Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
industries, undoubtedly reflects a cumulative legacy and the consequential gains of the prior mid-century civil rights movement. Today, it’s seemingly normal and likely approaching a sense of expectation to see professional and intercollegiate sports teams outfitted with black athletes. Even among individual sports steeped in a long history of racial disparity, we’ve become quite accustomed to seeing a presence, although intermittently in most cases, of black athletes. Progress is certainly progress. But to peel back the layers and look beneath the romanticizing narrative of sport as a champion of race relations reveals a more complete understanding not only of the strides of access and opportunity, but also of the complicated truths that energize a certain social imaginary while masking the lived realities and anguishes of the most vulnerable among us.
The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) details a comprehensive annual assessment of the racial and gender compositions across leading professional and amateur American sporting organizations. In a recent report on collegiate sport for the year 2017–2018, TIDES noted the participation of black male athletes compromised 22.6 percent, while black women accounted for 12.4 percent of Division 1 intercollegiate athletics (Lapchick, 2019). However, if we are to peel back another layer of these numbers, we are able to see a highly concentrated presence of black athletes in the high-profile sports of football at 49.2 percent and men’s basketball at 53.6 percent during the 2017–2018 season (Lapchick). In addition, black female athletes accounted for over 43 percent of basketball and nearly a quarter of track and field, respectively during the 2017–2018 season (Lapchick). In contrast to such concentrated participations of black athletes in high-profile, Division 1 intercollegiate athletics, the U.S. black community consists of only 13 percent of the American population (U.S. Census data). Just a glance at these statistics and those similar or to pull up a chair at a sports bar during football season or to simply turn the channel to the March Madness basketball tournament in hope of seeing the latest rendition of the suspenseful David vs. Goliath matchup, one can easily perceive how sport has functioned as a means of social progress and fits neatly into the ideals of the American dream. However, the moral challenge in the present day concerning the intersections of sport and society is to acknowledge how sports culture has functioned as a social norming, ideological project that redefines values and abilities that preserve and yield to social inequity.
The institution of sport, in the eyes of most, is unequivocal evidence that American society no longer lives beneath the dark shadows of slavery and the perils of old-fashioned Jim Crow racism. The seemingly cascade of black athletes, today, into intercollegiate athletics and professional sport industries across the nation is often hoisted as the litmus test of progress in the arena of race relations. This widely optimistic romanticism of the institution of sport in the mainstream of American consciousness is not echoed with the same tone and tenor by many scholars that study the institution of sport. A vast body of research and literature in such academic spaces, in contrast to mainstream comprehensions, illuminates the intellectual toils of their acute curiosities to understand how the veneer of progress in sport shades deeply rooted and persistent equities beholden to perceptions of race and practices of inequity. Building upon this body of scholarship, my argument here and the premise further explored throughout the following chapters is that modern institutions of sport, particularly intercollegiate athletics in this case, is not only influenced by but also a means through which a distinct agenda of neoliberal ideology normalizes the anguishes of the vulnerable while preserving the enduring truths of race that sustains racial disparity.
Society’s colorful reinventions of its social imagery regarding race and racism, from one generation to the next, have created a fertile environment for which the present phenomenon of new racism thrives. The fertility of new racism possesses a nature far subtler and more complicated. It is increasingly difficult to immediately pinpoint the apparent presence of culpability of racial injustice in relation to its predecessor, Jim Crow. Social scientists have termed a number of conceptual and theoretical frames evoking central characteristics that undergird new racism including that of aversive racism (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005), ambivalent racism (McConahay, 1986), symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981; Sears & Henry, 2003), laissez-faire racism (Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith, 1997), and color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2017). These frames, in their attempts to make sense of new racism, sketch the operative nature whereby racial phenomena functions in and about the bounds of extant policy, discursive maneuvering, favored values, and privileged ideals. Collectively, such conduits of new racism are organized by the neoliberal agenda piloting modern society. Several tenets guide and are underscored by scholarship exploring the sociocultural institution of sport and how the bearings of racism shape the climate, conditions, and experiences of modern black athletes.
1. Racism is deeply woven into the fabric of the American society. As a result, the inescapable effects of racism on the nation’s past matter toward present constructions of climate, conditions, and capacities of sport as a prominent social institution.
2. The currency of race and racism used to coercively manipulate the effusive labor of black athletes echoes the same currency once used to exploit black labor across rural plantations.
3. Black persons in sport, most particularly athletes, are systematically dehumanized and rendered in a historic fashion as a disposable commodity.
Framing the impacts of race and racism in these ways draws heavily upon the comprehensions of old-fashioned racism plaguing past generations of American society. Comprehensions of the experiences of modern black athletes grounded by the aforementioned tenets have evoked emotionally incensing, metaphoric depictions of modern sport. The palpable metaphor that seems to repeatedly be within reasonable scope used to illustrate the reincarnation of old racism in the present day is that of sport functioning as the new-age plantationnot. To this same accord, emotionally stimulating and thought-provoking analogies that interrogate how black athletes are situated in modern sport draw attention to the askew structural determinants between athletes and other key stakeholders such as their coaches and administrative leadership as well as an athletics industrial complex capitalizing on their participation (Smith, 2007).
Imagery of the structural institutions of slave plantations and the exploitation of black labor akin to the oppression of enslaved Africans is widely drawn upon when critiquing the state of black athletes in the twenty-first century. Recently, during the 2017 NFL football season, Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon-the-Interruption sports show, unapologetically drew upon this metaphor to describe the relationship between Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, and the players of the organization immediately following Jones’ disapproval and firm stance that players who would not stand for the national anthem before football games would not be allowed to play for the Cowboys (Tornoe, 2017). Wilbon’s response was expeditiously honest, and yet predictable of a conventionally critical view of the structural relationship and power dynamics embedded in the sport at the professional and intercollegiate levels.
And the word that comes to my mind―and I do not care who doesn’t like me using it―is plantation. The players are here to serve me [Jones], and they will do what I [Jones] want. No matter how much I [Jones] pay them, they are not equal to me. That’s what this says to me and mine.
The sentiments and claims, such as those of Wilbon, of the state of black participation in sport associated to slavery and black exploitation are emblematic of the overt, old-fashioned racism that we, in general, vehemently condemn. As jolting as these imageries of black exploitation might be too naïve social imaginations upholding sport as a champion for racial progress, they articulate a counter-narrative to typical beliefs and perceptions of progress. This illustration justly heightens the problems that undergird black sport participation in the modern era. However, to frame such problems by this imagery may also produce a limiting effect. The plantation metaphor and claims of modern-day slavery in sport quite possibly constrains an ability to fully address racial injustices and improve the state of challenges germane to black sport participation. This frame bounds an enlightenment of new racism as little more than a symptom or remnant of the old. I submit that too consider the political, moral and socially conscious strides achieved in eras past, albeit significantly impactful or minor, the complexities of addressing how and why racism persists today must be seen and addressed in manners distinctly different than