Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
as if we’ve been sprinting in place. In such a determined sprint to rid society of its plague of racism, many find themselves frustrated to think that our only progress has been little more than a recreation of past oppression.
Racism remains the most formidable, dynamic captor of our nation’s imagination five centuries removed since the first feet of the enslaved stepped onto the shores of this country. My fundamental argument throughout this book in regard of the dynamisms of racism is that our deepest and evolving understandings of these racial phenomena and its implications cannot be simply reduced to racist ideas or racial ideology nor can we see racism of today as only a vestige and relic of our past. Instead, we must come to recognize and grapple with how we as a society function by the guide of market-driven principles and ideas to shaped a normalizing view and articulation of racial progress in relation to the dream, often times, in particular of black achievement magnified within contexts of sport. And so, this brings us back to that historic and special day in early February of 2007 that will forever be near and dear to me. I want to return us the story of Super Bowl XLI for which I opened this chapter with. It was certain that coach Dungy’s Super Bowl victory would be added to the list of signifying moments in the sojourn of the black freedom struggle as well as the discourse of racial progress. Many saw the Super Bowl XLI match-up between Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith as yet another opportune moment to highlight the determined achievements by the black community through sport channels despite any existence of racial inequities. And likely those and many more, would see the game as proof of a dream, if not many, being fulfilled. Additionally, this match-up cued up racialized rhetoric to emphasize beliefs that for such a momentous occurrence to take shape could only mean that we were becoming a country that did not see race. To illustrate this sentiment, a columnist stated the following in his recap of the game,
If a single event could speak to onrushing opportunity, to a world where folks are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, this took that title while bestowing another.
Hyperbolic conjectures such as the language of an “onrushing opportunity” while reveling in the first match-up between two black head coaches may do more harm than good to actually promote racial progress—particularly in a league that still necessitates a race-based, neo-progressive policy in that of the Rooney Rule which aims to force hiring authorities to slow their processes and broaden their market analyses of coaching candidates of color. If we are to hold up singular events to suggest an onrush of opportunity that an entire race of people might be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, then we rob ourselves to see the complex realities of a hegemonic force persisting and reproduced in the present. We rob ourselves of our full capacities to not only speak truth to power, but concurrently speak truth to structure and truth to practices of inequities in manners that lead to a dismantling of inequality. Likewise, we risk robbing others of the ability to do the same.
Assertions leading up to and following Super Bowl XLI frequently signified a country that had lost sight of race in their rearview through a seemingly hypnotic moment suggestive of Dr. MLK’s dream. But more precisely, it reflected a segment of the country that was choosing to indiscriminately and discursively ignore race to promote a dilute notion of racial advances. Sport has all but eliminated its racial gulfs. But the coaching match-up as well as the overly optimistic perceptions concerning fissures wedged deep by race within and beyond sport during this time precisely reveal the paradox of the dream. At the end of this same year, the country witnessed the election of Barack Obama as its first black and forty-fourth U.S. president. Following his first inauguration in 2008, the notion that America had become a post-racial society overnight gained immediate and widespread popularity in mainstream discourse (Tesler & Sears, 2010). The words of James Baldwin to his nephew on the hundredth anniversary of Emancipation fill my thoughts at the utterance of a post-racial America:
You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. (Baldwin, 2013, p. 10)
Much has been written to debunk the myths of the twenty-first-century America functioning as a post-racial society (Dawson & Bobo, 2009; Lee, 2012). While this book does not intend to put the most obvious of racial progress at the altar of debate, it does build upon this body of works that aims to dispel the sense that society has evolved beyond the influence and impacts of race. This book, through a lens of the intersections of higher education and sport, is to problematize dominate discourses and mainstream views that purport a naiveté of racial progress and the role of race. But to see how peoples’ lives through institutions of sport are shaped by race alone is to misunderstand the complex, interlocking web of sociocultural gulfs that contribute in the experience of modern black athletes in intercollegiate athletics. The predominance of a narrative today that hoist sport upon a pedestal fails to attentively consider, not only how to understand race and racism within the contexts of sport and higher education, but also how the sociocultural structures of sport are fundamentally captive to neoliberal thought and practices of the twenty-first century.
The perpetual paradox of the dream has coordinated and stimulated black oppression and black achievement. Both of which are no strangers to one another, yet have relied on the assembly of a distorted common sense for which to speak of and see the other as such. The enigma of race and racism has long arrested the imaginations of the structural and cultural milieu of society and sport. And throughout the course of history, many within the black community, molded by an imperfect world, have continued to endure the sprinter’s pace to gain ground, through the dreams of access and opportunity, in an unjust world. All the while, they may be increasingly woke to the reality that the progress of their labor will only be gradually realized in the years and generations to come. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the paradox of the dream can be understood as Dungy’s victory in Super Bowl XLI and Colin Kapernick’s coincidentally suspicious disappearance from the same league after protesting on bended knee. The dream can be understood as the election of President Obama as well as the deaths of Trayvon, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner without culpability. The dream is as much the young black high school athlete that signs a letter of intent to play football and attend college as a first-generation student as it is the 2015 protests orchestrated by the University of Missouri students and their football team. We can even see the dream as LeBron James sits in front of the microphones of the media to speak his truth about the political climate inspired by a Trump administration in the battleground state—his home state—of Ohio as we see the dreams of others vehemently condemn black athletes by burning their jerseys for making a statement to bring awareness to matters of injustice while the national anthem plays.
The paradox of the dream for black athletes, historically and as it remains in the modern age, is a reminder of how they remain tethered to the enigma of race, but evermore more so, the dreams of others. Their paradox is hinged to the harsh realities that laid in the streets of Fergusson, Missouri and ran through the water of Flint, Michigan as the black community is constantly reminded of their disposability (Hill, 2017). This book offers an analysis of how the institution of sport, through the experiences and perspectives of a spectrum of key agents in intercollegiate athletics departments, are profoundly influenced by race and neoliberal rationalizations that encumber, yet ultimately shape peoples’ lives through systems of practices sustained by the dream.
Organization of the Chapters
Imaginations of the institution of sport in the twenty-first century have persuaded many to believe it to be the archetype of social progress upon the mountaintop of post-racial American dreams. For a nation that, historically, has looked with faith and optimism to sport as inspiration to navigate race relations and revise race rules, the endemic social inequities across race seem to many as an increasing certainty fortified by and inside the structure of American society. Despite shifts in racial beliefs and accesses and opportunities for black lives in the post-civil rights era of the American dream, we have yet to achieve a society that treats and values our humanities equally. Today, race remains a captor of our imaginations of the dream playing out in our systems of ideology and practices of inequity across all facets of society. Once again, sport is at the fore of the debate about race and particularly how it manifests in the shaping of our lives and dreams of a better—just—nation.
Today, in the twenty-first century, the relationship