raptor Morality does not operate solely within Toronto, but is exemplary of a kind of morality that the NBA uses to market and sell its product. This process is not an accidental one, but it is highly calculated. Lindon Barrett, in a reading of Dennis Rodman’s autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be, suggests that this has to do with the fact that the NBA must allow for the representation of young black males, who are presumed to be icons of trouble, in what Rodman calls “the most positive light.” Barrett continues by elaborating how this process works. He notes that: ... the NBA traffics indefatigably in heroism made to conform to the most proprietary standards. Heroism, as it is carefully and lucratively managed by the NBA, as well as U.S. moral and commercial culture, enforces market-driven colonizations of desire (and representation) (1997: 108). Barrett’s suggestions help contextualize some of the ways in which the Toronto Raptors appear in the public imagination. Notwithstanding Barrett’s United States centrism, certain realities are nonetheless evident. Raptor Morality, then, is not merely a Toronto phenomenon, but rather it operates both in relation to the more local cultural politics of Toronto, as well as within the burdensome morality proffered by the NBA. This morality, and the fact that it “enforces market-driven colonizations of desire,” means that clichés and stereotypes hold a much greater significance, as do fantasies of accumulation. In the context of Toronto, Barrett’s suggestions are helpful in gaining a sense of the politics of the Raptors, and the making of Raptor Morality, in the past few years. It is this morality, this dream/vision of blackness, that the Raptors, in attending Sheldon Aberdeen’s funeral, hope to establish in Toronto. This is further exemplified in the efforts of the Raptor Foundation, a very public organization designed to help promote the Raptors in the city. In one of their most recent events, a

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press conference for the NBA Team Up program, Damon Stoudamire, Raptors’ superstar from 1995 to 1997, was quoted as saying: “you gotta work hard and stay out of trouble if you want to be successful.”22 These invocations suggest the extent to which this phenomenon is both league wide and local.

Raptor Morality and the Commodification of Public Blackness Recently, commentators have discussed the commodification of blackness as a contemporary feature of black popular culture.23 In sport, this is evident in the multi-million-dollar salaries and shoe contracts paid out to black players, coaches, broadcasters, etc. One of the players at the forefront of this commodification of blackness has been the NBA, which markets a certain kind of blackness as entertainment, and does so with immense skill.24 One of the things that distinguishes the NBA is its community outreach programs and its emphasis on fun for “the entire family.” More than any other league, the NBA tries to, and has thus far, been successful in marketing itself as “everybody’s sport.” Yet there is a curious element to this phenomenon: the NBA is an almost all-black league in a racist culture. It would follow, according to this logic, that this sport would be marginalized and literally seen as a sport of difference. However, as we have seen, this is not the case. I want to suggest that the phenomenon of the success of the Raptors and the NBA is possible not so much as a result of a tidal wave of anti-racism in America and Canada, but rather due to the NBA’s skilful working of the Hoop Dreams aesthetic and/or its cultivation of the Hoop Dreamer. The Raptors’ success attests to the ways in which forms of capital have relied on pop cultural notions of blackness to sell an image to everyone, regardless of the average level of consciousness of “race” and racism. While this formula for success clearly motivates all sport franchises, the case of Toronto poses particular challenges to the marketing project of the NBA.This is so since Toronto is perhaps the first hockey town

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the NBA has come to. In other words, the NBA could not simply rely on an indigenous “base” of basketball fans to come to the games in Toronto. For this reason, the Raptors’ public profile is all the more important, and may help to explain the tireless efforts of the Raptor Foundation—as opposed to that of other pro sports clubs in the city. As a result of basketball’s initial representation as a sport of difference, the cultivation of the Hoop Dreamer becomes all the more imperative to establishing the Raptors in the city. Moreover, it is no secret that capitalism and anti-racism have contradictory logics. To put it simply, one sees life as essence and the other seeks to argue against essence. What this means is that in order for the Raptors to sell tickets, they must market a certain version of black public masculinity that accords with the rigid (essentialist) caricatures of black masculinity in the racist realm of American popular culture, some of which I alluded to in the previous chapter. Thus, the Raptors supply a clear demand among sports consumers for drama, pathos, and notions of the good. In an almost clearcut case, the Raptors have to produce a kind of commodified public black masculinity that is firmly rooted within American (or Americanadian) liberal notions of what blackness is “really” like—the kind that brought forward such iconic figures as Bigger Thomas and Uncle Tom. As evidenced in the Aberdeen funeral and the Raptorfest, the apolitical or, rather, conservative Hoop Dreamer becomes consumable to everyone. In view of the historical ways of representing blackness in colonialism, this has meant that the Raptor Morality, or the Raptors’ version of blackness, relies on the classical Manicheism of the Good Negro/Bad Negro. In addition to my two opening vignettes, this is seen in the representation of two players who were on the team’s 1996–1997 roster. For example, Carlos Rogers continually represents himself as a good Christian who believes that it is vital to care for family, and is also not overly concerned with money. In the case of Rogers, he was front-page news in the winter of 1997–1998, when he revealed that his sister Renee

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was dying of cancer, and he had offered his kidney to keep her alive. Renee Rogers was too sick to receive a kidney transplant, and she died shortly afterwards.What was remarkable is the extent to which Rogers’s grieving was so public. The day after Renee’s death, both the Toronto Star and Toronto Sun carried front-page pictures of Carlos crying at the news of his sister’s death. In contrast to Rogers, there is Marcus Camby, who was represented by both the Raptors and the mainstream press as someone who “just can’t get it together.” Camby’s public masculinity was constantly narrated (by himself and by media) as that of a wild man. In an act resembling the spirit of the Million Man March, Camby held a press conference to issue an apology to the Raptors and fans of Toronto for his excesses, which included the (not-uncommon) practice of receiving gifts and sleeping with prostitutes while he was a star player at the University of Massachusetts. Camby’s desire for atonement, Rogers’s patience through suffering, and the prevalence of patriarchal family values, as seen via the ubiquitous presence of Isiah Thomas, organizes these sentiments as the signposts of a Raptor Morality, and reproduce historically conservative (self)-representations of blackness. It’s important to understand that, within the context of the Toronto sporting scene, these kinds of dramas are peculiar to the Raptors. Many other Toronto sports heroes have had similar personal tragedies and private troubles, yet their troubles are not those that frame their public masculinities for all to see.While we must clearly note the double standard, I want to point out that the Raptors, under general manager Isiah Thomas, are comfortable with these representations. In both cases, it is the Raptors who issued press releases to announce these events.25 The spectacles of the Raptors, however “private” they may appear, are in fact very public affairs. For example, both Renee Rogers’s death and Camby’s repentance were staged events held by the Raptors at the team’s headquarters. Also, the Raptors were responsible for issuing the initial press releases that broke both stories. This tells us that not only are Raptor athletes hyper-visible (this is true of many sports stars) but that the

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Raptors’ “private” troubles are everybody’s business and are often disseminated by the team itself. This space, which allows sports consumers to “know” the Raptors, to know Carlos and Marcus, is a crucial component of selling the Raptors. Given that the Raptors are doing business in a (dying?) hockey town, it is not enough for the Raptors to play good ball. In this sense they must present a story that is tangible to be held by its fans, black and white. It is this story, this Hoop Dreams aesthetic, that draws heavily on anthropological traditions of voyeurism, or gazing at the other, that accounts for the exceedingly “private” nature of the Raptors’ public travails.

Dreams of Americanada: Blackness, Nation, and the Public Sphere Understanding the establishment of a Hoop Dreams aesthetic or Raptor morality in Toronto is important for two reasons. It is important to pay attention to the kind of blackness that the Raptors attempt to narrate, and to locate this process within the history of Canadian attempts to write black experiences out of the nation. Such a placement suggests that there is a link between state narratives of blackness and the cultivation of the Hoop Dreamer. Second, it shows the extent to which capital is informed and organized through conventional notions of blackness. I want to suggest that there is a connection between the whiteness of official narratives of Canada and the establishment of a Raptor Morality. It is important to do some contextualizing here. The media representations of Clinton Gayle are an example of this process. Gayle’s Jamaican heritage was not missed by crime reporters in the city as another instance of the crime-Jamaica connection. Moreover, the constant naming of Gayle as a “cop-killer,” the name of the infamous rap song by African-American artist Ice-T, helps to locate him as exterior to the nation.26 While this is done in the American and Canadian contexts regularly, in Canada its effects are to reinforce the idea that black folks are not Canadian. Gayle is framed as either Jamaican or

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American; he is an out-law, external to the boundaries of the nation. Such representations, unless challenged, make the space of black public masculinity very narrow. Adherence to such representations is an admission of the impossibility of black public masculinity in Toronto to have something that it can truly call its own. While I do not wish to argue for essentialism or a Canadian nationalism here, I want to stress that such a belief, or memory of what being a black man in Toronto is, must necessarily erase or forget other stories of blackness, not the least of which are histories of struggle (e.g., the CFTA protests; resistance to racist cops in Toronto). Further, it erases the multiplicity and the contradictions of black experiences in Toronto, and what these mean in terms of identity for the city of Toronto and anyone who lives within it. The fact that blackness in Canada, and in this case black masculinity in Toronto, is seen as the border to the public sphere makes the black public sphere a kind of “no-man’s land.” This can be seen both in the rarity of images in civil society of black men, but also in the paucity of such images within the Canadian public sporting sphere. The fact that “official” Canadian sporting culture is a “white thing,” whereby images of the land are tied to the bodies of white men and women, means that one of the other predominantly visual places of black public masculinity—sport—is also absented from the official narrative of the nation. The cultural void opens up a space for black masculinities to come forward, but all too often these are highly Americanized models (recall the assumptions about the presumed “organic” connection between America and blackness discussed earlier). Consider the popular appeal of the Raptors’ vice-president and general manager, Isiah Thomas. Thomas’s appeal is widespread, as evidenced by his current status as somewhat of a darling among the Canadian business media, among the sporting establishment in Toronto, and of members of the black community in Toronto. Moreover, in April 1997 during a furor over claims made by Cito Gaston about racist media in Toronto, Isiah Thomas was

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quoted as saying that Toronto was not racist for him. Thomas’s positioning, both by himself and the media, is interesting given his status as someone who did not live in Toronto, but commuted by plane from Detroit! While the history of African-American sporting stars actually locating to Toronto is rare, and treated with surprise by members of the media, this reality is telling about the makeup of black popular culture in Toronto. Thomas’s contradiction of Gaston’s claims is concurrent with a Canadian practice of “importing” American blacks to police and discipline black Canadian forms of protest.27 Such an effect can only occur given the void that exists with respect to blackness in Canada. This transplanted feeling can be seen if we look at my opening vignettes. In both the Aberdeen funeral and the Raptorfest, experiences of black masculinity in Toronto are read through the American lens of the (caricaturing) Hoop Dream. By contrast, both the CFTA protests and the reality of the Clinton Gayle trial, if taken seriously, force us to examine the very foundation of what Canada is and what it has historically meant for non-white peoples.To Raptor-ize the Sheldon Aberdeen funeral is a way of writing over a certain version of Canadian history. Such a tension, between the borders of blackness and the borders of the nation, attests to the struggle over who has the next run in the city and, moreover, to the fundamentally political nature of such a struggle. It appears that the Raptors themselves are content to overlay Canadian histories of blackness and, in so doing, see/promote life as a Hoop Dream as their way of “cementing” themselves to the nation’s playgrounds.28 Alas, it seems more “Canadian” to borrow an American version of blackness, that of the Hoop Dreamer, than to wrestle with what it means to be black in Canada. First, this tells us something about how current black public masculinities are imagined in Canada, and points to what may be a shift in the contours of such an imagining. Second, it points to an all-too familiar process of what Carl James (1997b) calls “going south” by sporting fans and athletes in this city for representations of black

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masculinity. Third, it points to the importance of recognizing the farmteam status of blackness I discussed earlier. The success of the Hoop Dreams narrative, now remade as Raptor Morality and embodied in the representation of the success of Isiah Thomas as antidote to the gangsta, is evidence of three things. First, the inability of Canadian state narratives to produce local versions of black masculinity; second, the power of certain kinds of blackness to travel across borders with greater ease than others; and last, but definitely not least, the cultural politics of young black men who take up this Raptor Morality. It is to this latter process that I turn.

Playing with Modernity: Raptor Morality and the New Black Nation In this section, I show how and why Raptor Morality has rooted itself in Canada, or at least Toronto, with a particular focus on the practices of young black fans and ballplayers in the city.29 Homi Bhabha’s (1994) claims that discourses of the nation are possible only through the pedagogical instruction, “be a national citizen,” are again important here. Nationalism is possible only through the repetition of the rituals of nationalism. If these rituals are interrupted, and they often are, they reveal the limits of the modern nation. The culture and practices of non-white peoples who do not “fit” into Canada’s official narrative have tended to be marginalized. This is an example of “the process of splitting” that Bhabha talks about. In that sense, the nation’s borders are revealed, and other cultural possibilities are engendered. However, the success and the institutional solidity of the Raptors, as embodied in their huge following by young fans, black and white, point to another process that we need to consider. This is another nationbuilding project, the familiar imperialistic variety known as Americanism. While it is clear that blacks have historically been written out of the official text of Canada, the Raptors represent one of the most successful

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attempts to date to write them in. However, the narration that the Raptors are promoting is that of a new black nation; and, more to the point, it is American and corporate! Thus, in reading Bhabha’s observations about performativity through the lens of black aspirations to modernity, we must rethink the performance of Raptor fans as evidence of a persistent social desire to redraw national boundaries. Since it is only through the willingness of young black men to perform a certain blackness that corresponds to the sanctioned Hoop Dream (a phenomena that is evident in gyms throughout the city), I want to suggest that considering the bourgeois revolution of blackness is crucial to understanding the success of the Raptors, as it is embodied in the entrenchment of a certain class of black folks in Canada and the United States.30 We cannot simply read the Raptors’ success as either attributable to a wave of anti-racism, as I stated earlier, nor can we read it solely through Bhabha’s framework. The margins of the modern nation, something that Bhabha astutely points us to, is not in this case the place where young black fans are asking what this nation is all about, but rather, it seems to be the place that is now implicated in another nation. In placing Raptor Morality within the narrative of black capitalism or modernism, some of the work of Arjun Appadurai is suggestive. His discussion of cricket in the former British Empire considers how cricket became hegemonic in India, which actually afforded a certain power to colonized subjects to play the game of the colonizers. He writes that, “Transformed into a national process by the process of spectacle ... cricket has become a matter of mass entertainment and mobility for some” (1997: 106). Appadurai’s linking of sports and subaltern masculinity can be translated to the context of the Raptors. As I have suggested, the Raptors’ success is linked to young black males identifying and performing the dream of “going south,” both literally and figuratively. The process of looking south is the performance and repetition of a certain

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notion of identity, namely a bourgeois African-American version of blackness. Moreover, it does accord with a hierarchy of blackness, where many folks assume that the United States is the centre of blackness. Thus for many, being a Raptor fan means participating in an American way of seeing and understanding basketball and blackness. In other words, it attests to a kind of mobility that is contingent on the discursive power of blackness in the United States. Moreover, it is a way of responding to the whiteness of Canada’s official narrative. This is so for two reasons. First, it is true given my discussion of the incompatibility of discourses of Canadiana and blackness. Second, it shows up the weakness of narratives of Canadian nationalism to interpellate large sections of the Canadian public. One of the curious features of Canadian nationalism is its inability to speak to its many citizens, often for reasons of class (whereas the most ardent nationalists assume bourgeois or petty bourgeois positions) and for reasons of whiteness. Thus the yearnings of young Torontonian Hoop Dreamers are not unlike the actions of a number of Canadians. However, it is worth noting that there is a clear power dynamic within which this works. This power dynamic is both liberating and constricting. Here, it is important to consider the way it works in relation to nationalism and masculinity. Speaking about this dynamic, Appadurai notes: But because cricket, through the enormous convergence of state, media, and private-sector interests, has come to be identified with “India,” with “Indian” skill, “Indian” guts, “Indian” team spirit, and “Indian” victories, the bodily pleasure that is at the core of the male viewing experience is simultaneously part of the erotics of nationhood .... The erotic pleasure of watching cricket for Indian male subjects is the pleasure of agency in an imagined community, which in many other arenas is violently contested (1997: 111; emphasis added).

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Appadurai’s insights are helpful here since they point to one of the ways that trans-border sporting communities are made. More specifically, they point to how important capitalist forms of sporting spectacle are to questions of identity. It should not surprise us that this is equally true for white folks and black folks. For Appadurai, initiation into the imagined sporting community is a bodily and erotic experience that allows sports enthusiasts a chance to play with the “means of modernity.” If we substitute the word “Indian” with the word “black” in the above quote, we get a sense as to how Raptor Morality works, and what tropes it relies upon. In many representations, notions of skill, guts, and team spirit are presented by the Raptors as elements of black style.31 Thus, the performance of Raptor Morality is a performance of blackness, the same kind of blackness or, more specifically, the same kind of sporting black masculinity embodied in Sunset Park, Boyz N the Hood, etc. The Raptors are drawing on the immense popularity of basketball throughout the world, which is discernible by a few signal events. In the case of basketball, the success of Dream Team 1992; the immense popularity and wealth of stars like Jordan, Pippen, Rodman, and Shaq are signs of the success of a bourgeois revolution of black public masculinity. This reality represents a new (modernist) configuration of blackness. Such high-profile successes, along with the immense popularity of Isiah Thomas as the Raptors’ general manager, across the sporting spectrum in Toronto suggest that the attempts by young black men to perform Raptor Morality in gyms throughout the city is partly about power. The desire to be “like Mike” is, in the words of Appadurai, a desire to partake in the “erotics of (black) nationhood.” By virtue of Canadian fears about blackness and black presences within the national borders, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the kind of blackness that would settle here would be a very conservative one32 that is reliant on a series of tropes about what blackness is “really like.” However, the possibility of an American modernist version of black masculinity settling in Toronto, and the ease in which it is

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reproduced among black fans in the city, indicates the power of hegemonic and imperialistic notions of blackness that the Raptors are reproducing in their marketing of the team. The strength of the Raptors’ success underscores the power that capitalist sporting institutions hold in the (re)formation of national identity.

Conclusion The battle over who’s got the next run in Toronto continues. I have shown that this is a political battle, and its victory may signal the triumph of a neo-conservative version of black modernism. The Raptors have landed on the cityscape in a very permanent way. Yet we must be careful not to celebrate the arrival of the NBA to Toronto as the epiphany of “integration” of the national sporting landscape. Rather, by paying attention to the place of the Raptors, namely where and how we see purple, we may understand their attempts at permanence as attempts to overlay black Canadian histories and struggles. In place of what Dionne Brand calls the “tough geography”33 that is Canada for many black people, the Raptors provide the blacktop and the myth of the Hoop Dreamer. In this regard, Raptor Morality is ruled by what Baldwin called “a theology of terror.” Houston Baker, commenting on Baldwin’s insights, notes that this theology “reduces black humanity to a cipher; a will-less Christian thing incapable of resisting even its own denigration” (1995: 27). Concomitant with this myth is the conservatism displayed in such admonitions as “stay in school,” “say no to drugs,” etc. Thus the Raptor, appearing when and how it does, is the attempt to (re)colour the national landscape by means of replacing one Americanism—the nightmare of the ’hood, with another—the Hoop Dream. In both cases, indigenous Canadian black masculinities are overlaid, thus keeping within official narratives that name the nation white. In addition, political forms of resistance, something indigenous to black Canada if nothing else, is overlaid. Thus, it is hard to call the

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Raptors’ arrival in Toronto something that helps cement a positive blackness on the sporting landscape. Moreover, there are some interesting conclusions to make if we consider the similarities at play between track and field and basketball. In both cases, the policing and Manichean presentation of black masculinity in Canada continue. However, here we see the importance of the way that blackness is also structured within a hierarchy along the United States–Canada border. This phenomenon demonstrates how this hierarchy works to structure the dreams and aspirations of young black men in Toronto. In this sense, the arrival of the Toronto Raptors underlines the struggle to politically embody something other than what Hall calls the “essential black subject.” This struggle is a testament to the importance of Hall’s work, and as we move to the next chapter, we can see again how it works in the case of professional football in Canada.

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5

SCRAMBLING THROUGH THE BLACK ATLANTIC: BLACK QUARTERBACKS AND AMERICANADA INTRODUCTION: Theories of Racial Stacking acialized notions of the mind and body continue to operate

R

within sporting cultures to the point where various positions are defined almost solely by “race.” This process has been

defined as “racial stacking.” It involves moving black players from positions marked as “intelligent” to “physical” or “athletic” positions, such as outfielder in baseball or wide receiver in football. Moreover, it involves moving white players into these “intelligent” positions. So, typically, most of the quarterbacks in football are white, and most running backs and receivers are black.This process has rightly warranted a literature in sociology of sport that studies racial stacking and documents instances of stacking, and the frequency with which it occurs.This literature expands upon some of the early work in the sociology of “race” and sport by people such as Harry Edwards, who detailed the ways in which black athletes were marginalized in the apparatus of professional and United States collegiate sports.

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While an important contribution to thinking about black masculinities and sport, this literature has severe limitations. These limitations have been exposed largely as a result of changes in the sporting demographic, both across time and space.The first limitation is that the work is primarily descriptive in nature. As such, it offers very little to the reader except to demonstrate what we already know, which is that sport—like all institutions in racist culture—is ruled by racist paradigms, and structures the world according to Enlightenment and colonialist divisions of physicality and rationality. Aside from documenting racist tendencies, these observations offer little insight into understanding sport and black masculinity. In other words, the performative elements of black quarterbacking and black football players in general, for example, are often unexamined within these debates. Second, the literature offers very little in terms of concrete strategies for change other than for us to recognize that stacking exists. In other words, it operates within a liberal paradigm of inclusion. And since the liberal paradigm of inclusion is unable to sustain political change, it often disappoints those looking for a more radical political solution. A third limitation of the literature is that it remains frozen in time. In other words, the literature has not been able to accommodate changes in the demography of quarterbacking and the reality that many prominent quarterbacks in the NFL are now black: Michael Vick, Steve McNair, Kordell Stewart, and Daunte Culpepper, to name a few. These quarterbacks have been and are changing the game to the extent that it is both unhelpful and misguided to limit discussions to the process of stacking alone. There is much more to the stories of Stewart et al. than simply racial stacking. Moreover, this work cannot incorporate black feminist and queer interventions that argue that racism is not the only unequal social relation at work in contemporary society generally and sporting popular culture specifically. The fourth limitation is the question of geography, or the fixation on the National Football League as the sole focus of these practices. While the exclusion of black quarterbacks

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from major (read: white) colleges in the United States and in the NFL and has been well documented,1 this is not the case across the board. In fact, in “other” leagues—smaller United States colleges, the Canadian Football League, and the Arena Football League—the longstanding presence of black quarterbacks means that focusing solely on racial stacking is severely misleading. It is with these limitations in mind that I comment on updating the literature. More specifically, given my feminist and queer liberationist imperative, I probe recent celebrations and nostalgic attempts to search for black pioneers at the position of quarterback. Even more specifically, I want to ask about the timing of such desires. Why now? Why in such a fashion? How do we go about undertaking such a project? And, with my eyes always open to the political, which routes are opened and which are closed in doing so? Two phenomena of the late 1990s are worth detailing to begin my discussion. The first was the general emergence of black quarterbacks as a regular feature in professional and collegiate football in the United States. This emergence was significant given the historical exclusions that black quarterbacks have faced in these organizations. In the National Football League (NFL), young stars such as Kordell Stewart and Steve McNair represent what we could call a “golden age” of black NFL quarterbacks. In addition, the United States collegiate football industry, grouped together under the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), now features many black quarterbacks. In 1998, for the first time, the two top-rated quarterbacks in pre-season polls in the NCAA were black: Culpepper of Syracuse University and Donovan McNabb of Central Florida University.2 Both quarterbacks are now in the NFL: Culpepper stars at quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and McNabb with the Philadelphia Eagles. While they do not point to the eradication of racism, these shifts do suggest that a major revision in thinking is necessary. This cannot be accomplished through a narrow focus on stacking.3

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The second phenomenon is of a more political nature, and it has do with the way black masculinity is represented in the post-Civil Rights era both in Canada and the United States. This representation, as I mentioned earlier, features an emphasis on a unitary and heterosexual black masculinity that is often seen as devoid of emotion. This kind of masculinity is visible in the actions of people like Reggie White, Louis Farrakhan, and Michael Jordan. Although varied, this politics privileges a black community (read: black heterosexual patriarchy) and yearns for its renaissance and stable maintenance as the most urgent and pressing social and political task. Moreover, as a result of changes in the sporting landscape in the last thirty years, it may be that black political spokesmen from the right wing are more high-profile than ever. This reality means that black right-wing voices, as they are articulated through the sporting apparatus, hold more sway than at any other point in time. This phenomenon is apparent if we consider Reggie White, a former star defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers, who has been an outspoken homophobic advocate in United States national campaigns against same-sex rights. White’s political prominence typifies existing heterosexist sentiment in black popular culture (and the collusion with the mainstream media). The terms of this position are characterized by a re-territorialisation of desire and its safe containment within the black nuclear family. In addition to the example of White, we might consider how images of Jordan and Farrakhan privilege what could be called a denial of the body, or the denial of the complexity and historicity of blackness.What is ironic here is that as well as being quintessentially bourgeois characteristics (black or white), these are also the traits that define the essential quarterback, at least as they have been historically narrated at the level of the NFL. The quarterback, as we know, is often seen as more than merely an athlete. He occupies a highly valued cultural position. In the United States, the quarterback is the “field general,” part politician, part military hero, part colonialist all wrapped in one.4 For these reasons there

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has been historical discrimination in the NFL to keep the quarterbacking ranks “lily white.” In addition, dominant quarterbacking styles are defined by an absence of presumed physicality. Perhaps there is no correlation at all between dominant quarterbacking styles and the emergence of neo-conservative forms of black masculinity in the public sphere. But we do know that as black quarterbacks move into positions of power in the National Football League, there will be a necessary tension around questions of containment versus freer forms of expression. In light of this, we need to read black desires for American quarterbacking success in conversation with current trends in black gender politics in the post-Civil Rights period. In doing so, we will have reason to question these desires and ask whether or not, politically and intellectually, these are the most challenging and sustaining positions available.

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Thus, while it may be premature to say that the position of quarterback is “integrated,” it is clear, as I show above, that stacking is not the modus operandi for many teams and organizations today (despite the efforts of reactionary holdouts like the Pittsburgh Steelers). This may be the case for a series of reasons, such as capitalist opportunism, etc. But in spite of these changes, the stacking literature persists.Therefore, the question becomes: who does and does not benefit by the reproduction of the stacking literature; who benefits by telling a story that is in large part highly distorted or, at best, incomplete?

The New Stacking Literature As the above discussion shows, the question of sport and black quarterbacking is far more unruly than a sole reliance upon a stacking perspective would allow. But the stacking paradigm persists in what I call the new stacking literature. An interesting example of this is the Kenneth Shropshire’s In Black and White: Race and Sports in America (1996).5 Shropshire details racism in the men’s sporting industry in the United States, with discussions of how blacks (read: men) are excluded from the old boys’ networks and sport, from the boardroom of sports corporations and league front offices, to the actual practices on the field. The book is very informative, and contains many examples of white racism toward black athletes and coaches in America. Shropshire outlines how black male athletes are streamed into certain positions and denied opportunities to excel in others. His book is in line with a tradition of books that goes back to some of the early work done on racial stacking by Harry Edwards and others. In spite of these strengths, what is disturbing about the book is the way it is organized by the discourse of black male invisibility, what we could call “the endangered species school.” This adherence distorts many facts about black experience in sport and, therefore, it is hard to seriously consider claims put forward by Kellen Winslow, in the book’s

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foreword, about Shropshire’s experiences of racism in America: “After a nine-year career in the National Football League filled with honors and praises, I stepped into the real world and realised, in the words of Muhammad Ali, that I was ‘just another nigger’” (1996: xi). What is hard to fathom is that by now, Winslow is probably a multi-millionaire who has profited from numerous endorsement deals and a professional football salary somewhere in the millions. It is certainly not the case that Winslow is “just another nigger.” In addition to using “race” and racism to mask class privilege, this framework also works to mask heterosexual male privilege. In describing how he was asked to “bare his soul” about his experiences in the world of sport, we find nothing in Winslow’s foreword on the construction of heterosexuality and masculinity in the world of sport.6 This is borne out not only in the foreword, but also in the main body of the text. It is done so poignantly in the reference to O.J. Simpson in Shropshire’s introduction. Disappointingly, Shropshire uses the example of O.J. Simpson not to probe the question of domestic abuse or the commodification of black masculinity (as has been done in Roediger and Johnson [1997]). Nor does he use the example of O.J. Simpson as a chance to probe black middleclass gains at the expense of black working classes. Rather, the O.J. Simpson drama is used solely to point to the way that the issue of “race” divides Americans and that the trial and verdict strained “race relations.” The above example provides some indication of whom the new stacking literature is directed. The audience is a very narrowly constructed black bourgeois male subject who will continue to cite racism and only racism perpetuated against black men as the sole pressing evil that haunts the United States. In this sense the new stacking literature adds very little to earlier black nationalist arguments about racism in professional sport, such as those advanced by Edwards. However, and this is perhaps the most politically disturbing element of the new stacking literature, the masculinism and the homophobia at work in the early Black Power literature has remained unchecked.

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The Hard Work Thing As I suggested in chapter two, the petrification of black masculinity and the discourses that represent it, be it through the Million Man March, Nike, or the NBA, are motivated by a politics of restraint. More specifically, and perhaps as a result, these politics are beholden to and defined by the search for “positive images.” Simply put, the search for positive images that demands that we see proper black (heroic) faces everywhere, regardless of all else (namely politics, history, etc.), is exemplary of a Manichean response to colonialism and the prevalence of invisibility that black people suffer under it. It is a demand for a certain kind of visibility; a demand that “we” see “ourselves” and it is rooted in a notion of ethnicity and identity as mimesis. In other words, it argues that black folks need to see black faces; Asians need to see Asian faces, etc., in order to be whole. This politics has many limitations. First of all, not just any coloured face will suffice as a positive image. The politics of narcissism at work here demand that positive images need to be heroes and heroines, not just any folks. In fact, positive images are designed to wipe out the unruly traces of the body, and provide a mythical image in its place.7 Such a demand implies that “positive” images usually resonate with dominant or bourgeois aesthetic codes. Second, by virtue of a strictly racialized mimesis, it cannot provide an analysis of how cultures are made in and through difference.8 Third, as a result of the link between positive images and bourgeois politics, it ignores how easily “positive” images can be colonized and colonizing by conservative forces, black, white, and otherwise. In football, the search for positive images accords with the hitherto exclusion of black quarterbacks in the National Football League. Once again, while I recognize the importance of breaking down barriers, I want to argue that Manichean responses to oppression are often done through individualist means and, unfortunately, they use the same logic of oppression they are purporting to overturn. They represent, if you will, a “buggin’ out” demand.A telling example of the connection between

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conservative politics and positive images in black popular culture is the character Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Buggin’ Out is always visiting Sal’s Famous Pizzeria (a white Italian family-owned establishment that employs a black delivery man) and complaining about the lack of pictures of “great” black folks on the restaurant’s wall of fame, which is populated by photos of “great” Italian Americans such as Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. In response to this absence, Buggin’ Out demands that Sal (Danny Aiello), the owner, put up pictures of black folks.What marks Buggin’ Out’s project is that he is locked into the same logic of thinking as Sal, one that ultimately privileges (largely male) icons such as Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Michael Jordan. As Wahneema Lubiano (1996) has suggested, the message in Lee’s Do the Right Thing is thoroughly capitalist, and blames black folks for their own shortcomings. This shows the extent to which positive images and conservative politics are linked. Lubiano shows that the demand for positive images is also an affirmation of capitalist values. In that sense, it does not offer a vision of political alternatives in opposition to capitalism. She also observes that the language used in the film is thoroughly bourgeois individualist, typified by Sal’s response to Buggin’ Out’s demand for black icons on the wall of fame’: “When you own your own pizzeria, then you can put your own pictures up” (1996: 192). This passage tells it like it is under the rules of capitalism: when you own something, you are in control. It therefore leaves those with no property, or those opposed to the capitalist ethics of ownership, without a political alternative. Invoking Buggin’ Out here helps us understand one aspect of the current black quarterbacking iconography. To illustrate this, I will discuss a Nike advertising campaign of 1997 and 1998 featuring Kordell Stewart, who was then the quarterback for the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. In one of the advertisements, Stewart is featured in the uniform of his alma mater, the University of Colorado. He is shown from the waist up, with his arms bent at his elbows, and with his head tilted to his right.The ubiqui-

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tous Nike “swoosh” adorns Stewart’s jersey. He appears with slight beads of sweat on his body and with Nike gloves on his hands. He is positioned in front of a metal backdrop, and framed by a metal “window” of sorts that allows us to peer in at him. In addition, six rays of light emanate from his head and continue until the frame of the picture. On the opposite page, there remains the metal backdrop, and there is an inscription branded into the metal that reads, “Whosoever dons this cloth, if knightly, shall possess the spirit of Stewart.” Beneath this inscription, there is a Nike “team sports” logo, representing its team uniform line of clothing and accessories. First, I want to stress the element of hardness. The metal encasement and its backdrop symbolize an almost industrial theme that I read as another instance of a longstanding tradition of equating black masculinity with hardness. This combination and the aesthetics of hardness should be read in line with recent post-industrial representations of black sporting cultures. Specifically, I am referring to the chain link fence that is standard fare in most basketball commercials, meant to represent the authentic ’hood. In both cases, metal is used to connote blackness, and to translate it to the consumer, who is presumed to be outside of this reality. This is a common way of representing black subjectivity in films such as Hoop Dreams and in much sports writing/anthropology.9 In other words, such cultural productions represent the ghetto as a space of criminality and poverty, and argue that the solution to this nightmare is for young folks to try to escape.10 The fact that black and Latino urban spaces are actually communities is something that these cultural productions actively deny. Such a pattern is common in popular culture, where, as Robin D.G. Kelley notes: ... the pervasive imagery of the “underclass” makes the very idea of a contemporary urban working class seem obsolete. Instead of hardworking urban residents, many of whom are Latino,

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Asian-Pacific Islanders, West Indian [sic] immigrants, and US born African-Americans, the dominant image of the “ghetto” is of idle black men drinking forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor and young black women with distended bellies, their youthful faces belying the fact that they are often close to delivering their second or third child (1997: 127). In addition to the metallic theme is the quasi-religious tone of the ad. If not evident in the print copy, the rays of light and the positioning of Stewart’s body work to establish him as a Christ-like or saintly figure whom we all must emulate.11 In that regard, religion is used to secure Stewart as a heroic figure and, in addition, a positive image. Clearly, one could argue that this ad represents a positive image. Here is an image of a black man in a position we have not yet seen: an NFL quarterback advertising for Nike. Moreover, it could be argued that this is an empowering image for young black folks, possibly offering new motivation and/or dreams. This, in effect, is the argument put forward by Michael Eric Dyson (1993) in his essay on Michael Jordan entitled “Be Like Mike?” Dyson argues that sport has been a crucial site for the production of black identities and, in that sense, images of Michael Jordan have a somewhat liberating element to them for black kids watching him. Dyson suggests that Michael Jordan, in “his big black body— graceful and powerful, elegant and dark, symbolises the possibilities of other black bodies to remain safe long enough to survive within the limited but significant sphere of sport.”12 However, one wonders to what extent Dyson is allowing Nike to set the agenda for him. In other words, as long as positive images are represented through hardness, the question becomes: Positive for whom? Regarding Jordan, hooks notes that in effect Jordan’s body does not transgress at all, but serves to reproduce what she calls “repressive racialised body politics” (1994). Moreover, such a position is tenuous given its reproduction of what Michelle Wallace refers to

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as the “problem of celebrity.”13 We must ask what it means when Nike can provide positive images. In other words, how much are those of us who are anti-racist and activist willing to give to corporations in order that they can beam back “positive images”? Moreover, at what point does this image become an oppressive version of blackness?

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These questions reveal what is at stake in the discussion of Kordell Stewart. The Kordell Stewart ad represents the limits of a search for positive images and the search for black visibility on capitalism’s own terms. Thus, the search for positive images leaves Nike to define what “positive” looks like. What is ironic and perhaps most disturbing about the Nike ad is that it represents Kordell Stewart encased in his fixity. It is not an action shot, for example. The shot in no way reflects Stewart’s many magnificent skills, which include pass catching, scrambling, and throwing. What has made Stewart exciting to watch for me and many

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others is his polyvalency. Aptly named “Slash” for his ability to pass, run, and his incredible speed, Stewart represented a radical departure from the traditional NFL quarterback. In fact, this representation, by providing us a stoic Stewart, is the exact opposite of Stewart’s contribution to the game. In this regard, Dyson’s work needs to be nuanced slightly to take into account the ways that images of transgression, and images that are pleasurable to look at, often end up being re-territorialized within a neo-conservative framework. Thus, Nike’s representation of Kordell Stewart fills a need for positive images. However, much is lost through this representation. In that regard, it responds to a Buggin’ Out demand, whereby privileging the quarterback amounts to privileging white rationality. Such logic mirrors—but does not necessarily subvert—racist definitions of invisibility/visibility, and cannot therefore conceive of “the visible” in other ways. Given that such desires are destined to lead to disappointment, I suggest less cheering take place with respect to the quarterback as a site for securing stable black masculinities and for questions of freedom and community. While it may be that cheering for people like Kordell Stewart and others can secure a stable identity, and while it is an important struggle for black peoples generally, as it represents the breaking down of another barrier, it is important to pay attention to its limits. Specifically, I am referring to the erasures and silences that prop up such heroes. It is clear that an investment in the position of quarterback is an investment in existing power relations along the lines of class, gender, sexuality, and “race.” As a result, such investments are more often than not what leads to disappointment. These disappointments could be the place where we imagine new political possibilities beyond individualist approaches to racism, invisibility, and other forms of discrimination. Those motivated to continually offer individualistic solutions through some notion of black pride must ask themselves the question: To whom does their blackness speak? And of equal importance: Who does it liberate?

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An Other Visibility: Back to Life, Back to Canada Clearly, besides the handful of black quarterbacks who make it in the NFL, those liberated within such a project are few and far between. And while breaking into the ranks of NFL quarterbacks is important, the question of rationality remains in tension. In other words, my question is: Is it possible to consider another black rationality besides the one that searches for positive images? To do this, I would like to take a trip back across the border to comment on the kind of blackness being constructed by the constant focus on NFL quarterbacks as sites of freedom. By going back to Canada, I hope to complicate this discussion by linking up geography with questions of black rationality. The linking of geography and theory in the work of Edward Sa’id, Gilroy, and others, has been a welcome addition to recent cultural theory. In relation to Canada, Rinaldo Walcott (1997) has made important contributions. In particular he has found an inability within the discipline of black studies to hear “other” black voices, in this case those from Canada, as authentic. As a result, black studies is often synonymous with black United States studies. Walcott demands that we think about Canada as an instance of the hybridity that marks the production of black identities, wherever they are. This hybridity can thus be used as a heuristic tool to think about how we “see and hear” blackness, outside of existing ways. In the current context, this could mean thinking of blackness outside of the oppression of black fundamentalism. He notes: As a location for post-emancipation and post-national independence for Caribbean migrants, and more recently for continental African migrants, and as a sanctuary for escaping enslaved African Americans and their descendants, the multiplicities of blackness collide in ways that are important for current diasporic theorizing (1997: 29).

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To Walcott’s list of black Canadians, I would add the category of African-American labourers in Canada, specifically football players. More specifically, quarterbacks. Since as far back as the 1960s there has been a significant black quarterbacking presence in the Canadian Football League (CFL). These men played their college ball in the United States and came to Canada to play because of racism in the United States. In the CFL, many clubs have featured, and continue to feature, black quarterbacks as starters or as backups. I will name a few: Turner Gill. Warren Moon. Roy Dewalt. John Henry Jackson. Danny Barrett. Andre Ware. Condredge Holloway. Damon Allen. Chuck Ealey. Homer Jordan. J.C. Watts. Don MacPherson. I cite these names as a gesture to provide a genealogy, however incomplete, of black quarterbacks in Canada who go missing in the discussions of black quarterbacking focusing solely on the US context and the problem of stacking. Moreover, these quarterbacks offer a counterpoint to forms of black rationality that share too much with bourgeois masculinity. The presence of black quarterbacks in the CFL has less to do with anti-racist initiatives from the league than the differences in the social meaning of football north and south of the border. But what is important about the different histories of black quarterbacks in Canada and the United States is that they complicate the fundamental claim of stacking literature, which stresses black exclusions (and thereby supports the individualist claims put forward by people like Shropshire and Winslow). Moreover, it suggests that a reading of Canada within the black diaspora changes the politics of anti-racism, as well as the way that resistance is understood. Specifically, it suggests that the discourse of black invisibility, a pre-condition to the search for black heroes, relies on a wilful denial of connectedness of black lives elsewhere. Moreover, within the context of the new stacking literature, and neo-conservative black gender politics more generally, the exclusion of Canada is about retaining and reproducing a masculinist narrative of oppression. In other words, the claim of black invisibility in the postmodern relies on a

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host of exclusions and fictions. Thus, in spite of the passion that motivates desires for black histories, it should come as no surprise that these historical terrains are highly mediated landscapes. As we know, the CFL story is not a story about black invisibility. It is a story of a number of black men who, as a result of racism in the United States, came to a place with which many were unfamiliar and that, in many respects, was equally racist. Moreover, the CFL experience tells us about men who are professional and black, and who play the game as well as anyone. It is only by ignoring these accomplishments that one can keep hoping for people like Jeff Blake, Stewart, and McNair as a way to break down existing barriers. Remembering black quarterbacking in the CFL automatically re-maps the historical boundaries and therefore makes us reconsider the political project. If you accept that Warren Moon and Turner Gill are as good as anyone, even though they played in Canada, it changes the way you orient to exclusion and discourses of black authenticity. Moreover, it could possibly change the orientation to rationality that motivates the desire for black quarterbacking historiography. What then becomes of the pedagogy of desire as Michael Dyson describes it? What do “we” desire and who is the pedagogue? Given this latest example, it is clear that the pedagogy of desire is rooted in a semiotic chain and a politics of gender that reinforces conservative versions of black masculinity, and thus one of which we must be highly suspicious. Also, what becomes of the search for positive images? If we accept that including Canada allows us to think very differently about the question of invisibility, the question of the visible, or as Dyson would call it, the desirable, changes. In addition to hooks’ criticisms of Dyson’s work, I would like to add that what limits his conception of Jordan is that he locates Jordan as the site of desire. It is worth noting that a similar argument to Dyson’s could be made for Kordell Stewart as a contradictory site of desires for black kids in the world of sports. But doing so leaves the question of the restrained masculinity, with which I began

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this chapter, unanswered. My trouble with such a project is that it leaves desire within official parameters. Thus alternative or subaltern black masculinities—the CFL quarterback, for example—cannot be addressed.

Conclusion: Scrambling through the Black Atlantic In closing, I would like to suggest a few points in search of a methodology that can move us away from black conservatism, including the demand to see black faces at the position of quarterback. Moreover, this conclusion will set the stage for a discussion of black political culture and sexuality in sport, which I take up in my conclusion. Here, I want to ask: what becomes of our pedagogy of desire if we include Canada and rely less on official versions of the “hero”? While I began with detailing the restrained politics of both the position of hegemonic definitions of the quarterback and the New Right version of black masculinity, I close with the opposite.14 If we think about CFL quarterbacks, restraint is not usually the dominant characteristic. While this is largely a result of the different rules of the Canadian game, one cannot but think that this legion of scrambling quarterbacks is an example of a style that is very distinct. When I think of black CFL quarterbacks, what comes to mind is a verb: to scramble.15 Two examples are of interest here that highlight key aspects of scrambling both on and off the field. The first is Condredge Holloway. It is important to stress Holloway’s polyvalency. Holloway started at quarterback at the University of Tennessee in the late 1960s, where he set and broke a number of school records. Holloway was also a star at shortstop on the varsity baseball team. However, his success on the football field did not translate into an offer to play quarterback in the NFL. As was the custom for black collegiate quarterbacks then, he was drafted and told that the team wanted to bring him in “as an athlete” and play defensive back, which was a typically “black” position.

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Holloway’s talents as a baseball player made him the most highly sought-after baseball player in North America. Upon graduation, he was drafted first overall by the expansion Montreal Expos. In addition to these offers, he was also drafted in the first round of the CFL draft by the Ottawa Roughriders, where he was told he would be given the chance to play quarterback. Holloway chose the CFL, above baseball and the NFL, because of his desire to play quarterback professionally. During his CFL career with Ottawa and the Toronto Argonauts, Holloway was an outstanding player and became well known for his scrambling and his ability to improvise and make opportunities, apparently out of nothing. In addition to Holloway, there is the example of Turner Gill, who played with the University of Nebraska and led his team to great success in the early 1980s. Gill was also a two-sport star at Nebraska (he also played shortstop for the Nebraska baseball team). When his playing career ended with the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL, Gill went on to a brief pro baseball career with the Cleveland Indians of the American League. Gill’s story was very much the same as Holloway’s: despite his success in the NCAA, he was stacked to play a position other than quarterback in the NFL.What distinguishes these two quarterbacks and a host of others, is their polyvalency and their ability to play different positions other than a traditional quarterback, who is a drop-back style passer. Moreover, what distinguishes them is their ability to scramble, to be many things in one, passer and runner if need be. In defence of my claims about the connection between geography and theory, we must consider the (ironic) way that the metaphor of scrambling appears within some trends in black cultural studies as well. Such a coincidence means that we might consider scrambling as a methodology for current politics. As I stated in the first chapter, both C.L.R. James and Paul Gilroy stress movement as a key theoretical tool in the understanding of black life. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy suggests that knowledge of a history of movement among “new world” black

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peoples may take us away from the constricting and politically disastrous forms of chauvinism, what he calls “ethnic absolutism.” In this vein, I suggest that thinking of scrambling, or rather thinking as scrambling, becomes an enabling and subversive practice in the political landscape. More to the point, I want to name Holloway and Gill as examples of black Atlantic sports stars, who because of discriminatory labour practices, prized polyvalency and improvisation as necessary features of their art/work. If the black Atlantic is the counterculture of modernity, and there is no reason to think otherwise, it is clear that the scrambling and polyvalency displayed by Gill and Holloway is countercultural to the modernist and colonialist paradigm of the quarterback: white, tall, unitary, reserved, and appearing “in control.” Considering Holloway and Gill makes us read the appropriation of Kordell Stewart via the Nike ad, and his complicit performance in it very differently. Getting back to the theme of visibility that I have discussed throughout the chapter, I want to suggest that paying attention to the black Atlantic quality of CFL quarterbacks like Holloway and Gill means that we can read them as emblematic of Gilroy’s claim, that “[t]he specificity of the ... Black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and of the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (1993: 19). Thus, I want to scramble away from conventional readings of the quarterback and think about a black Atlantic reading of quarterbacking, which automatically includes Canada and changes the relation to exclusion. In that sense, since we are both moving the map and moving on the map, the question of visibility changes and we may move into spaces that we didn’t think existed. Also, given that the question of visibility changes, so does the corresponding question of desire that means in this case: What kind of blackness is possible, and what kind of blackness do we want? I suggest movement, particularly scrambling, as a key element in our pedagogy of desire.

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chapter

6

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE CLOSET: A BLACK QUEER THEORY OF SPORT AND MASCULINITY We dance as if we are marching. As if we are stepping from mountaintop to mountaintop, afraid to fall yet not giving a good Goddamn if we do (Bill T. Jones, with P. Gillespie, 1995: 3).

INTRODUCTION: James and Edwards at the Limit his book is deeply indebted to, among others, the work of Harry

T

Edwards and C.L.R. James. It is difficult to pursue a project exploring black masculinities and sport (or sport and popular

culture generally) without engaging with their work and political projects. What I take from Harry Edwards is the invaluable connection that he, and those of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights, made between sport, labour, and politics. To this day, Edwards’s Revolt of the Black Athlete remains essential reading for those trying to think through black political culture and sport. C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary makes

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a crucial connection between sport and politics, and insists that we read sport as one of many human artistic practices. This insistence on reading sport not as a discrete sphere but as part of public culture generally is nothing short of revolutionary. There are important differences and similarities in James’s and Edwards’s work as discussed in chapter one. Some of the fundamental differences are as follows. First, although writing in the same time period as James, Edwards, by and large, is writing from within a narrative of blackness that is local to the United States (even though his position is critical of official United States policy and its racist culture). As such, the work emerges as a text of black nationalism, operating within the context of the largely US-based black studies movement as a political and intellectual project. Part political pamphlet and part historical record, Revolt is written with an urgency and an activism that places it firmly within a tradition of writing on Black Power. It has few positive things to say about “Uncle Toms” and in closing, announces that the days of the apolitical black athlete are numbered indeed. Second, in contrast to Edwards, James was always quite troubled by the rhetoric of Black Power, even if he was sympathetic with both its frustrations and aims. Instead of clearcut discussions of right and wrong that, in the United States, translated to black and white, James was often uncomfortable with “race” as a metanarrative for politics.1 Not only was James a faithful reader and follower of Lenin throughout his life, he was also steeped in, and clearly comfortable with, the Western intellectual tradition. Thus James often shies away from manifestos, and instead peppers his writing with references to the foundations of classical English education. In Beyond a Boundary, with his erudite discussions of Peisisastrus, the democracy of the Greeks, and the Olympic Apollo, James’s political intentions on the subject of blackness might be hard to detect, especially if he is being read by those looking through the lens of Black Power.

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Moreover, James’s work is continually criss-crossing the limits of national boundaries, partly by choice, but partly also because he was often exiled from certain countries.2 Moving from the United States, to England, to Ghana, to Trinidad clearly helped make James a truly black Atlantic figure. As a result, James’s work has been studied enthusiastically by those in the diverse fields of Caribbean studies, cultural studies, and post-colonial criticism. However, as I hope I have argued, precisely because of the neglect of James within sport studies, a return to his work, in tandem with a reading of Edwards, is essential to energizing and revitalizing the contemporary body of work that we call black cultural studies of sport, and help to take it away from its status as what James Baldwin has called “protest literature.” However, in this section, instead of reading James and Edwards for their differences, I will begin by reading them for their confluences, which occur primarily in their imagining of masculinity. I would like to read them at their limits in order to both interrogate and deconstruct the versions of masculinity that each puts forward. The major epistemological and political reason for doing so is in order to introduce questions of sexuality to the heart of a discussion of black masculinity and sport. Raising these questions is the last, but certainly not the least, question, in deconstructing and reconstructing black masculinity. In this sense, my work is inspired once again by black queer studies, including the work of people such as Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien. To date, their work is seen as beyond the boundary of studies in black cultural studies of sport, yet I hope here to make an implicit argument that they should be treated as key thinkers. The one major confluence in the work of James and Edwards occurs, perhaps not accidentally, in the dedications to the works that I have been reading here, Beyond a Boundary and Revolt of the Black Athlete. I suggest that we read the beginning of each book as if it were a kind of metaphorical ending: each book begins with a dedication that, I argue here, proscribes the limits of the masculinity that could be

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consciously or unconsciously elaborated in each author’s argumentation. As such, I am suggesting that it is interesting to take both James and Edwards, past the limits of their own narratives of masculinity. In the dedication to The Revolt of the Black Athlete, Harry Edwards begins with a very moving paean to those men who have been influential in the writing of his book, and also to the formation and ongoing work of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights (OCHR). In addition, the dedication is a celebration of the journey to black self-consciousness that was central to Edwards, and the consciousness of the political struggles of the period across Africa and the diaspora. He begins his dedication as follows: This book is dedicated to the following beautiful black warriors in the sincere faith that their sacrifice and courage shall not have been in vain: Lew Alcindor, Bill Russell, Mike Warren, Tommie Smith, Lucius Allen, Muhammad Ali and John Carlos. Edwards goes on to thank the other athletes and activists (only one of whom is female) who, in his words, “dared attempt to practice the ideals of humanity, sportsmanship, and the Olympic spirit in the face of condemnation and ridicule.” Finally, Edwards thanks a series of athletes who became politicized as a result of the 1968 Olympics and the work of the OCHR, and ultimately who “emerged black.” James dedicates Beyond a Boundary to three male cricketers of different eras whom he sees as foundational to our ability to recognize the connected nature of history, politics, and sport/art. Never one to pass up the chance to make an argument, James’s dedication is therefore in line with his central claims in the book: namely that sport is art, and that art is central to the many cultural pursuits, including, in the case of Learie Constantine, the project of self-determination in the Caribbean. His dedication reads as follows:

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To Learie Constantine and W.G. Grace for both of whom this book hopes to right grave wrongs, and, in so doing, extend our too limited conceptions of history and of the fine arts. To these two names I add that of Frank Worrell, who has made ideas and aspirations into reality. James’s dedication can be read in line with the book, which, in part, details the nature and the depth of James’s friendship and association with Learie Constantine, in addition to outlining the importance of W.G. Grace and Frank Worrell to the sport of cricket and to refining the art of the game, if you will. What is striking about both dedications is how each is constructed via a masculine homosocial that permits deep same-sex affinities without the existence of any explicit display of sexual affection or attraction. While the homosocial remains a somewhat undertheorized concept in contemporary gender studies, it is nonetheless a place to begin to think through these dedications.3 As several scholars have written, notably Eve Sedgwick, the homosocial is characterized by a deep masculine “love” that at the same time eschews, even disavows, any reference to homosexuality. In addition, the homosocial is often secured by implicit and/or implicit gestures of homophobia. As such, the homosocial makes up the limit of heterosexual masculine intimacy, and heterosexual masculinity in general (1985: 1–20). These deeply homosocial dedications, then, in addition to the works that follow them, comprise the foundation for two of the most influential texts dealing with black men in sport in the past forty years. Thus, it behooves us to try to think through this problematic further, in order to posit a place after the homosocial, namely a black queer theory of sport and masculinity. I have attempted to sketch out much of this in chapter two, but here I will take my argument slightly further. What these dedications signal to me is the need to probe the limits of black masculinity, that which understands itself as homosocial, and therefore

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both aligns itself with, and mirrors, much of patriarchal men’s sporting life and culture in the contemporary period. Moreover, I want to uncover some of the silences and closets that such a limit proscribes, with a view to re-imagining masculinity. In other words, I do not mean to read James or Edwards as implicitly gay, but in the tradition of people like Riggs and Julien I do want to open up the category of black masculinity for these kinds of discussions without being met by silence. On the question of silences, I return to the work of Philip Brian Harper, whose essay I discussed in chapter two. Harper’s opening essay in his book Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of AfricanAmerican Identity discusses two incidents of silence concerning black masculinity in the public sphere in the United States. Harper juxtaposes the silence surrounding ABC news anchor Max Robinson’s homosexuality following his death from AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s with the management of, and response to, Magic Johnson’s contraction of HIV during the same period.What Harper suggests is that these two instances, as well as the sound of silence created around both of them, are important, since they are replicated in the common sense of black masculinity. I return to Harper in order to add another story of silence: the death of Justin Fashanu, a star soccer player and one-time member of England’s national soccer team. The following is a brief account of the silences and fabrications around Fashanu’s homosexuality and the resulting costs: When Fashanu came out to the tabloids in 1990, he was criticized by some gay activists and attacked by the black media and his brother, fellow soccer player John Fashanu, who offered him thousands of pounds to hide his identity and did not speak to him for the last seven years of his life .... When he died (he hanged himself), (the tabloids) stated that he had killed himself after “a final orgy of homosexual lust” before ending his guilt, despite disavowals from the sauna where he had spent his last hours (Miller, 2001: 69; emphasis added).

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Fashanu’s story illustrates the need for a black queer theory of sport that understands masculinity beyond the heteronormative constructs of the homosocial. Moreover, it suggests that the silences, which are often produced as a result of black homosocial masculinity, are deathly, as was once the slogan for AIDS activists.The closet for men in sport continues to be highly destructive, and the racialized nature of this closet poses particular challenges for black men who wish to come out in the world of athletics, given the pre-existing racist notions that seem to equate heterosexuality with black masculinity. Of the few gay men in big-time sport who have come out of the closet, one thing can be said for sure: the costs have been very high.This is equally true in the case of the black gay men who have come out—Glenn Burke, Jerry Smith, Roy Simmons, and Justin Fashanu, who, in the early 1990s spent a season with Hamilton in the Canadian professional soccer league. All have taken monumental steps in order to put black gay male athletes on the agenda. In addition to the tragic death of Fashanu, the case of Glenn Burke is also very sad. Burke, who played outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the mid-eighties, felt he could not come out while remaining in professional baseball at the same and, as a result, he came out after he had retired. Shortly after retiring from baseball, Burke tested positive for HIV, and died shortly thereafter of AIDS-related illnesses. This painful reality suggests that the question of coming out remains a tortured, troubling, and often deathly process.While the homosocial may have been the limit for James and Edwards, it certainly cannot be the limit today. As such, work on sport and masculinity must go in these directions in order to risk reproducing the familiar line of good boy feminism that is posited on narcissistically exploring heterosexuality, and which has become completely irrelevant to discussing gender, “race,” and sexuality. Moreover, at the level of black masculinity in sport, such a move is necessary, given that we can no longer solely talk of black men in the frame of the melancholic.The kind of criticism that considers only how black men have been rendered silent is difficult to avoid given the state of the world

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we live in. But clearly, as critics like Kobena Mercer and Judith Butler have shown, melancholia is not simply an expression of sadness. Borrowing on the work of Freud, Butler and Mercer, in different contexts, have shown the extent to which melancholia is an effect, or price, of heterosexuality.4 In black cultural studies, this structure of melancholia has influenced the work of the early Frantz Fanon (specifically Black Skin, White Masks) and continues to influence much contemporary criticism, including the otherwise fine collection by David Marriott, On Black Men.

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In addition to thinking about silences and the homosocial, there are useful ways to move beyond the confines of masculinity studies. One way to begin would be to follow some of the work on women in sport, including that of Susan Cahn (1994). Cahn’s work argues strenuously for the need to decouple the connection that equates sport and heterosexual masculinity. If we complicate Cahn’s claims somewhat to account for black masculinity, a black queer theory of sport sees a connection between sport and heterosexual masculinity. In addition, such a theory also finds that black masculinity within this economy is read as more heterosexual than white, owing to historical associations between blackness, labour, and the body. In addition, in light of the

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work of bell hooks and Michele Wallace (discussed in chapter two), it is also the case that the connection between sport and heterosexual masculinity also works via a spectacularization of black masculinity. Given my arguments in chapter two, it is worth asking seriously whether in the realm of sport, spectacularization is a necessarily heterosexist practice.

Conclusion: Black Queer Theory and Sport As such, a black queer theory of sport and masculinity involves building upon one of the key insights in the work of people who attempt to draw the connection between sport and sex. Brian Pronger’s provocative The Arena of Masculinity contains important insights into thinking through these questions. For example, he writes: If the orthodox masculine world of athletics were to be known as a deeply hidden homoerotic world of paradox, the patriarchal power of those men who pursue athletics for that power would be ironically undermined, making the entire edifice of orthodox athletic masculinity tremble (1992: 182).

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Pronger’s insight is important, especially if we consider how black masculinity works as a foundation for both the gaze of whiteness and the gaze of heterosexual masculinity within sport. In that sense, black bodies in sport often work not only as labourers as Edwards suggested, but their surplus labour is also exploited at the level of the semiotic and spectacular in order to shore up a series of racialized sexual fantasies of both white men and women. The equation of sport and sex thus needs to be augmented to account for processes of racialization. Only a casual familiarity with the career of Dennis Rodman (after his tenure with the Detroit Pistons) proves the case. Rodman’s disruption of the rules of black masculinity, and the hysterical reaction with which it was met, offer some clues as to how we might articulate a black queer theory of sport. In Rodman’s autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be, Rodman proclaims that “Fifty percent of life in the NBA is SEX” (Rodman, with Keown, 1996: 179). It is clear that, to some extent, Rodman is explicitly referring to heterosexual sex; however, Rodman’s ruminations about homosexuality throughout the book are evident. In that sense, this is the fundamental question in consideration of sport and black masculinity: What happens when we equate sport, “race,” and sex? Such a question takes us beyond consistently turning our gaze back to masculinity and, moreover, it allows us to move away from the familiar way of seeing things, which equates sport, blackness, and heterosexual masculinity. Linking sport, black masculinity, and sex together both politically and intellectually might go a long way toward undermining some of the oppressive and repressive apparatuses that both contain and limit how we can describe black men’s lives. Moreover, it might mean that we could develop a language about black sexuality in sport that would allow us to perhaps avert human tragedies, such as those of Justin Fashanu and Glenn Burke. Moreover, it might also circumvent episodes of black male athletes behaving at their most repressed and destructive (recall the events of O.J. Simpson’s life, as well as the actions of and the

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behaviour of certain black members of the New England Patriots toward white female reporter Lisa Olson in the late 1980s).5 Moreover, focusing specifically on the issue of blackness in Canada, a black queer theory of sport might offer a chance to re-read many of the figures in the nation’s stories and histories much differently, including those of Ben Johnson, Daniel Igali, etc. In addition, it would involve drawing a connection between narratives of nation and narratives of sexuality, an area of inquiry that needs further exploration. It would ask the question: How is blackness implicated and constructed within these narratives? Finally, it might enable us to uncover previously unknown histories that are part of the general project of queer studies. Given that much of the work of black queer theory inside and outside of sport engages questions of visibility and recognition, such an equation—sport, racialization, and sex—might allow us to re-read black masculinity in sport, so that we may be able to hear, see, and affirm what exists both underneath and beyond the silences.

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RELATED WEBSITES www.keithboykin.com This is an interesting website that addresses the question of homoeroticism and homosexuality among black male athletes in interesting and crucial ways. www.ccmacanada.org/urban/blackcanhistory A more sociological look at who and what constitutes black Canada. Contains important historical information. www.blackculturalstudies.org The definitive website for black cultural studies, upon which my work relies, with interviews and features on a number of black cultural studies scholars. Unfortunately, nothing on black cultural studies in Canada. www.generation-online.org/index.html A very good website for both activists and scholars, this website contains very useful information about the revolutionary contributions of C.L.R. James. www.yorku.ca/aconline The website of the Centre for the Study of Black Cultures in Canada, located at York University. Contains very useful information about upcoming events.

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ENDNOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.The notion of haunting is also a useful hermeneutic in this book. In that regard, I am indebted to Scott McFarlane’s insightful essay,“The Haunt of Race: Canada’s Multiculturalism Act, the Politics of Incorporation, and Writing Thru Race” (FUSE, vol. 18, 3: 18–31). 2. I owe half of this insight to Travis Turner, a student in my PERLS 351 class in 2003 at the University of Alberta, who argued that sporting cultures seem incapable of dealing with social difference. 3. For example, witness how track athletes Bruny Surin and Donovan Bailey who, while competing with injuries, were constantly labelled quitters in the media during the same Olympics. 4. I borrow this term from Walter Rodney. 5. Such orientalist distortions appear frequently in the bourgeois press and are the backdrop that allows for Igali’s story to be represented as it has been. Witness recent investigations of life in Africa by the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno and the Globe and Mail’s John Stackhouse.

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6. This incident is outlined in detail in chapter three, below. 7. I am using “race” in quotation marks to underline the fact that it is not a biological category, but a social and historical one that is largely deployed to maintain existing power relations. For a sustained discussion of this, please see the work of Paul Gilroy, especially his most recent work, Against Race. 8. I am grateful to Ray Morris for helping me think through the way patchwork is connected to Canadian sporting cultures. 9. For more on this, see Ben Carrington (2001); and Paul Gilroy (2000). 10. For examples of work in the James’s renaissance, please see Farred (1996); and Nielsen (1997). 11. James unfortunately omitted gender and sexuality as an organizing principle in his work. For more, please see chapter one of this work.

CHAPTER 1 1. While there are differences in the work of Ahmad, Gordon, and McClintoch, what they share is a dismissal of post-colonial studies as bourgeois, metropolitan, and apolitical. 2. Anyone familiar with James’s work can see his effects on Gilroy and, as such, might anticipate some of my arguments. 3. Edwards does not suggest this, but it might follow that black sporting labour in the United States is also doubly exploited. 4. Edwards’s work betrays what some have called a clenched-fist aesthetic that presents a masculinist and heteronormative understanding of the black male body and the world in general. I take up this discussion in greater detail in the following chapter. While Beyond a Boundary does not portray a clenched-fist aesthetic, it is a masculinist text and has been rightfully criticized for it. I also discuss this in the following chapter.

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5. Much of the scholarship on James suffers from overemphasizing the tropes of boundary and movement in his work. It seems to be unable to bring him into the present. See, for example, Grant Farred (1996). 6. For examples of this conflation, see the work of Alan Wiggins, Gary Sailes, and Kenneth Shropshire. 7. A notable exception to this trend is Disch and Kane (1996). 8. The one major weakness of this formulation is that by aestheticizing sport, one places more value on the so-called beautiful moves in sport, while the more mundane seem to be ignored, thus once again producing a hierarchy. In addition, it should be noted that owing to James’s exceptionalist streak, he did seem to suggest that cricket was more of an art form than the inanimate forms. 9. The key thinker of Afrocentrism is Molefi Kete Asante, whose books, including The Afrocentric Idea, outline his position about the existence of a mythical Africa and the need for New World black folks to return to such a set of values. In addition to Gilroy’s critique, Asante’s work has been critiqued for being misogynist and homophobic. 10. Gilroy’s comments against sociology come in light of the fact that most “race” relations sociology focuses on what is happening to black people instead of considering what kinds of practices black folks are engaging in, in spite of the existence of racism. He notes that “[r]acial subordination is not the sole factor shaping the choices and actions of Britain’s black settlers and their children” (1991: 152). 11. It is worth noting here that this formulation is similar to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, to which he refers as a combination of “force and consent.” See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1989). 12. The “Just Desserts” case, which I discuss in more detail in chapter four, refers to the alleged killing of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis, a white woman, by four black men in a café (called Just Desserts) in north Toronto in 1995. The murder, and the media’s hysterical response, ushered in a wave of white paranoia and profiling of young black males

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that was denounced by many activists. For more on this, see NourbesePhilip (1994). Only one of the accused, Lawrence Brown, was found guilty of the murder in 2001. 13. In an insightful essay, Sonia Kruks (1996) points out the modifications of Frantz Fanon to the term that appears first in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The quote from Fanon I cite above is found in Kruks (1996: 128). 14. Here I am reminded of Roland Barthes’s essay on wrestling in Mythologies, where he suggests that what characterizes wrestling is the sense of a demand on the part of fans for justice without ambiguity: “the idea of paying (morally for one’s sins) is essential to wrestling” (1972: 22). 15. For more on Jack Johnson, please see Gail Bederman (1995). 16. For more on globalization as Americanization in the world of sport, please see Miller et al. (2000).

CHAPTER 2 1. See the following chapter for a more detailed discussion of Ben Johnson, the Dubin Inquiry, and the national media attention surrounding it. 2. For more on this, please see Morrison (1996). 3. There has been much scholarly attention paid to these crises, with the exception being the Ben Johnson affair, given that it occurred outside the United States. In fact, it is fair to say that much of black cultural studies would not be possible without these spectacles. See the following for more information: on Thomas-Hill, see Toni Morrison (1992); for the Rodney King beatings, see Robert GoodingWilliams (1993); for the O.J. Simpson murder trial, see Morrison and C. Brodsky Lacour (1997); for the Million Man March, see Robert Reid-Pharr (1996).

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4.There have been many interesting responses to the Farrakhanist view of “race” and masculinity, perhaps one of the most poignant being Marlon Riggs’s 1995 documentary video, Black Is, Black Ain’t. 5. Gramsci’s use of the concept hegemony, outlined in his Prison Notebooks, is difficult to define. The term refers to ideology, and suggests that ideas become dominant within a historical context; also, what is dominant ideologically is constantly shifting and retooling by the ruling class. As such, the openness of the term suggests that what is hegemonic is open to attack and change from subaltern elements. For more, see the work of Stuart Hall, especially his book The Hard Road to Renewal (1988). Hall is clearly one of Gramsci’s most eloquent interlocutors. 6. On the way that Africa is seen as Europe’s other, please see Mudimbe (1988). With respect to how this works to carnivalize black masculinities, please see Davis (1983, chapter 11). 7. For example, Burstyn (1999); McBride (1995); Messner and Sabo (1995); Trujillo (1995); Jansen and Sabo (1994); Messner and Sabo (1992); Pronger (1992); Sabo and Runfola (1980). 8. However, it is worth noting, as my female students constantly remind me, that hypermasculinity in sporting competition is not only the province of men. 9. One of the other weaknesses is that, in its insularity, men’s studies (of which Good Boy Feminism forms a part) is unable to deal with women’s concerns across the spectrum of feminism, and in this case is exemplary of what Tania Modleski calls “feminism without women.” For more on this, please see Leo Bersani (1995, 69–71). Moreover, it is worth noting that the Good Boy Feminist project cannot in any way re-imagine masculinity. 10. It is worth noting that both conceptions fail at the level of imagining masculinity other than through the binary terms of unrestrained/restrained.

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11. For more on televised sport, see Randy Roberts (1995). Also see Harry Edwards (1973) for a discussion of the integration of sport in the United States. 12. James’s work, while remarkably different at both the level of form and content, contains a similar desire for black heroes. Beyond a Boundary was by no means a manifesto, and in that sense, betrays James’s distrust of black nationalist politics. For more on James’s disaffection with black nationalism, especially its United States variant, please see Farrukh Dhondy’s (2001) recent biography of James. 13. For a critique of this position, please see Robin D.G. Kelley (1997), especially chapter three. 14. Wallace is not alone in this regard. This is something that has been commented upon by hooks (1994).

CHAPTER 3 1. For more on the way that “race” acts to construct black women’s bodies as accessible, please see Angela Davis (1983, chapter one). In terms of a discussion on the confluence of the sexual and economic subjugation of black women, and the role of the Canadian state in such, please see Silvera (1989); and Brand, in Bannerji (1993). 2. Rose’s work is not as detailed in terms of linking racism and economic crisis. 3. There are many sources to cite regarding this; in terms of an overview, please see Li and Singh Bolaria (1988). 4. See Goldberg (1993). 5. Note that Ben Johnson’s opinion was not sought. 6. For a longer discussion on the actions of Charest and Mulroney, see McAloon (1990).

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7. Bhabha (1994: 143). Emphasis on “historical” in original; other emphases added. 8. There is a resonance between my concept of forgetful remembering and Bhabha’s claim that nation and its unanimism are in fact challenged. While I argue that remembering to forget is a necessary task in Canadian nationalism, Bhabha (1994: 160) suggests that its opposite, “forgetting to remember,” opens up ways to imagine the nation differently. 9. While I am writing the revisions to this chapter in September 1999, this is no longer the case. However, I cannot go into detail here about the current representations. 10. Please see also Anne McClintoch (1995, chapter five). 11. Toronto Sun (7 Aug. 1995: front page); Toronto Star (7 Aug. 1995: B1); Globe and Mail (7 Aug. 1995: D1). 12. The obsession with cleanliness as necessary for healthy nationhood has been a hallmark of Canadian nationalism for quite some time, and perhaps had one of its most fervent periods in the early twentieth century. For more on this, please see Valverde (1991). 13. Tess Chakkalakal (1999) has shown to what extent being “humanitarian” is central to Canadian nationalism, especially in the area of foreign policy. 14. Such inversions are common in what Butler (1993) calls “the racist imaginary.” Borrowing on Fanon, Butler shows how the Los Angeles police justified their continued beating of Rodney King through a belief that King, while almost unconscious, was attacking them. 15. With specific reference to nationalism, this is also a longstanding practice, the most poignant example being the D.W. Griffiths’s film Birth of a Nation, which features a white woman being raped by a black man (a white actor in blackface) to symbolize the defilement of the nation.

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16. The reason I have placed public in quotation marks is because of its dubious reality. For me, and many others with an anti-racist conscience, what we were watching was a completely different spectacle, one that was clearly about pinning the blame on Ben Johnson while other guilty parties escaped without blame. While McAloon is for the most part aware of this, he does often refer to public in a white way. The same is true for Steven Jackson’s (1998) use of “Canada.” 17. In the wake of the Tour de France steroid scandal, Ben Johnson argued in an interview with the Daily Mail, an English newspaper, that this proves he was “not the only bad guy.” See Toronto Star (5 Aug. 1998: E9). 18. While there is insufficient space to discuss this here, I suggest that many fans refuse to accept athletes’ “impurity” because of persistent desires for our “superheroes” to be superhuman. 19. Note also that in 1997, when Johnson applied to be reinstated by the International Amateur Athletic Federation, he and his agent, Morris Chrobotek, were arguing that effectively Johnson did not do anything wrong because everyone else was on steroids as well. 20. “Signifyin(g)” is an African-American term. It usually involves a form of wordplay among competing individuals. Sometimes it also refers to artists building on and revising the work of their predecessors. For more on signifyin(g), see H.L. Gates (1998), The Signifying Monkey. 21. For more on this, please see the Globe and Mail (13 Oct. 1988: A7). See also “Responding to the Crisis,” Nation of Immigrants Project, Phase II, 1996, Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI). 22. Munoz (1997: 353) suggests that, “Disidentification ... is the way that a subject looks at an image constructed to exploit and deny identity and instead finds pleasure, both erotic and self-affirming.”

CHAPTER 4 1. The title of this chapter refers to a common vernacular reference

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heard at gyms or playgrounds where pick-up basketball is played in the city. If, on the court, there are already two teams playing, and there are one or more players waiting to play on the sidelines, the first person who loudly announces “I got next” or “I got next run” gets the right to play in the next game and has the right to choose his or her players. 2. The Caribbean presence in Canadian track and field can be seen in the Caribbean heritage of most of the top sprinters in Canada, including Bruny Surin, who is of Haitian origin, and Donovan Bailey, who is of Jamaican origin. However, recently there is also a West African presence in Canadian track and field, with the successes of women’s sprinter Philomena Mensah and men’s high jumper Kwaku Boiteng, who are both of Ghanaian origin. 3. Note that these examples are from the years 1996 and 1997, when the Raptors began in Toronto. Thus, many of these examples are out of date, and some of the key players in the Raptors organization have left. 4. Bloor Collegiate. 5. Hereinafter, I will refer to Toronto’s team as “the Raptors.” 6. Please see Thornton (2000). 7. For more background on the protests, please see Eva Mackey (1995), “Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over Truth in the Into the Heart of Africa Controversy” (Public Culture 7(2): 403–431). 8. The Toronto Raptors uniforms are purple, red, and white. 9. Regarding the migratory practices of black Canadian musicians, please see Rinaldo Walcott (1997), especially chapter four. With reference to boxing, there are the cases of boxers Egerton Marcus and Lennox Lewis. Marcus, a silver medallist in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, left Canada to train in the United States shortly after his victory. Lewis, a gold medallist in Seoul and Canada’s most decorated boxer in a generation, left Canada for England because of a lack of support and media

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friendliness to his career. This coldness was only more intensified in light of the endless hype that surrounded Sean O’Sullivan and Willie DeWitt, two white boxers who had very mediocre professional careers. In the realm of basketball, there is a legion of young black men who have gone to the United States rather than stay in Canada to play. For more on this, see Carl James (1997a). 10. I borrow this term from Errol Lawrence (1981), “Common Sense Racism and the Sociology of Race Relations.” No. 66 in the Papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Birmingham). 11. See Basketball Rules Book (1995), and also conversations with basketball officials in Toronto. 12. The most paranoiac version of this is the calling of police officers to games where there are no fans! This evidence was attained in conversations with Peel Region basketball officials. 13. For example, see James Christie, Globe and Mail (13 Feb. 1995). 14. Evidence of this type of article is Joyce (1994). 15. Please see Report of the Review Committee, Men’s National Basketball Team, December 1994. See also Abdel-Shehid (2003). 16. Recently, Nike has come to be synonymous with the rise in popularity of the NBA, given the popularity of its icon, Michael Jordan, and its PLAY program. For more on Nike, PLAY, and basketball, please see Cole (1996). 17.With reference to the Nike camp, see Toronto Star (19 Sept. 1997: E12). 18. Throughout Clinton Gayle’s trial, the media in Toronto referred to him as a “cop-killer,” which was a riff on the rap song by Ice-T. 19. While the Raptors were absent at the trial of Gayle, it is worth mentioning that Raptor community personnel do not generally attend anti-racist rallies either.

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20. The reason that I put “black” in parentheses in front of capitalism is because at the time of the 1997 Raptorfest, Isiah Thomas, then the Raptors’ general manager, had an agreement in principle to buy the Raptors from its white owner, Alan Slaight. However, since then, Slaight withdrew his offer of sale of the team. Thomas retained his 9 per cent share of the team, which he has owned since the team’s inception. 21. For more on Hoop Dreams anthropology, please see AbdelShehid (1997). 22. See Thornton. 23. For more on this, please see the essays in Dent et al. (1992). 24. On the connection between blackness, entertainment, and sport, Isiah Thomas, the Raptors’ general manager, recently commented upon Tracy McGrady (one of the Raptors’ players) that “he understands that this is a business but it’s also entertaining.” Please see Toronto Star (16 Oct. 1997: C4). 25. The extent to which Raptor players themselves are also complicit would involve more detailed interviews of the players. This, however, is outside the scope of my book. 26. For more on this, see Rose (1994). 27. It is true that Gaston is American, but he was clearly speaking to the realities of the Toronto media. The practice of policing blackness by African-Americans is most succinctly illustrated in the appearance of African-American academic Henry Louis Gates, at the request of Garth Drabinsky, to quell black Canadian protests of Drabinsky’s staging of “Show Boat” at the North York Centre for the Performing Arts. For more on this, please see Sanders (1999). 28. For the tensions between borrowed blackness and the cement of the nation in Canada, please see Walcott (1997, chapter seven). 29. In doing so, I recognize that the category “black,” like all identities, is not in any way complete or closed. In addition to what could be

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described as black fans in the city, I will provisionally include many non-white boys and men such as South Asians, East Asians, and Latin Americans into my analysis. But considering the experience of these many different ethnicities would be far too complicated for the scope of this chapter. 30. For a comment on the rise of neo-conservatism in the United States, please see Houston Baker (1995). On the neo-conservatism of the black Canadian bourgeoisie, please see Walcott’s (1997) discussion of Third Cinema in Canada. 31. For an essay on the synonymous relation between blackness and basketball in contemporary popular culture, please see Nathan McCall (1997). 32. Basketball aficionados should also note the modernist configurations of the Raptor ball club itself. It is significant that Isiah Thomas drafted a point guard, Damon Stoudamire, first and then again when he traded for centre Sharone Wright later in that same year. In doing so, he made it clear that this would help Damon because he would now have a “natural centre” to pass to. The insistence on this approach to building a team, one with a natural centre and natural point guard, points to an adherence to a conservative style of play, straight out of the John Wooden tradition, and shows the influence of Bobby Knight, Thomas’s college coach at Indiana University.The classic text of basketball modernism is Wooden’s Practical Modern Basketball. 33. Brand, as quoted in Walcott (1997: 35).

CHAPTER 5 1. For example, please see Jones et al. (1987); Lapchick (1996). 2. It is worth noting that on the Canadian collegiate scene, grouped together under the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU), black

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quarterbacks are non-existent.The information regarding Culpepper and McNab appeared on the ESPN Sports Center pre-season poll, May 1998. 3. These shifts have also been enabled by the presence of three black NFL head coaches: Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, and Ray Rhodes. Green, above all, seems most committed to this development, as witnessed by his unpopular commitment in 1998 to veteran quarterback Randall Cunningham, and his new commitment to Culpepper, who, despite his phenomenal ability, has been called “too young” by many members of the media. 4.This reality (and its correlation) was made most poignantly in the 1991 Gulf War, in the way that football and militarism were simultaneously positioned. Please see Curry Jansen and Sabo for more on this. 5. Other examples of this work are Billy Hawkins (1998). Please see also Earl Ofari Hutchison (1996). 6. For work on the intersection of “race,” sexuality, and masculinity in pro sports, please see Roediger and Johnson (1997), and Disch and Kane (1996). 7. For more on the critique of positive images, please see Julien (1992). 8. For more on this please, see Bhabha (1994). 9. For an example other than Hoop Dreams of sports writing as anthropology, please see Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground (1995). For a longer discussion of blackness, sport, and anthropology, please see Abdel-Shehid (2000) and Kelley (1997), especially chapter one. 10. The way that the ’hood is represented in Hoop Dreams and other films is not merely fictional. It accords with reading black urban centres as what Goldberg calls periphractic spaces. 11. On a somewhat unconscious level, I could not help noticing the place of “knightly” in the middle of the page of text and noting that Knight is the last name of the Nike chief executive officer, Phil Knight.

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12. Dyson, as quoted in hooks (1994: 134). 13. For more on this, please see chapter two. 14. Moreover, they have been forced to convert to this model and those who have not have been punished. For example, Kordell Stewart’s career has nose-dived in large part due to the conservatism of his white coach, Bill Cowher. Also, witness the exploits of white quarterback Doug Flutie, who, in spite of spectacular success in two years with the Buffalo Bills, was benched before the 1999–2000 playoffs. 15. Here I do not want to suggest that this position is by nature more feminist, but we must wonder makes it so forbidden south of the border in the NFL.

CHAPTER 6 1. For more on James’s uneasy relation to bBack Power, not the least of which is his socialist politics, see Farrukh Dhondy (2001). 2. See Dhondy here for more on James’s movements. 3. The homosocial is also largely undertheorized in relation to “race.” 4. See Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification” in Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (1995). For Kobena Mercer, see his critique of heterosexism in Black Skin, White Masks entitled “Decolonisation and Disappointment: Frantz Fanon’s Sexual Politics” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, edited by Alan Read (1996). 5. Olson was a white female sports reporter for the Boston Herald who was sexually harassed in September 1990 in the New England Patriots locker room. According to Lisa Disch and Mary Jo Kane (1996: 278), “The incident was initiated by one (black) player who walked over to

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Olson and thrust his penis toward her, asking ‘Do you want to take a bite out of this?’”

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182

INDEX A Abdul-Jabaar, Kareem, 19 Aberdeen, Sheldon, 97, 102, 111 absent presence, 30 absolutist currents, 11–12 Adorno, Theodor, 19 Africa, Enlightenment/colonialism notions of, 49 Afrocentrism, 25–26 Agee, Arthur, 104 ahistoricism, 58 Ahmad, Aijaz, 15 Alcindor, Lew, 19 Ali, Muhammad, 19 Allen, Damon, 133 Alliance Party, 70 Americanada, dreams of, 109–112 anti-Americanism, 91 anti-racism, and capitalism, 107 Appadurai, Arjun, 113–115 Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (Harper), 63, 144 Arena Football League, 121 The Arena of Masculinity (Pronger), 147 art and sport, 22–24, 56 authenticity, and the “centre” of diaspora, 34–38 Autobiography of Malcolm X, 18

B Bad as I Wanna Be (Rodman), 105 Bailey, Donovan, 5, 7, 12, 33, 36–37, 69, 74, 78, 79–83, 88–91, 92

183

WHO DA MAN? Baker, Houston, 116 Baldwin, James, 48, 53, 55, 116 Barrett, Danny, 133 Barrett, Lindon, 105 Barthes, Roland, 2 basketball Americanada, dreams of, 109–112 “colour” of, 98–99 common-sense racist understandings of, 99 hardness, quest for, 40 Hoop Dreams aesthetic, 103, 106–107, 109–112 leagues and teams, emphasis on, 96 negotiation of difference, 101 popularity of, in Toronto, 100–101 Raptor Morality, 102, 103–105, 106–109, 112–116 repression, at high school level, 99–100 as a sport of difference in Canada, 98–100 Toronto Raptors, 100–101 vs. track and field, 95–96 violence in, vs. hockey, 99–100 and “white paranoia,” 100, 101 Basketball Canada, 100 Baylis, Todd, 71, 96 “Be Like Mike?” (Dyson), 129 Bederman, G., 52 Beyond a Boundary (James), 17–20, 21–24, 56–57, 139–140, 141, 142–143 Bhabha, Homi, 6, 27–29, 38, 67, 78, 112 black athletes ambiguous position of, 32 coming out, lack of safety in, 8–9 continuous migration of, 99 endangered species school, 124 as hero, 58–59, 60 heterosexuality, equation with, 64 historical and political constraints, 24–29 ignorance and denial, process of, 34 Manichean representation, 33 marginalization of, 119 movement outside Canada, for support, 34–35 as outsiders, 4–5 spectacularization of black athletic masculinity, 9 black Atlantic, 6, 16, 38, 135–137 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 25, 136–137 Black Camelot (Van Deburg), 58 black Canadian cultural studies, 79, 82 black Canadians. See Canada black feminist and queer critique see also black queer theory of sport Carby’s critique, 57

184

INDEX Harper’s critique, 63–64 hooks’ critique, 59–61 James’ insights, perspective on, 57–58 problem of celebrity, 61–63 remakings of masculinity, 58–64 and spectacles of black masculinity, 42–43 Wallace’s critique, 61–63 Black Jacobins (James), 21 Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Walcott), 30–31, 79 “black male,” as category, 45 black masculinity Americanized models, 110–111 cool pose, 104 criminalization of, 71–72 crisis of, 59 designation as outside Canadian nation-state, 32 forgetful remembering, 78, 79–83 fundamental misunderstandings of the constituents of, 42–43 gay men, disavowal of, 63–65 ghost of Black Power masculinity, 61 “going south,” 111–112 heterosexist version of masculinity, 55 historical and political constraints, 24–29 interiority of, 58 invisibility of other forms of, 63 mythical masculinity, 44–45 New Right version of, 135 outernational consciousness, 34 overdetermining structure, 8 in post-Civil Rights era, 122 public spectacles of, 41–46 and racial stacking theories, 119–124 and Raptor Morality, 103 refashioning of, 43–45 representation of, within capitalist sporting cultures, 103 rigid versions of, 63 silences in, 63–64, 144 unravelling, 58–64 white macho deployment of, 49 Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton), 18 Black Power era, 17–18 Black Power rhetoric, 140 black public sphere, as no-man’s land, 110 black quarterbacks, 120–121, 133–135 black queer theory of sport see also black feminist and queer critique and heterosexual masculinity, 146 the homosocial, 143–144 James and Edwards at their limits, 141–144

185

WHO DA MAN? melancholia, 146 need for, 145 silences, 144–145 women in sport, 146–147 black rationality questions, 132–135 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 146 black subjectivity, 128 blackness authenticity and the “centre” of diaspora, 34–38 black public sphere, as no-man’s land, 110 bourgeois revolution of, 113–115 Canadian blackness, as “farm league” blackness, 36 Canadian fears of, 115 Canadiana discourse, incompatibility with, 114 commodification of public blackness, 106–109 and crime, 29, 31–32 experimental or forbidden forms of, 35 limit of, 37 making and unmaking of, 39 and modernism, 112–116 movement to nation’s margins, 32 and official Canadian nation-state practices, 96 physicality, synonymity with, 48 and state of nature, 48–49 Toronto Raptors, as border, 101–106 uncleanliness, linkage with, 82–83 in United States, 35 white deployment of, 49 Blake, Jeff, 134 both/and position, 16–17, 24 bourgeois revolution of blackness, 113–115 boxing, 47–48 Brand, Dionne, 5, 30, 34, 79, 82, 83, 84, 116 Bread Out of Stone (Brand), 82 Britain, anti-black racism in, 26–27 Brohm, Jean-Marie, 19 Brown, Jim, 19, 71 Brown, Lawrence, 31–32 Brunt, Stephen, 83, 84 “buggin’ out” demand, 126–127 Burke, Glenn, 145, 148 Butler, Judith, 100, 146

C Cahn, Susan, 146 Camby, Marcus, 108 Canada black cultural producers in, 34 circumscriptions of non-white identities, 69–70

186

INDEX denial of racism, 6–7 “going south,” 111–112 good citizen, 28 iconography of blackness, crime and nation, 69–70 import of American blacks, 111 innocence, racialized concept of, 83–84 marginalization of non-white peoples, 29 movement of blackness to nation’s margins, 32 movement outside, for support, 34–35 neo-liberal approaches, 70 “official” sporting culture, as “white thing,” 110 “other” black voices, 132 paradox of myth-making, 78 public spectacles of black masculinity, 41–46 “race,” nation and blackness in, 29–34 tensions of black existence, 30–31 track and field in. See track and field undocumented immigrant workers in, 69 Canadian Football League, 35, 121, 133–135 Canadian identity, 5–6, 30, 77, 87, 89 Canadian National Basketball, 100 Canadian Olympic Association, 76 Canadian sporting culture, genealogy of, 7 capitalism and anti-racism, contradictory logics in, 107 crises of, and scapegoating, 71 internal national differences, exploitation of, 27 and Raptor Morality, 113 and sport, 19, 24–25 Carby, Hazel, 57 Carmichael, Stokely, 18 Charest, Jean, 73 classic Canadian nationalism, 91 Clifford, James, 15 C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (Nielsen), 21 Coalition for the Truth about Africa (CFTA), 102–103, 111 colonialism. See Enlightenment/colonialism commodification processes in black United States, 35 hooks’ view on, 60 public blackness, commodification of, 106–109 Wallace’s view on, 61–62 commodity fetishism, 9 community black and Latino urban spaces, 128 and sport, 56–58 and Toronto Raptors, 102 and tragic protagonist, 75–76 trans-border sporting communities, 115

187

WHO DA MAN? competitive individualism, 104 Constantine, Learie, 143 cool pose, 104 Copps, Sheila, 77 cricket, 113 crime, 29, 31–32, 71–72, 109–110 crisis of black masculinity, 59 Culpepper, Daunte, 120, 121

D Davis, Angela, 42, 52, 84 Debord, Guy, 9 denial of the body, 122 Dewalt, Roy, 133 diaspora black Atlantic, 25 and black expressive cultures, 26 “centre” of, and blackness and authenticity, 34–38 concept of, 6–8, 20 key insight in black cultural studies, 38 Dimaggio, Joe, 2 Do the Right Thing (Lee), 127 double standard, 77 Dubin Inquiry, 42–43, 69, 83–89 Dutch national men’s soccer team, 3 Dyson, Michael Eric, 129, 131, 134–135

E Ealey, Chuck, 133 Edwards, Harry, 9–10, 11, 17, 38–39, 58, 59, 119, 124, 125, 139–143 Ellison, Ralph, 62–63 endangered species school, 124 Enlightenment/colonialism Africa, notions of, 49 physicality and rationality, divisions of, 120 racism of, 29–30 sports, vs. “high” culture, 52 state of nature, 47, 48 erasure, 34 eroticism in sport, 146 Esmie, Robert, 33–34, 36 essentialism, 58, 110 ethnic absolutism, 137 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Baldwin), 53 exclusion, 30

F Fanon, Frantz, 32, 48, 49, 81, 100, 146 Farber, Michael, 90

188

INDEX Farrakhan, Louis, 43–45, 55, 64, 122 Farred, Grant, 21 Fashanu, Justin, 144–145, 148 feminism see also black feminist and queer critique definition of, 50 Good Boy Feminism, 49–55 heterosexist paradigm, 54 innate masculine essence, racialization of, 53 masculinity, relation to, 51 racial paradigm, 54 racist and heterosexist discourse, 52–53 reformation of men’s sport, 51–52 religious overtones, 53 state of nature, reliance on, 54 fetishization of the black body, 61 Fighting Words (McGruder), 64–65 football black quarterbacks in, 120–121, 133–135 CFL quarterbacks, 133–135 geography, and black rationality questions, 132–135 Good Boy Feminist perspective on, 50 hard work thing, 126–131 and jazz, 130 liberal paradigm of inclusion, 120 male bodies as weapons, 50–51 Nike advertising campaign, 127–131 positive images, search for, 126–127 the quarterback in, 122–123 racial stacking in, 119–124 as war, 51 forgetful remembering, 78, 79–83 Francis, Charlie, 87 Francis, Gary, 71

G Gaston, Cito, 110–111 gay men see also black queer theory of sport costs of coming out, 144–146 disavowal of, 63–65 Gayle, Clinton, 71–72, 78, 96–97, 102, 109–110, 111 gender separatism, 3 gendered hierarchies, 56–57 geography, and black rationality questions, 132–135 ghost, 78 Gilbert, Glenroy, 36 Gill, Turner, 133, 134, 136, 137 Gilroy, Paul, 6, 16, 25–27, 28–29, 132, 136–137

189

WHO DA MAN? Glissant, Edouard, 6 global capitalism, 4–5 Globe and Mail, 80, 81–82, 83 “going south,” 111–112 Goldman, Ronald, 42 Good Boy Feminism, 49–55 see also feminism good citizen, 28 Gordon, Lewis, 15, 75–76 Grace, W.G., 143 Grant, O’Neil, 71, 78 Greene, Maurice, 91 Gretzky, Wayne, 2

H Hall, Stuart, 71, 102, 117 Hamilton, Charles V., 18 Hanger, Art, 70 hard work thing, 126–131 hardness in basketball, 40 Nike advertising campaign, 127–131 in United States, 39 Harper, Philip Brian, 63–64, 144 Harris, Mike, 46 heteronormative patriarchy, 24 high school basketball, 99–100 Hill, Anita, 42, 43 hockey, 67–68, 91, 98, 99 Hoffman, Abbie, 87–88 Holloway, Condredge, 133, 135–136, 137 homoerotic paradox, 146 the homosocial, 143–144 hooks, bell, 42, 50, 59–61, 103–104, 147 Hoop Dreams, 103, 128 Hoop Dreams aesthetic, 103, 106–107, 109–112 hybrid formations of nations, 27

I Igali, Daniel, 4–5, 8, 34 immigrants anti-immigrant racism in Canada, 70 as scapegoats, 71 In Black and White: Race and Sports in America (Shropshire), 124–125 inclusion framework, 4–5 individualism, 44, 55, 104, 133 innocence, racialized concept of, 83–84, 87 integration of vision, 23 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 5

190

INDEX International Olympic Committee, 76 “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit, 97, 102–103 Invisible Man (Ellison), 62–63

J Jackson, John Henry, 133 Jackson, Steven, 82 Jamaican, as marker, 40 James, Carl, 111 James, C.L.R., 6, 11, 17, 21–24, 38–39, 46, 56–57, 59, 136, 139–143 jazz, 130 “Joe” Canadian, 2 Johnson, Ben blackness outside of nation, 7 body of, 68 and Canadian boundaries, 76–77 and Dubin Inquiry, 85–86 impact of, 42 media representations of, 69–70, 72–74, 75–76 paranoiac reaction, 33–34 and projection of guilt, 84 remaking as “ghost,” 77–78 remaking as “ghost,” 92 as scapegoat, 88 as symbol, 12 Johnson, Jack, 33 Johnson, L., 125 Johnson, Magic, 63, 64, 144 Johnson, Michael, 37 Jordan, Homer, 133 Jordan, Michael, 35, 59, 63, 122, 129, 134 Just Desserts case, 31–32, 71

K Keith, Adrian, 81 Kelley, Robin D.G., 104, 128–129 King, Rodney, 42 Korbut, Olga, 2

L Langley, Neil, 102 Laumann, Silken, 2, 76 Lee, Spike, 127 Leimonis, Georgina “Vivi,” 31–32, 71 Leone, Michele, 97 Lewis, Carl, 73 Lewis, Lennox, 34 Li, P., 69, 71 Liberal Party, 70

191

WHO DA MAN? Lorde, Audre, 42 Lott, Ronnie, 49 Lubiano, Wahneema, 127

M MacPherson, Don, 133 Magliore, Jamaal, 101 Majors, Richard, 104 Mandela, Nelson, 47–48 Manichean approach cleanliness, 79 colonialism, response to, 126 Good Negro/Bad Negro, 107 mapping of “race,” 52 representation, 33 sports writing and, 75 terms, 6–7 Marable, Manning, 42 Marchi, Sergio, 72 marginalization, 29, 34 Marriott, David, 146 Marxism and sport, 19 “Masculinity in Black Popular Culture” (Wallace), 61 McAloon, John, 84–86, 87 McBride, James, 50, 51 McClintoch, Anne, 15–16 McGruder, Kevin, 64–65 McLeod, Lyn, 71 McLeod Report, 70–71 McNabb, Donovan, 12, 121 McNair, Steve, 12, 120, 121, 134 media coverage, 79–80 melancholia, 146 Mercer, Kobena, 146 Messner, Michael, 50, 51 metonym for the nation, 1–2 Million Man March, 43–45, 55 Minty Alley (James), 21 Moon, Warren, 133, 134 Morrison, Toni, 130 movement art and sport, 22–24 critical foundations of, 15–20 importance of, in C.L.R. James’ thought, 21–24 outernational desires, 24–29, 34–35 universal desire for, 23 Mudimbe, Valentin, 48 Mulroney, Brian, 73 mythical reading, 25

192

INDEX “mythologies,” 2 myths of racism, 32

N Naismith, James, 98 nation construction of double, 78 hybrid formations of nations, 27 limits of concept of, 7 other, construction of, 27 pedagogical element of, 28 performative re-mappings of, 88–89 and “race,” 25–26, 29–34 sports writing, and “race,” 74–76 temporality of, 88 Nation of Islam, 43–45, 55 National Basketball Association, 96, 105, 106–107 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 121 National Football League, 120–121, 121, 123, 126 nationalism ambivalence of, 29 classic Canadian nationalism, 91 inherently unstable foundations of, 28 performative element of, 27–28 repressive nature of, 4–5 rituals of nationalism, repetition of, 112 sport, importance of, 25 sporting cultures, similarity with, 3 “Us” vs. “them,” 2 Native Son (Wright), 53 NBA Team Up program, 106 negotiation of difference, 101 neo-colonialism, 5 NEPAD, 5 new black nation, 112–116 New England Patriots, 149 Nielsen, Aldon, 21 Nike advertising campaign, 127–131, 137 Nike “Exposure Camp,” 101 Nike-fied presentations, 12 non-citizens, 2 North American Free Trade Agreement, 70 nostalgic pose, 60–61

O Olson, Lisa, 149 Olympic Committee for Human Rights (OCHR), 18–19, 59, 139, 142 Olympics, 1996, 36–37 On Black Men (Marriott), 146

193

WHO DA MAN? “other” black voices, 132–135 outernational desires, 16, 24–29, 34–35 outsiders, 2–3 overdetermination, 8, 9, 32, 34

P patriarchal family values, 108 pedagogical element of the nation, 28 Pelé, 2 performativity, 24–29 Perkins, Dave, 77 permanence critical foundations of, 15–20 and exclusion, 30 performativity and the outernational, 24–29 Pittsburgh Steelers, 124, 127 policing of athletes, 2–3 Policing the Crisis (Hall), 71 politics, and sport, 46–47 politics of restraint, 126 positive images, search for, 126–127 post-Civil Rights context, 59 Pound, Richard (Dick), 76–77, 78 problem of celebrity, 8–9, 61–63, 65, 130 process of splitting, 29, 112 Progressive Conservative Party, 70 Promise Keepers, 43–44, 45, 55 Pronger, Brian, 64, 146, 147–148 public blackness, commodification of, 106–109 Puritan politics, 55

Q quarterbacking, 122–123 see also football queer critique. See black feminist and queer critique; black queer theory of sport queer studies, 147

R “race” and blackness in Canada, 29–34 class privilege, mask of, 125 and nation, 25–26, 29–34 and sports writing, 74–76 Race Men (Carby), 57 “race”-relations sociology, 25–27 racial stacking in football, 119–124 misleading focus on, 121

194

INDEX new stacking literature, 124–125 persistence of, 10 theories of, 119–124 update of literature, 121 racialized division of labour, 18–19 racism anti-immigrant racism in Canada, 70 against black men only, 125 blackness and uncleanliness, linkage between, 82–83 class privilege, mask of, 125 innocence about, in Canada, 83–84 racist homophobia of sporting cultures, 8 and state practices, 68–72 racist culture, 76 Raptor Foundation, 105 Raptor Morality, 102, 103–105, 106–109, 112–116 Raptorfest, 97, 102–103, 111 Rebagliati, Ross, 74, 76–78 Reform Party, 70 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 44, 55, 64 restraint, politics of, 126 Revolt of the Black Athlete (Edwards), 9–10, 17–20, 139–140, 141–142 rituals of nationalism, 112 Robinson, Jackie, 35 Robinson, Max, 63, 144 Rodman, Dennis, 99, 105, 148 Roediger, D., 125 Rogers, Carlos, 107–108 Rogers, Renee, 108 roots, 15–16 see also permanence Rose, Tricia, 71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47 routes, 15–16 see also movement Royal Ontario Museum, 97, 102–103 running. See track and field Russell, Bill, 19 Ruth, Babe, 2

S Sabo, D., 51 Sa’id, Edward, 15, 132 Sedgwick, Eve, 143 sexuality and sport, 148 see also black queer theory of sport and visibility in black popular culture, 63–64 Sharma, Nandita Rani, 2

195

WHO DA MAN? Shields, Ken, 100 Shropshire, Kenneth, 124–125, 133 silences, 63–64, 144–145 Simmons, Roy, 145 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 42 Simpson, O.J., 20, 42, 43, 59, 125, 148 Singh, Vijay, 3 Singh Bolaria, B., 69, 71 Smith, Jerry, 145 Smith, Tommie, 19 social difference, 3, 10 “softness,” punishment of, 60–61 Sorenstam, Annika, 3 Sotomayor, Javier, 2 spectacles of black masculinity, 41–46 sport and art, 22–24, 56 as colonial project, 33 and community, 56–58 as erotic realm, 146 vs. “high” culture, 52 homoerotic paradox, 146 as hypermasculine, 52 James’ conception of, 57–58 male bodies as weapons, 50–51 and manliness, 52 as moral regulation, 33 and politics, 46–47 and the popular imagination, 46–47 as school of patriarchy for boys, 50 and sex, 148 and the state of nature, 46–48 and subaltern masculinity, 113 women in, 146–147 SportCanada, 87 sporting culture nations, similarity with, 3 racialized division of labour, 18–19 racist homophobia of, 8 repressive nature of, 4 seductiveness of, 8 silences, foundation of, 63–64 unethical treatment of the socially different, 3 as “white thing,” 110 sports writing, 74–76, 80–82, 128 Starkman, Randy, 80–81 state of nature and blackness, 48–49 described, 47

196

INDEX Good Boy Feminism, reliance by, 54 hypermasculine concept of sport, 52 racialization, 48 racist biology, 49 and sport, 46–48 state practices, and racism, 68–72 Stevenson, Teofilo, 2 Stewart, Kordell, 12, 120, 121, 127–131, 134, 137 Stoudamire, Damon, 106 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 53 Surin, Bruny, 34, 36

T terror of damnation, 55 theology of terror, 116 “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (Gilroy), 25 Thomas, Clarence, 42, 43 Thomas, Isiah, 102, 108, 110–111, 115 Thornton, Andrew, 97 tolerance, 4 Toronto Board of Basketball, 99 Toronto Raptors and Americanism, 112–113 as border for conventional representations of blackness, 101–106 community and, 102 negotiation of difference, 100–101 and public imagination, 105 Raptor Morality, 102, 103–105, 106–109, 112–116 Raptorfest, 97, 102–103, 111 spectacles of, 108–109 Toronto Star, 80, 96, 102 Toronto Sun, 80, 81 track and field vs. basketball, 95–96 Ben Johnson, 72–74, 76–77 Caribbean-inflected blackness in, 96 Donovan Bailey, 78, 79–83, 88–91 Dubin Inquiry, 83–89 forgetful remembering, 78, 79–83 “Golden Age of Canadian sport,” 84 vs. hockey, 67–68, 91 itinerant temporality, 68 sports writing, role of, 74–76, 80–82 steroid use in, 86–87 tragedy, racialization of, 75–76 tragedy, role of, 74 world’s fastest man debate, 37 tragedy, racialization of, 74, 75–76 trans-border sporting communities, 115

197

WHO DA MAN? Tretiak, Vyacheslav, 2 Trujillo, N., 50–51 two-sport stars, 135–136 Tyson, Mike, 20, 59, 60, 63

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 53 unethical treatment of the socially different, 3 United States blackness, and authenticity, 35–36 blackness and speed in, 37 hardness, version of, 39 Hoop Dreams, 103 imperialist attempt to centre blackness in, 37 Million Man March, 43–45 myth of blackness, 38 public spectacles of black masculinity, 41–46

V Van Deburg, William, 58 Vick, Michael, 120

W Walcott, Rinaldo, 30–32, 79, 132 Wallace, Michele, 8–9, 61–63, 64, 129, 147 War, Battering and Other Sports (McBride), 50 Ware, Andre, 133 Watts, J.C., 133 White, Reggie, 122 white macho deployment of black masculinity, 49 White Men Can’t Jump, 103 whiteness, 89 Williams, Desai, 87 Williams, James, 97, 102 Winslow, Kellen, 124–125, 133 Winter, Sylvia, 21 women in sport, 146–147 Woods, Tiger, 35, 59 World Bank, 5 World Championship of Basketball, 101 World Trade Organization, 4 world’s fastest man debate, 37 Worrell, Frank, 143 Wright, Richard, 53 Wynter, Sylvia, 56

198