Last
year's celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's
breaking the color line in major league baseball was one of
the most pronounced and prolonged ever held in the history of
our Republic in memory of a black man or of an athlete. It seems
nearly obvious that, on one level, our preoccupation was not
so much with Robinson himself--previous milestone anniversaries
of his starting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April
1947 produced little fanfare--as it was with ourselves and our
own dilemma about race, a problem that strikes us simultaneously
as being intractable and "progressing" toward resolution;
as a chronic, inevitably fatal disease and as a test of national
character that we will, finally, pass.
Robinson
was the man white society could not defeat in the short term,
though his untimely death at age 53 convinced many that the
stress of the battle defeated him in the long run. In this respect,
Robinson did become something of an uneasy elegiac symbol of
race relations, satisfying everyone's psychic needs: blacks,
with a redemptive black hero who did not sell out and in whose
personal tragedy was a corporate triumph over racism; whites,
with a black hero who showed assimilation to be a triumphant
act. For each group, it was important that he was a hero for
the other. All this was easier to accomplish because Robinson
played baseball, a "pastoral" sport of innocence and
triumphalism in the American mind, a sport of epic romanticism,
a sport whose golden age is always associated with childhood.
In the end, Robinson as tragic hero represented, paradoxically,
depending on the faction, how far we have come and how much
more needs to be done.
As
a nation, I think we needed the evocation of Jackie Robinson
to save us from the nihilistic fires of race: from the trials
of O.J. Simpson (the failed black athletic hero who seems nothing
more than a symbol of self-centered consumption), from the Rodney
King trial and subsequent riot in Los Angeles and, most significant,
from the turmoil over affirmative action, an issue not only
about how blacks are to achieve a place in American society
but about the perennial existential question: Can black
people have a rightful place of dignity in our realm, or is
the stigma of race to taint everything they do and desire? We
know that some of the most admired celebrities in the United
States today--in many instances, excessively so by some whites--are
black athletes. Michael Jordan, the most admired athlete in
modern history, is a $10 billion industry, we are told, beloved
all over the world. But what does Michael Jordan want except
what most insecure, upwardly bound Americans want? More of what
he already has to assure himself that he does, indeed, have
what he wants. Michael Jordan is not simply a brilliant athlete,
the personification of an unstoppable will, but, like all figures
in popular culture, a complex, charismatic representation of
desire, his own and ours.
Perhaps
we reached back for Jackie Robinson last year (just as we reached
back for an ailing Muhammad Ali, the boastful athlete as expiatory
dissident, the year before at the Olympics) because of our need
for an athlete who transcends his self-absorbed prowess and
quest for championships, or whose self-absorption and quest
for titles meant something deeper politically and socially,
told us something a bit more important about ourselves as a
racially divided, racially stricken nation. A baseball strike
in 199495 that canceled the World Series, gambling scandals
in college basketball, ceaseless recruiting violations with
student athletes, rape and drug cases involving athletes, the
increasing commercialization of sports resulting in more tax
concessions to team owners and ever-more-expensive stadiums,
the wild inflation of salaries, prize money and endorsement
fees for the most elite athletes--all this has led to a general
dissatisfaction with sports or at least to some legitimate uneasiness
about them, as many people see sports, amateur and professional,
more and more as a depraved enterprise, as a Babylon of greed,
dishonesty and hypocrisy, or as an industry out to rob the public
blind. At what better moment to resurrect Jackie Robinson, a
man who played for the competition and the glory, for the love
of the game and the honor of his profession, and as a tribute
to the dignity and pride of his race in what many of us perceive,
wrongly, to have been a simpler, less commercial time?
What,
indeed, is the place of black people in our realm? Perhaps,
at this point in history, we are all, black and white, as mystified
by that question as we were at the end of the Civil War when
faced with the prospect that slave and free must live together
as equal citizens, or must try to. For the question has always
signified that affirmative action--a public policy for the unconditional
inclusion of the African-American that has existed, with all
its good and failed intentions, in the air of American racial
reform since black people were officially freed, even, indeed,
in the age of abolition with voices such as Lydia Maria Child
and Frederick Douglass--is about the making of an African into
an American and the meaning of that act for our democracy's
ability to absorb all. We were struck by Jackie Robinson's story
last year because it was as profound, as mythic, as any European
immigrant's story about how Americans are made. We Americans
seem to have blundered about in our history with two clumsy
contrivances strapped to our backs, unreconciled and weighty:
our democratic traditions and race. What makes Robinson so significant
is that he seemed to have found a way to balance this baggage
in the place that is so much the stuff of our dreams: the level
playing field of top-flight competitive athletics. "Athletics,"
stated Robinson in his first autobiography, Jackie Robinson:
My Own Story (ghostwritten by black sportswriter Wendell
Smith), "both school and professional, come nearer to offering
an American Negro equality of opportunity than does any other
field of social and economic activity." It is not so much
that this is true as that Robinson believed it, and that most
Americans today, black and white, still do or still want to.
This is one of the important aspects of modern sports in a democratic
society that saves us from being totally cynical about them.
Sports are the ultimate meritocracy. Might it be said that sports
are what all other professional activities and business endeavors,
all leisure pursuits and hobbies in our society aspire to be?
If
nothing else, Robinson, an unambiguous athletic hero for both
races and symbol of sacrifice on the altar of racism, is our
most magnificent case of affirmative action. He entered a lily-white
industry amid cries that he was unqualified (not entirely unjustified,
as Robinson had had only one year of professional experience
in the Negro Leagues, although, on the other hand, he was one
of the most gifted athletes of his generation), and he succeeded,
on merit, beyond anyone's wildest hope. And here the
sports metaphor is a perfectly literal expression of the traditional
democratic belief of that day: If given the chance, anyone can
make it on his ability, with no remedial aid or special compensation,
on a level playing field. Here was the fulfillment of our American
Creed, to use Gunnar Myrdal's term (An American Dilemma
had appeared only a year before Robinson was signed by the Dodgers),
of fair play and equal opportunity. Here was our democratic
orthodoxy of color-blind competition realized. Here was an instance
where neither the principle nor its application could be impugned.
Robinson was proof, just as heavyweight champion Joe Louis and
Olympic track star Jesse Owens had been during the Depression,
that sports helped vanquish the stigma of race.
In
this instance, sports are extraordinarily useful because their
values can endorse any political ideology. It must be remembered
that the British had used sports--and modern sports are virtually
their invention--as a colonial and missionary tool, not always
with evil intentions but almost always with hegemonic ones.
Sports had also been used by their subjects as a tool of liberation,
as anti-hegemonic, as they learned to beat the British at their
own games. "To win was to be human," said African
scholar Manthia Diawara recently, and for the colonized and
the oppressed, sports meant just that, in the same way as for
the British, to win was to be British. Sports were meant to
preserve and symbolize the hegemony of the colonizer even as
they inspired the revolutionary spirit of the oppressed. Sports
have been revered by fascists and communists, by free-marketers
and filibusters. They have also been, paradoxically, reviled
by all those political factions. Sports may be among the most
powerful human expressions in all history. So why could sports
not serve the United States ideologically in whatever way people
decided to define democratic values during this, the American
Century, when we became the most powerful purveyors of sports
in all history?
Both
the left and the right have used Jackie Robinson for their own
ends. The left, suspicious of popular culture as a set of cheap
commercial distractions constructed by the ruling class of post-industrial
society to delude the masses, sees Robinson as a racial martyr,
a working-class member of an oppressed minority who challenged
the white hegemony as symbolized by sports as a political reification
of superior, privileged expertise; the right, suspicious of
popular culture as an expression of the rule of the infantile
taste of the masses, sees him as a challenge to the idea of
restricting talent pools and restricting markets to serve a
dubious privilege. For the conservative today, Robinson is the
classic, fixed example of affirmative action properly
applied as the extension of opportunity to all, regardless of
race, class, gender or outcome. For the liberal, Robinson is
an example of the process of affirmative action as the
erosion of white male hegemony, where outcome is the very point
of the exercise. For the liberal, affirmative action is about
the redistribution of power. For the conservative, it is about
releasing deserving talent. This seems little more than the
standard difference in views between the conservative and the
liberal about the meaning of democratic values and social reform.
For the conservative, the story of Robinson and affirmative
action is about conformity: Robinson, as symbolic Negro, joined
the mainstream. For the liberal, the story of Robinson and affirmative
action is about resistance: Robinson, as symbolic Negro, changed
the mainstream. The conservative does not want affirmative action
to disturb what Lothrop Stoddard called "the iron law of
inequality." The liberal wants affirmative action to create
complete equality, as all inequality is structural and environmental.
(Proof of how much Robinson figured in the affirmative action
debate can be found in Steve Sailer's "How Jackie Robinson
Desegregated America," a cover story in the April 8, 1996,
National Review, and in Anthony Pratkanis and Marlene
Turner's liberal article, "Nine Principles of Successful
Affirmative Action: Mr. Branch Rickey, Mr. Jackie Robinson,
and the Integration of Baseball," in the Fall 1994 issue
of Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Social Policy
Perspectives.) Whoever may be right in this regard, it can
be said that inasmuch as either side endorsed the idea, both
were wrong about sports eliminating the stigma of race. Over
the years since Robinson's arrival, sports have, in many respects,
intensified race and racialist thinking or, more precisely,
anxiety about race and racialist thinking.
Race
is not merely a system of categorizations of privileged or discredited
abilities but rather a system of conflicting abstractions about
what it means to be human. Sports are not a material realization
of the ideal that those who succeed deserve to succeed; they
are a paradox of play as work, of highly competitive, highly
pressurized work as a form of romanticized play, a system of
rules and regulations that govern both a real and a symbolic
activity that suggests, in the stunning complexity of its performance,
both conformity and revolt. Our mistake about race is assuming
that it is largely an expression of irrationality when it is,
in fact, to borrow G.K. Chesterton's phrase, "nearly reasonable,
but not quite." Our mistake about sports is assuming that
they are largely minor consequences of our two great American
gifts: marketing and technology. Their pervasiveness and their
image, their evocation of desire and transcendence, are the
result of marketing. Their elaborate modalities of engineering--from
the conditioning of the athletes to the construction of the
arenas to the fabrication of the tools and machines athletes
use and the apparel they wear--are the result of our technology.
But modern sports, although extraordinary expressions of marketing
and technology, are far deeper, far more atavistic, than either.
Perhaps sports, in some ways, are as atavistic as race.
The
Whiteness of the White Athlete
In a December 8, 1997, Sports Illustrated article, "Whatever
Happened to the White Athlete?" S.L. Price writes about
the dominant presence of black athletes in professional basketball
(80 percent black), professional football (67 percent black)
and track and field (93 percent of gold medalists are black).
He also argues that while African-Americans make up only 17
percent of major league baseball players, "[during] the
past 25 years, blacks have been a disproportionate offensive
force, winning 41 percent of the Most Valuable Player awards."
(And the number of blacks in baseball does not include the black
Latinos, for whom baseball is more popular than it is with American
blacks.) Blacks also dominate boxing, a sport not dealt with
in the article. "Whites have in some respects become sports'
second-class citizens," writes Price. "In a surreal
inversion of Robinson's era, white athletes are frequently the
ones now tagged by the stereotypes of skin color." He concludes
by suggesting that white sprinter Kevin Little, in competition,
can feel "the slightest hint--and it is not more than a
hint--of what Jackie Robinson felt 50 years ago." It is
more than a little ludicrous to suggest that white athletes
today even remotely, even as a hint, are experiencing something
like what Robinson experienced. White athletes, even when they
play sports dominated by blacks, are still entering an industry
not only controlled by whites in every phase of authority and
operation but also largely sustained by white audiences. When
Jackie Robinson departed the Negro Leagues at the end of 1945,
he left a sports structure that was largely regulated, managed
and patronized by blacks, inasmuch as blacks could ever, with
the resources available to them in the 1920s, '30s and '40s,
profitably and proficiently run a sports league. Robinson's
complaints about the Negro Leagues--the incessant barnstorming,
the bad accommodations, the poor umpiring, the inadequate spring
training--were not only similar to white criticism of the Negro
Leagues but they mirrored the criticism that blacks tended to
levy against their own organizations and organizational skills.
As Sol White makes clear in his seminal 1907 History of Colored
Base Ball, black people continued to play baseball after
they were banned by white professional leagues to show to themselves
and to the world that they were capable of organizing
themselves into teams and leagues. When Robinson left the Kansas
City Monarchs, he entered a completely white world, much akin
to the world he operated in as a star athlete at UCLA. It was,
in part, because Robinson was used to the white world of sports
from his college days that Branch Rickey selected him to become
the first black man to play major league baseball. Today, when
white athletes enter sports dominated by blacks, they do not
enter a black organization but something akin to a mink-lined
black ghetto. (My use of the word "ghetto" here is
not meant to suggest anything about oppression, political or
otherwise.) Although blacks dominate the most popular team sports,
they still make up only 9 percent of all people in the United
States who make a living or try to make a living as athletes,
less than their percentage in the general population.
What
I find most curious about Price's article is that he gives no
plausible reason for why blacks dominate these particular sports.
He quotes various informants to the effect that blacks must
work harder than whites at sports. "Inner-city kids,"
William Ellerbee, basketball coach at Simon Gratz High in Philadelphia,
says, "look at basketball as a matter of life or death."
In a similar article on the black makeup of the NBA in the Washington
Post last year, Jon Barry, a white player for the Atlanta
Hawks, offers: "Maybe the suburban types or the white people
have more things to do." Much of this is doubtless true.
Traditionally, from the early days of professional baseball
in the mid-nineteenth century and of professional boxing in
Regency England, sports were seen by the men and boys of the
poor and working classes as a way out of poverty or at least
out of the normally backbreaking, low-paying work the poor male
was offered. And certainly (though some black intellectuals
may argue the point, feeling it suggests that black cultural
life is impoverished) there probably is more to do or more available
to amuse and enlighten in a middle-class suburb than in an inner-city
neighborhood, even if it is also true that many whites who live
in the suburbs are insufferably provincial and philistine.
Nonetheless,
these explanations do not quite satisfy. Ultimately, the discussion
in both articles comes down to genetics. There is nothing wrong
with thinking about genetic variations. After all, what does
the difference in human beings mean and what is its source?
Still, if, for instance, Jews dominated football and basketball
(as they once did boxing), would there be such a fixation to
explain it genetically? The fact of the matter is that, historically,
blacks have been a genetic wonder, monstrosity or aberration
to whites, and they are still burdened by this implicit sense
that they are not quite "normal." From the mid-nineteenth
century--with its racist intellectuals like Samuel Cartwright
(a Southern medical doctor whose use of minstrel-style jargon,
"Dysesthaesia Ethiopica," to describe black people
as having thick minds and insensitive bodies is similar to the
talk of today's racist geneticists about "fast-twitch"
muscles) and Samuel Morton (whose Crania Americana tried
to classify races by skull size), Louis Agassiz, Arthur de Gobineau
and Josiah Nott (who with George Gliddon produced the extremely
popular Types of Mankind in 1854, which argued that races
had been created as separate species)--to Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein's most recent defense of intelligence quotients
to explain economic and status differences among racial and
ethnic groups in The Bell Curve, blacks have been subjected
to a great deal of scientific or so-called scientific scrutiny,
much of it misguided if not outright malicious, and all of it
to justify the political and economic hegemony of whites. For
instance, Lothrop Stoddard, in The Revolt Against Civilization
(1922), a book nearly identical in some of its themes and polemics
to The Bell Curve, creates a being called the Under-Man,
a barbarian unfit for civilization. (Perhaps this is why some
black intellectuals loathe the term "underclass.")
"The rarity of mental as compared with physical superiority
in the human species is seen on every hand," Stoddard writes.
"Existing savage and barbaric races of a demonstrably low
average level of intelligence, like the negroes [sic],
are physically vigorous, in fact, possess an animal vitality
apparently greater than that of the intellectually higher races."
There is no escaping the doctrine that for blacks to be physically
superior biologically, they must be inferior intellectually
and, thus, inferior as a group, Under-People.
But
even if it were true that blacks were athletically superior
to whites, why then would they not dominate all sports instead
of just a handful? There might be a more plainly structural
explanation for black dominance in certain sports. This is not
to say that genes may have nothing to do with it but only to
say that, at this point, genetic arguments have been far from
persuasive and, in their implications, more than a little pernicious.
It
is easy enough to explain black dominance in boxing. It is the
Western sport that has the longest history of black participation,
so there is tradition. Moreover, it is a sport that has always
attracted poor and marginalized men. Black men have persistently
made up a disproportionate share of the poor and the marginalized.
Finally, instruction is within easy reach; most boxing gyms
are located in poor neighborhoods, where a premium is placed
on being able to fight well. Male fighting is a useful skill
in a cruel, frontierlike world that values physical toughness,
where insult is not casually tolerated and honor is a highly
sensitive point.
Black
dominance in football and basketball is not simply related to
getting out of the ghetto through hard work or to lack of other
amusements but to the institution most readily available to
blacks in the inner city that enables them to use athletics
to get out. Ironically, that institution is the same one that
fails more often than it should in fitting them for other professions:
namely, school. As William Washington, the father of a black
tennis family, perceptively pointed out in an article last year
in the New York Times discussing the rise of tennis star
Venus Williams: "Tennis, unlike baseball, basketball or
football, is not a team sport. It is a family sport. Your immediate
family is your primary supporting cast, not your teammates or
the players in the locker room.... The experiences [of alienation
and racism] start soon after you realize that if you play this
game, you must leave your neighborhood and join the country
club bunch. You don't belong to that group, and they let you
know it in a variety of ways, so you go in, compete and leave."
In short, because their families generally lack the resources
and connections, indeed, because, as scholars such as V.P. Franklin
have pointed out, black families cannot provide their members
the cultural capital that white and Asian families can, blacks
are at a disadvantage to compete in sports where school is not
crucial in providing instruction and serving as an organizational
setting for competition. When it comes to football and basketball,
however, where school is essential to have a career, not only
are these sports played at even the poorest black high schools,
they are also the dominant college sports. If baseball were
a more dominant college sport and if there were no minor leagues
where a player had to toil for several years before, maybe,
getting a crack at the major leagues, then I think baseball
would attract more young black men. Because baseball, historically,
was not a game that was invented by a school or became deeply
associated with schools or education, blacks could learn it,
during the days when they were banned from competition with
white professionals, only by forming their own leagues. Sports,
whatever one might think of their worth as activities, are extremely
important in understanding black people's relationship to secular
institutions and secular, non-protest organizing: the school,
both black and white; the independent, nonprofessional or semiprofessional
league; and the barnstorming, independent team, set up by both
whites and blacks.
Given
that blacks are overrepresented in the most popular sports and
that young black men are more likely than young white men to
consider athletics as a career, there has been much commentary
about whether sports are bad for blacks. The March 24, 1997,
issue of U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story
titled "Are Pro Sports Bad for Black Youth?" In February
of that year Germanic languages scholar John Hoberman published
Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and
Preserved the Myth of Race, to much bitter controversy.
The Journal of African American Men, a new academic journal,
not only published a special double issue on black men and sports
(Fall 1996/Winter 1997) but featured an article in its Winter
1995/96 number titled "The Black Student Athlete: The Colonized
Black Body," by Billy Hawkins. While there are great distinctions
to be made among these works, there is an argument about sports
as damaging for blacks that can be abstracted that tends either
toward a radical left position on sports or, in Hawkins's case,
toward a militant cultural nationalism with Marxist implications.
First,
Hoberman and Hawkins make the analogy that sports are a form
of slavery or blatant political and economic oppression. Superficially,
this argument is made by discussing the rhetoric of team sports
(a player is the "property" of his team, or, in boxing,
of his manager; he can be traded or "sold" to another
team). Since most relationships in popular culture industries
are described in this way--Hollywood studios have "properties,"
have sold and swapped actors, especially in the old days of
studio ascendancy, and the like--usually what critics who make
this point are aiming at is a thorough denunciation of popular
culture as a form of "exploitation" and "degradation."
The leftist critic condemns sports as a fraudulent expression
of the heroic and the skilled in capitalist culture. The cultural
nationalist critic condemns sports as an explicit expression
of the grasping greed of white capitalist culture to subjugate
people as raw resources.
On
a more sophisticated level, the slavery analogy is used to describe
sports structurally: the way audiences are lured to sports as
a false spectacle, and the way players are controlled mentally
and physically by white male authority, their lack of access
to the free-market worth of their labor. (This latter point
is made particularly about college players, since the breaking
of the reserve clause in baseball, not by court decision but
by union action, has so radically changed the status and so
wildly inflated the salaries of many professional team players,
regardless of sport.) Probably the most influential commentator
to make this analogy of sport to slavery was Harry Edwards in
his 1969 book, The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Richard
Lapchick in his 1984 book, Broken Promises: Racism in American
Sports, extends Edwards's premises. Edwards is the only
black writer on sports that Hoberman admires. And Edwards is
also cited by Hawkins. How convincing any of this is has much
to do with how willing one is to be convinced, as is the case
with many highly polemical arguments. For instance, to take
up Hawkins's piece, are black athletes more colonized, more
exploited as laborers at the university than, say, graduate
students and adjunct faculty, who teach the bulk of the lower-level
courses at a fraction of the pay and benefits of the full-time
faculty? Are black athletes at white colleges more exploited
than black students generally at white schools? If the major
evidence that black athletes are exploited by white schools
is the high number who fail to graduate, why, for those who
adopt Hawkins's ideological position, are black students who
generally suffer high attrition rates at such schools not considered
equally as exploited?
What
is striking is the one analogy between slavery and team sports
that is consistently overlooked. Professional sports teams operate
as a cartel--a group of independent entrepreneurs who come together
to control an industry without giving up their independence
as competitive entities. So does the NCAA, which controls college
sports; and so did the Southern planters who ran the Confederacy.
They controlled the agricultural industry of the South as well
as both free and slave labor. The cartelization of American
team sports, which so closely resembles the cartelization of
the antebellum Southern planters (the behavior of both is remarkably
similar), is the strongest argument to make about slavery and
sports or about sports and colonization. This is what is most
unnerving about American team sports as an industry, and how
the power of that industry, combined with the media, threatens
the very democratic values that sports supposedly endorse.
The
other aspects of the sports-damage-black-America argument, principally
made by Hoberman, are that blacks are more likely to be seen
as merely "physical," and thus inferior, beings; that
society's promotion of black sports figures comes at the expense
of promoting any other type of noteworthy black person; that
black overinvestment in sports is both the cause and result
of black anti-intellectualism, itself the result of virulent
white racism, meant to confine blacks to certain occupations.
Implicit in Hoberman's work is his hatred of the fetishization
of athletic achievement, the rigid rationalization of sports
as a theory and practice. He also hates the suppression of the
political nature of the athlete, and hates, too, both the apolitical
nature of sports, mystified as transcendent legend and supported
by the simplistic language of sportswriters and sports-apologist
intellectuals, and the political exploitation of sports by ideologues
and the powerful. As a critical theorist, Hoberman was never
interested in proving this with thorough empiricism, and, as
a result, was attacked in a devastatingly effective manner by
black scholars, who blew away a good number of his assertions
with an unrelenting empiricism. But he has got into deep trouble
with black intellectuals, in the end, not for these assertions
or for the mere lack of good empiricism. Hoberman, rather, has
been passionately condemned for suggesting that blacks have
a "sports fixation" that is tantamount to a pathology,
a word that rightly distresses African-Americans, reminiscent
as it is of the arrogance of white social scientists past and
present who describe blacks as some misbegotten perversion of
a white middle-class norm.
There
is, however, one point to be made in Hoberman's defense. Since
he clearly believes high-level sports to be a debased, largely
unhealthy enterprise and believes that the white majority suffers
a sports obsession, he would naturally think that blacks, as
a relatively powerless minority and as the principal minority
connected to sports, would be especially damaged by it. The
black intellectual who most influenced Hoberman was Ralph Ellison;
and, as Darryl Scott pointed out in a brilliant analysis delivered
at a sports conference at New York University this past April
that dealt almost exclusively with Hoberman's book, Ellison
might rightly be characterized as "a pathologist"
and "an individualist." But he was, as Scott argued,
"a pathologist who opposed pathology as part of the racial
debate." Yet one of the most compelling scenes in Invisible
Man is the Battle Royal, a surreal perversion of a sports
competition in which blacks fight one another for the amusement
of powerful whites. Although racism has compelled blacks to
participate in this contest, the characters come willingly,
the winner even taking an individualistic pride in it. Such
participation in one's own degradation can be described as a
pathology. How can an Ellison disciple avoid pathology as part
of the debate when Ellison made it so intricately serve the
artistic and political needs of his novel? Ellison may have
loved jazz, and growing up black and poor in Oklahoma may have
been as richly stimulating as any life, just as going to Tuskegee
may have been the same as going to Harvard--at least according
to Ellison's mythologizing of his own life--but he found black
literature generally inadequate as art and thought that blacks
used race as a cover to avoid engaging the issues of life fully.
For Ellison, black people, like most oppressed minorities, intensely
provincialized themselves.
This
is not to say Hoberman is justified in adding his own pathologizing
to the mix, but his reasoning seems to be something like this:
If racism is a major pathology and if we live in a racist society,
one might reasonably suspect the victims of racism to be at
least as pathologized by it as the perpetrators. If the victims
are not pathologized at all by it, why single out racism as
a particularly heinous crime? It would, in that instance, be
nothing more than another banal example of man's inhumanity
to man.
In
response to an article like SI's "Whatever Happened
to the White Athlete?" blacks are likely to ask, Why is
it whenever we dominate by virtue of merit a legitimate field
of endeavor, it's always seen as a problem? On the one hand,
some blacks are probably willing to take the view expressed
in Steve Sailer's August 12, 1996, essay in National Review,
"Great Black Hopes," in which he argues that black
achievement in sports serves very practical ends, giving African-Americans
a cultural and market niche, and that far from indicating a
lack of intelligence, blacks' dominance in some sports reveals
a highly specialized intelligence: what he calls "creative
improvisation and on-the-fly interpersonal decision-making,"
which also explains "black dominance in jazz, running with
the football, rap, dance, trash talking, preaching, and oratory."
I suppose it might be said from this that blacks have fast-twitch
brain cells. In any case, blacks had already been conceded these
gifts by whites in earlier displays of condescension. But black
sports dominance is no small thing to blacks because, as they
deeply know, to win is to be human.
On
the other hand, what the SI article said most tellingly
was that while young whites admire black athletic figures, they
are afraid to play sports that blacks dominate, another example
of whites leaving the neighborhood when blacks move in. This
white "double-consciousness"--to admire blacks for
their skills while fearing their presence in a situation where
blacks might predominate--is a modern-day reflection of the
contradiction, historically, that has produced our racially
stratified society. To be white can be partly defined as not
only the fear of not being white but the fear of being at
the mercy of those who are not white. Whiteness and blackness
in this respect cease to be identities and become the personifications
not of stereotypes alone but of taboos, of prohibitions. Sports,
like all of popular culture, become the theater where the taboos
are simultaneously smashed and reinforced, where one is liberated
from them while conforming to them. Sports are not an idealization
of ourselves but a reflection.
The
Prince and His Kingdom
Arguably the most popular and, doubtless, one of the most skilled
boxers in the world today is the undefeated featherweight champion,
Prince Naseem Hamed of England. (The "Prince" title
is a bit of platonic self-romanticism; Naseem, of lower-middle-class
origins--his father a corner-store grocer--has no blood tie
to any aristocracy.) When he was boy, Hamed and his brothers
fought all the time in the street, usually against white kids
who called them "Paki." "I'd always turn around
and say, 'Listen, I'm Arab me, not Pakistani,'" said Hamed
in an interview some years later. "They'd turn round and
say you're all the same." Indeed, Hamed was discovered
by Brendan Ingle, his Irish manager, fighting three bigger white
boys in a Sheffield schoolyard and holding his own very well.
The fight was probably instigated by racial insult. Although
his parents are from Yemen and Naseem is worshiped nearly as
a god among the Yemeni these days, he was born in Sheffield,
is a British citizen, never lived in Yemen and, despite his
Islamic religious practices, seems thoroughly British in speech,
taste and cultural inclination. Yet when Naseem was fighting
as an amateur, he was sometimes taunted racially by the crowd:
"Get the black bastard." Even as a professional he
has sometimes been called "Paki bastard" and "nigger."
He was once showered with spit by a hostile white audience.
But Naseem was far more inspired than frightened by these eruptions,
and was especially impressive in winning fights when he was
held in racial contempt by the audience, as he would wickedly
punish his opponents. For Hamed, these fights particularly became
opportunities to rub white Anglo faces in the dirt, to beat
them smugly while they hysterically asserted their own vanquished
superiority. But his defiance, through his athleticism, becomes
an ironic form of assimilation. He is probably the most loved
Arab in England, and far and away the most popular boxer there.
As he said, "When you're doing well, everyone wants to
be your friend."
On
the whole, these displays of racism at a sporting event need
to be placed in perspective. For what seems a straightforward
exhibition of racialist prejudice and Anglo arrogance is a bit
more complex. And deeper understanding of the Naseem Hamed phenomenon
might give us another way to approach the entangled subject
of race and sports.
It
must be remembered that professional boxing has been and remains
a sport that blatantly, sometimes crudely, exploits racial and
ethnic differences. Most people know the phrase "Great
White Hope," created during the reign (190815) of
the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, when
a white sporting public that had, at first, supported him turned
against him in part because he flaunted his sexual affairs with
white women; in part because he seemed to be so far superior
to the white opponent, Tommy Burns, from whom he won the title.
The advent of Johnson did not, by any means, invent the intersection
of race and sports but surely heightened it as a form of national
obsession, a dark convulsion in an incipient American popular
culture. The expression "Great White Hope" is still
used today, in boxing, track and field, and professional basketball,
whenever a white emerges as a potential star.
But
ethnicity and racialism in boxing has a more intricate history
than white against black. Boxers have often come from racially
and ethnically mixed working-class urban environments where
they fought racial insults as street toughs. This was particularly
true of white ethnic fighters--Jews, Italians and Irish--in
the United States from the turn of the century to about the
fifties, when public-policy changes widened economic and educational
opportunities, and suburbanization altered white ethnic urban
neighborhoods, changing the character of boxing and big-city
life. John L. Sullivan, the last great bare-knuckle champion,
may have been "white" when he drew the color line
and refused to fight the great black heavyweight Peter Jackson
(at nearly the same time that Cap Anson refused to play against
blacks in baseball, precipitating a near-sixty-year ban on blacks
in professional baseball), but to his audience he was not merely
white but Irish. Benny Leonard was not just a white fighter
but a Jewish fighter. Rocky Graziano was not merely a white
fighter but an Italian fighter. Muhammad Ali, reinventing himself
ethnically when the fight game became almost exclusively black
and Latino, was not just a black fighter but a militant black
Muslim fighter. Fighters, generally, as part of the show, tend
to take on explicit ethnic and racial identities in the ring.
One needn't be a deconstructionist to understand that race aspires
to be a kind of performance, just as athletic performance aspires
to be something racial. This is clear to anyone who has seriously
watched more than, say, a half-dozen boxing matches. Today,
basketball is a "black" game not only because blacks
dominate it but because they have developed a style of play
that is very different from the style when whites dominated
the pro game back in the fifties. It is said by scholars, writers
and former players that Negro League baseball was different
from white baseball and that when Jackie Robinson broke the
color line, he introduced a different way of playing the game,
with more emphasis on speed and aggressive base-running. In
the realm of sports, this type of innovation becomes more than
just performance. The political significance of race in a sporting
performance is inextricably related to the fact that sports
are also contests of domination and survival. It should come
as no surprise that the intersection of race and sports reached
its full expression at the turn of the century when social Darwinism
was the rage (Charles Murray is our Herbert Spencer); when sports,
imitating the rampant industrialism of the day, became a highly,
if arbitrarily, rationalized system; when business culture first
began to assimilate the values of sports; when it was believed
that blacks would die out in direct competition with whites
because they were so inferior; when Euro-American imperialism--race
as the dramaturgy of dominance--was in full sway.
In
most respects, the racialism displayed at some of Naseem Hamed's
fights is rather old-fashioned. This racialism has three sources.
First, there is the old Anglo racism directed against anyone
nonwhite but particularly against anyone from, or perceived
to be from, the Indian subcontinent. (Hamed is insulted by being
called a "Paki," not an Arab, a confusion that speaks
to something specific in white British consciousness, as does
the statement "they are all the same.") In short,
in British boxing audiences, we see Anglo racism as a performance
of competitive dominance as well as a belief in the superiority
of "whiteness."
Second,
there is the way that Hamed fights. "Dirty, flash,black
bastard," his audience shouts, meaning that Hamed has stylish
moves, is very fast, but really lacks the heart and stamina
to be a true boxer, does not have the bottom of a more "prosaic"
white fighter. Hamed is derided, in part, because his showy,
flamboyant style seems "black," although there have
been several noted white fighters in boxing history who were
crafty and quick, like Willie Pep. Hamed is immodest, something
the white sporting crowd dislikes in any athlete but particularly
in nonwhite athletes. He fights more in the style of Sugar Ray
Leonard and Muhammad Ali than in the mode of the traditional
stand-up British boxer. To further complicate the ethnicity
issue, it must be remembered that famous black British boxers
such as Randy Turpin, John Conteh and Frank Bruno have been
very much accepted by the British sporting public because they
fought in a more orthodox manner.
Third,
traditional working-class ethnocentrism is part of most boxing
matches, as it is a seamless part of working-class life. Hamed
calls his manager "Old Irish," while Ingle calls him
"the little Arab." A good deal of this ethnocentrism
is expressed as a kind of complex regional chauvinism. Below
the glamorous championship level, boxing matches are highly
local affairs. Hamed has received his most racist receptions
when fighting a local boy on that boy's turf. This almost always
happens, regardless of ethnicity, to a "foreign" or
"alien" boxer. In international amateur competitions,
Hamed himself was constantly reminded that he was "fighting
for England." It is all right if Hamed is a "Paki"
as long as he is "our Paki."
What
we learn from the example of Hamed is that race is a form of
performance or exhibition in sports that is meant, in some way,
for those at the bottom, to be an act of assertion, even revolt,
against "how things are normally done." But also,
in boxing, ethnic identities are performances of ethnic hatreds.
As Jacques Barzun wrote, "In hatred there [is] the sensation
of strength," and it is this sensation that spurs the fighter
psychologically in the ring, gives him a reason to fight a man
he otherwise has no reason to harm. So it is that within the
working-class ethnic's revolt there is also his capitulation
to playing out a role of pointless, apolitical resentment in
the social order. This is why boxing is such an ugly sport:
It was invented by men of the leisure class simply to bet, to
make their own sort of sport of their privilege; and it reduces
the poor man's rightful resentment, his anger and hatred, to
a form of absurd, debased, dangerous entertainment. The Hameds
of the boxing world make brutality a form of athletic beauty.
Postscript:
O Defeat, Where Is Thy Sting?
She: Is there a way to win?
He: Well, there is a way to lose more slowly.
--Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past
I'm
a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be.
--Lennon and McCartney
It
is a certainty that sports teach us about defeat and losing,
for it is a far more common experience than winning. It might
be suggested that in any competition there must be a winner
and a loser and so winning is just as common. But this is not
true. When a baseball team wins the World Series or a college
basketball team wins a national title or a tennis player wins
the French Open, everyone else in the competition has lost:
twenty-nine other baseball teams, sixty-three other basketball
teams, dozens of other seeded and unseeded tennis players. Surely,
all or nearly all have won at some point, but most sports are
structured as elaborate eliminations. The aura of any sporting
event or season is defeat. I am not sure sports teach either
the participants or the audience how to lose well, but they
certainly teach that losing is the major part of life. "A
game tests, somehow, one's entire life," writes Michael
Novak, and it is in this aspect that the ideological content
of sports seems much like the message of the blues, and the
athlete seems, despite his or her obsessive training and remarkable
skill, a sort of Everyperson or Job at war, not with the gods
but with the very idea of God. Sports do not mask the absurdity
of life but rather ritualize it as a contest against the arbitrariness
of adversity, where the pointless challenge of an equally pointless
limitation, beautifully and thrillingly executed, sometimes
so gorgeously as to seem a victory even in defeat, becomes the
most transcendent point of all. Black people have taught all
of us in the blues that to lose is to be human. Sports, on any
given day, teaches the same.
My
barber is a professional boxer. He fights usually as a light-heavyweight
or as a cruiser-weight. He is 34 and would like to fight for
a championship again one day, but time is working against him.
He has fought for championships in the past, though never a
world title. It is difficult to succeed as a boxer if you must
work another job. A day of full-time work and training simply
leaves a fighter exhausted and distracted. I have seen him fight
on television several times, losing to such world-class fighters
as Michael Nunn and James Toney. In fact, every time I have
seen him fight he has lost. He is considered "an opponent,"
someone used by an up-and-coming fighter to fatten his record
or by an established fighter who needs a tune-up. An opponent
does not make much money; some are paid as little as a few hundred
dollars a fight. My barber, I guess, is paid more than that.
This is the world that most boxers occupy--this small-time world
of dingy arenas and gambling boats, cramped dressing rooms and
little notice. It is the world that most professional athletes
occupy. He last fought on June 2 against Darryl Spinks for something
called the MBA light-heavyweight title at the Ambassador Center
in Jennings, Missouri. Darryl Spinks is the son of notorious
St. Louis fighter and former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks.
Spinks won a twelve-round decision, and my barber felt he was
given "a hometown decision" in his own hometown, as
he felt he decisively beat young Spinks. But Spinks is an up-and-coming
fighter, and up-and-coming fighters win close fights. When I
talked to my barber after the fight, he seemed to accept defeat
with some equanimity. What upset him was that the local paper,
or the local white paper, as it is seen by most blacks, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, did not cover the fight. It
was prominently covered by the St. Louis American, the
city's black paper. I told him I would write a letter to the
editor about that; he appreciated my concern. As things turned
out, the fight was mentioned in the Post-Dispatch ten
days later as part of a roundup of the local boxing scene. My
barber's fight earned three paragraphs. It probably wasn't quite
what he wanted, but I am sure it made him feel better. After
all, a local fighter has only his reputation in his hometown
to help him make a living. Nonetheless, I admired the fact that
he took so well being unfairly denied something that was so
important to him. Most people can't do that.
I
might quarrel a little with my good friend Stanley Crouch, who
once said that the most exquisite blues statement was Jesus,
crucified, asking God why he had been forsaken. It's a good
line Jesus said on the old rugged cross. But for us Americans,
I rather think the most deeply affecting blues statement about
losing as the way it is in this life is the last line of a song
we learned as children and we sing every time we go to the park
to see our favorite team: "'Cause it's one, two, three
strikes you're out at the old ball game."
Gerald
Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters
at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include The
Culture of Bruising and, most recently, The Muhammad
Ali Reader (both Ecco).
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PERFORMANCE
AND REALITY