Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
rise above an unjust society built upon the marginalization and oppression of their humanity. Such historical figures, who rose out of our nation’s sport culture, are as much a part of the black freedom struggle as is the black educator, poet, engineer, civil rights activist, and musician. The story of black athletes is a story of those that have harnessed their athletic talents to boldly defy beliefs and dogmas meant to expunge the most vulnerable. The story of black athletes, past and present, is about how sport has been used as a conduit and means to attain social mobility all the while defining and redefining black identities. Black athletes’ stories reveal of an intimate relationship with American sport culture and American culture, more broadly. The history of these athletes exposes not only to hegemonic orchestration of race, but so too the configures of class, patriarchy, and sexism. Through their stories, we are forced to encounter the greatest sins of our nation as well as an incongruous ensemble of values, policies, and practices used to inform modern rationale for inequity and inequality. But most significantly, the story of black athletes exposes us to the deepest truths of the human condition.
The black athlete is far from an accidental, bewildering figure that we are forced to reconcile with between the chronicles of history and occasional folklore. Too often, our understandings of the sojourn and contributions of black athletes are disingenuously confined by questions rooted solely in curiosities of how they endured times of challenge, or how they accomplished seemingly insurmountable feats, and even how they have periodically championed the black freedom struggle. Wonders of the black athlete that prompt deeper reflections of their experiences, but evermore, their existence compels us to acknowledge each of them is very much a paradoxical figure. The black athlete is at once a symbol of the circumstances and potencies shaped by their day as they are an expressive symbol of a people’s self-agency to define their reality and destiny. They are a representation of a people cast to the margins and the epitome of determined perseverance. They, too, are a representative of those excluded behind hate and ignorance, yet also a symbol of our nation’s attempt to recalibrate the scales of justice.
To garner a more nuanced gaze upon the truths, for which black athletes reveal, requires deep reflection on those forces influencing the communal, institutional, political, and sociocultural wombs that constitute a figured world not just for the athlete, but that of the decedents of people displaced. Furthermore, to bear witness to the truths of black lives and black spaces through a lens of sport requires a deep read of how these same forces have authored white lives and white spaces, past and present. To this extent and more, fully comprehending the plight of black athletes necessitates a more nuanced look at America’s plight. Being woke in the twenty-first century requires us to struggle through a deep analysis of the paradox of what it means to dream. Or better yet, to be woke to the injustices of present, has and will always require us to be fearful of being what Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) describes as “a country lost in the Dream” (p. 12).
Enigma of Race
Racist thoughts have captured the spirits, minds, and imaginations of people far before the ships set out to sea from the docks of European shorelines. Race has been the most historic culprit to commandeer peoples’ ingenuities to engineer nation building as they journeyed from Europe to a land known to us now as America. History reveals to us that racist ideas have, time and time again, been employed to launch and excuse systemic endeavors that reinforce racial stratifications of people. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2014) characterized such endeavors as racial projects to construct ways of living and people, themselves. These ideas and the construction of racial projects are what undergird the birth and maturation of the nation. In this same vein of history, the racial oppression projects ushered in by major league baseball’s gentleman’s agreement to segregate the game (Tygiel, 2008) alongside legal rulings that authorized “separate, but equal” can be understood as further promoting and normalizing explicit racial ideology to govern our nation centuries after the creations of the utility and enigma of race.
While evoking racist ideas, the enigma of race, has too, produced an offspring of anti-racist resistance (Kendi, 2016). From Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion against conditions of slavery in Southampton County, Virginia to the persuasiveness and political savvy of Fredrick Douglas to the black union soldiers that battled against confederate armies throughout the civil war, black resistance has manifested in many forms to contest anti-black racism. By the turn of the century, the intimate thoughts of Du Bois were well-known and widely read. His writings elevated an anti-racism consciousness calling specific attention to the immeasurable dangers of white supremacy’s resentment to Reconstruction efforts following the American civil war. He wrote extensively of the implications of consequential perils, those social, cultural, structural and psychological, certain to ripple through all the crooks and crannies of America touched by the reaches of institutionalized racial apartheid straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By 1903, the most fundamental problem of the twentieth century, as claimed by Du Bois, was “the problem of the color line.” At nearly every turn of society, Du Bois insightfully exposed how the color line fueled persistent disparities and inequities across the races and classes of people. Racial gulfs were evermore accentuated as the country suffered through Jim and Jane Crow, the great depression, two world wars and volatile desegregation efforts. The ghosts of the color line familiar to Du Bois and the souls of black folk continues to haunt the nation many decades and generations since his proclamation. The emblematic color line proves to be quite a vivid reality across all facets of society to this day, including our social institutions and systems of education and sport (Leonard & King, 2010; Carrington, 2010).
With an increasing number of black athletes participating across the major sporting enterprises of the American sport scene, excessive hyperbole commonly beholds sport as the poster child for racial progress. With the passing of time, the milestones of black achievements in sport are celebrated as indications of racial progress sown by the seeds of past black resistance. Seemingly without pause, black successes and breakthroughs in sport are heralded to not only black folk, but to the entire nation, that it is moving leaps and bounds from a supposed far distant era eclipsed by Jim Crow apartheid. The unapologetic fists raised by Tommie Smith and John Carlos to the harmony of the national anthem have become the inspirational sermon used to sway American sensibilities. The images of Smith and Carlos represent an iconic moment for which to remember the battles for justice fought in the twentieth century. In reality, however, the enigma of race and privileged rationalizations of race and racial progress muddles our common sense that appropriates those very fists as a time buried in the past and not of the present.
With every breakthrough achievement by black sport participants, social discourse has increasingly advanced a narrative that sport is the most immediate, principal evidence to support a modern worldview with an appetite for racial apathy. Many have gone so far to argue that the means to effectively navigate the post-civil rights era is to use sport as our compass (e.g. Freind, 2016) or that some of our greatest sports icons managed to transcend race conflict with their success (Harriot, 2016). For decades to follow after the protest of Smith and Carlos, each signifier of black achievement—such as the countless Olympic medals by black men and women to our first head coaching opportunities, from the transcendent marketing campaigns that convinced us Bo Knows and that every kid wanted to Be Like Mike to even the late Stuart Scott’s famous “Booyah!” catchphrase that would literally transform sports broadcasting—sport culture was at the forefront of shaping perceptions of race relations and racial ideology. And to this day, the present plight of black athletes and the plight of America is shared in a hegemonic process captured by the enigma of race that works to change how we see and think about our world all the while changing who we are and who we become.
The pace of progress concerning matters of race in America has not occurred in any linear fashion and certainly not with tremendous speed or regularity. While the pace of progress has been slow and deliberate, at best, by institutions and people of influence, the effort by those living in the margins of society has rivaled a sprinter’s pace in the pursuit of justice and the rewards of the dream. Depending on one’s lived experiences, their perspective of this progress might tell us of a different truth than that of reality encompassing all of our histories. I do not claim to argue that change has not come about with every generation. Nonetheless, in the first quarter of twenty-first century, we’ve taken to the streets and media outlets to shout and