Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
a champion; at the time I was champion of nothing and unlikely to be.
(Lansbury, 2001)
The international public relations efforts to utilize Gibson on an international tour highlight a tradition of how black athletes were utilized to purge the stigma of racial disharmony. This practice of commandeering the successes and imagery of black athletes to politically leverage matters of race evokes a profound comprehension of how the triumphs and imaginings by Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, Jackie Robinson, and others were used to at once to hijack and mask the realities of race relations in the United States. The shift in comprehensions of race reflected a sense of concern about how racism stigmatized American society and its status within a more global society. The stigma of Jim Crow racism reflected a realization of declining view from its crest point for which it once directed the economic and political functionality of American society. By the mid-twentieth century, there was a broadening recognition that Jim Crow racism posed more of a threat, rather than the once harboring effect to American progress, particularly for white Americans.
Comprehensions of Race and Racism
Racial inequities cemented by Jim Crow were manufactured by systems and structural arrangements obliged by the social norms and mores of the day. The extent of Jim Crow governance, de facto and de jure, served to justify racial segregation and the systemic dispossession of black humanity. Moreover, racial attitudes bound by the ethos of past racism served in the dual capacities as both the creator and harvest of black Americans’ marginalization and oppression. But the decline of a structural need for Jim Crow alongside political and ideological supports yielded to pivotal legislation and innovative tactics of resistance. As a result, these modes of resistance produced pinnacle triumphs that well defined the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement exposed the unjustifiability of institutional racism negatively affecting black communities, yet also the whole of American society. Likewise, the strategic efforts of the movement inevitably drew those from behind their willful ignorance to bear witness to the sanctioned violence of Jim Crow racism. Consequently, the defining feats of the civil rights movement included general support to condemn forms of old-fashioned racism characterized by state-mandated segregation, blatant racist ideology, and intentional domination and marginalization on the basis of race. Hallmark legal victories in the civil rights era were most notably the passing of the Brown v. Board decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the gains and principally acclaimed accomplishments of the civil rights movement, however, the nation remained beholden to manipulations of race and racism. In the aftermath of the erosions of Jim Crow racism, racial inequities persisted as deeply entrenched realities ever part of the continuing experiment that is, America.
The civil rights movement and its legal victories marked a progressive turn in America’s history regarding race relations. Still, the feats of this era certainly did not produce a panacea for racial inequalities. Productions of reframed ideas of racism, racially motivated political agendas, and intricate racial projects soon germinated on the heels of the mid-twentieth century. Significant plights experienced across American communities such as the inadequate distribution and access to quality education as well as the swelling impacts of poverty and crime were targets of reform efforts, yet also posed as platforms to manipulate the social, political, cultural, and racial consciousness of America. Almost suddenly, post-civil rights movement racial ideologies echoed a collection of conscious and unconscious efforts to reposition Du Bois’s definitive color-line to more and more sociocultural and sociopolitical spaces of ambiguity. But that which was near indefensible was the perpetuity of racial inequities and inequalities sustained through the mid-century transitions to the latter part of the twentieth century. The veracity of these racial gaps, at nearly all measurable turns of society, despite the moral and legal victories of the civil rights movement were not only a constant reality but a reminder of a struggle acutely repressive to non-white communities. While evidence of the existence of racial gaps—spanning matters of education, income and wealth, healthcare, crime, housing, and more—was and remains largely irrefutable, rationalizations offered to justify the creation and perpetuation of such gaps was subject to widespread debate. Even today, many of us remain baffled and frustrated by the durability of racial gaps persisting over the decades from one generation to another.
Out of the waning years of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s and early seventies emerged a more progressive institutionalist perspective of the operative nature of racism. This perspective pointedly challenged a pervasive discourse that commonly situated responsibilities for the evils of racism within the limits of overt individual acts and the systems of domination staged by white southerners, particularly poor whites. At its core, the institutionalist perspective argued that racism reached far beyond the southern states to affect all of white Americans and societal institutions. Rooted by the institutionalist perspective and arguably captured at the radical boundaries of the paradigm, racism was understood as a consequence of the colonialization of non-white persons. The concept of colonization, from this perspective, views that institutionalized racism functions as a sustained, systemic force of domination fueled by a formula of prejudice plus power. At the core of this perspective, blacks are consigned to the ranks of a categorically inferior group deprived of power, while whites possess both power and prejudice to enact their racial dominance.
Building upon the foundational propositions of an institutional perspective, Blauner (1969) posited ideas of an internal colonial framework. Internal colonialism concedes that racism is systemic and institutionalized. Moreover, Blauner’s refinement of racism as expansively systemic further outlined that racism was “located in the actual existence of domination and hierarchy” whereby the centrality of economic capitalism is most vital in that it establishes an occupational relationship affixing roles that determine social status (Blauner, 1969, p. 10). Critical to elaborating on the institutionalist perspective, the internal colonial framework reveals how the element of objective rationality serves white interests atop economic labor markets. The utility of the internal colonial framework undoubtedly advanced the limitations of prevalent views which had couched racism within the bounds of a psychological phenomenon commonly supposed as irrational prejudice.
Notwithstanding insightful gains of the institutionalist perspective and internal colonial model, their residual limitations left plenty to be considered of contemporary race relations (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). Michael Omi and Howard Winant advanced a theory of racial ideology marking a significant conceptual shift toward a discernably radical, nuanced view of race and racism. Their theory aimed to illuminate the concrete processes of racial formations occurring in American society as a reciprocal influence of race (Omi & Winant, 2014). This body of work, representing yet another link of the scholarly toils to deepen and broaden understandings of race relations, ingeniously and daringly fuels imaginations of racial matters by stretching the very boundaries of conceivable comprehensions of racial ideology. As such, the theory of racial formation contemplates the duality of roles for which race occupies—a courier for subordination and oppression of social groups while also a cutout for resistance to forms of marginalization and domination.
Race is fundamentally situated in the theory of racial formation as a malleable and ambiguous complex of social meanings transformed by political struggle and constantly subjected to a contestation of how such meanings should matter across a multitude of contexts. Hence, race is understood as ideological by way of a socially constructed concept, but also in possession of a materially corporeal dimension consequential to ones’ life experiences and social structures. The notion of racial formation is built upon an emphasis of racial projects transpiring to shape how human identities, individual and collective, and social structures are racially signified. In turn, that which becomes racially signified shape the ways in which racial meanings get entrenched within social structures. In all, Omi and Winant posit racial formation is a socio-historically situated process whereby race functions to shape and signify identities, institutions, structural relationships, and experiences through continuous racial projects that reciprocate contested meanings of race.
Although conscientious of the political, intellectual contributions of critical racial theories evolved out of late 1960s through the mid-1980s, the premises and propositions of such racial frames and racialization perspectives reflect what some critics