Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.
narratives and the complex realities that constitute the multiplicity of black experiences accentuates the paradoxical veracity of our society’s existence. For so long, forces of oppression in its many forms, all to maintain and protect a dream, have sought to damage, degrade, and deny the humanity of black persons while simultaneously instituting hope in a dream to overcome black subjugation. The objectives in such endemic oppression have aimed at manufacturing a social stratification of identities, culture, education, communities, and values to matter as determined by a market that elevates, and so far, as justifies dreams drawn on either sides of the modern color line. This book explores two key threads related to black intercollegiate student athletes. I examine how black athletes make sense of participating in intercollegiate athletics within institutions of higher education and how their experiences are indicative of the paradoxes of a dream kindled by neoliberal principles of logic.
The following chapters are based on my research of how black student athletes are the embodiment of the dream. The study of the dream in this research included several intercollegiate athletics administrators from within top-tier college athletic programs at historically white institutions of higher education. My study of black student athletes and the impacting forces upon their experiences was conducted from 2014 to 2017 as an assembly of interview sessions and series of on-campus observations. This book is about questioning what it means to be a black collegiate athlete in the twenty-first century. It is about questioning what it means for the study participants to live within the bounds and opportunities of the imaginations of the American dream. It is about making sense of the agilities of ideology and a climate of sociocultural praxis that constructs the modern black collegiate athlete, their institutions of education, and the society that surrounds them. But ultimately, it is my hope that readers of this book will come to recognize how “we” are constructed within and by the paradox of the black athlete.
In this first chapter, I have made the case that our imaginative acquaintances with the dream undergird the very foundation of our aspirations for prosperity as well as our plights. Exploring the black athlete of the twenty-first century first requires an understanding of their origins. In chapter 1, I discuss the contexts of historical tensions between ideas of race and the institution of sport that are knotted in the developing nature of the modern neoliberal project. The chapter begins with an analysis of how historical tensions of the social and political mores of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were revealed at the intersection of race and sport through the legacy of an iconic black boxer. I consider how issues of race within the institution of sport are historically situated in the black freedom struggle through Jim Crow to the modern post-civil rights era to shed light on shifting comprehensions of race and racism for which modern ideologies of race and racism have evolved. The material consequences of today’s racism are considered behind the veil and hegemonic chaperon of a neoliberal agenda.
In chapter 2, I introduce the participants in this study through individualized portraits of each of the six student athletes and four athletic administrators. The profiled portraits of each athlete offer insights into their personal backgrounds and journey to and through their respective institutions. Portraits of the athletic administrator participants are introduced to show how each understands and makes sense of supporting the development of student athletes, in particular the black athlete within historically white settings. Before sketching out participant profiles, I provide an overview of the four institutional settings of this research. Following the sections outlining the institutional settings and sketch of participants in this study, I discuss how participants’ experiences and perspectives of schooling and thoughts of how they either personally navigate or support the black athletes to navigate their respective institution are located within and by the paradoxes of their private, and that of a broader, dream. I frame this closing section using three themes that emerge from the data.
The subsequent chapters expound upon how neoliberalism has become entrenched within the intersecting contexts of higher education and intercollegiate athletics. The research presented in this book explores how policies and practices as well as governing strategies and pedagogical approaches intended to facilitate the educational and athletics experiences of collegiate black athletes are fashioned by the ideological schemas of the broader neoliberal project. Drawn from participant narratives, applied manifestations of the neoliberal agenda are critically examined to make sense of how free-market values, sociocultural relations, and sociocultural identities have been defined and redefined to construct a modern social imagination (Lipman, 2013) of black intercollegiate athletes and their education. Simultaneously, the voices of black student athletes are shared to reveal how the matrix of the neoliberal project taking shape in their education is contested. This research seeks to understand how both the ideology and practice, or otherwise, cultural and political praxis of neoliberalism is cultivating our common sense and changing who we are.
I begin chapter 3 by revisiting a parable that warns against the threats of inconspicuous dangers. Drawing from this parable, I provide some historical perspective of the relationship between social welfare policies and the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics. In this chapter I present interview data on participant views of the climate of intercollegiate athletics. I discuss how the study participants understand and make meaning of practices and policies of their athletic departments that shape the athletic and academic experiences of the black student athletes. I go on to explore how rationales of governance, managerial strategies, and the aims to develop human capital are implemented across each institutional locale considering how the hegemonic forces of neoliberal ideology are normalized yet contradict the ambitions to address relevant social and educational crisis by producing and reproducing practices of inequities.
In chapter 4, I argue how academic reform efforts targeting U.S. school systems have informed and guided academic reform within intercollegiate athletics. I discuss how neoliberal education reform initiatives adopted by the NCAA and its member institutions have paralleled the neoliberal logics and polices entrenched with U.S. academic reform since the 1980s. The chapter discusses how motivations for education reform within intercollegiate athletics have been animated, in part, although significantly by views of the black athlete recruited to campuses of higher education. The schooling of black athletes has been marketized by neoliberalism. This chapter presents participant narratives that reveal how their schooling has been shaped by the neoliberal rationalities. In this chapter, I also argue how the student athlete development services and programs, akin to academic reform efforts, are imbued with the logics of neoliberal beliefs of the purposes of human capital development.
Chapter 5 takes a nuanced look at what it means for black athletes to be exceptional. Drawn from Imani Perry’s conceptualization and thoughts of the notions of black exceptionalism (Perry, 2011), I engage in a discussion of how inequity is maintained through the works of neoliberalist perspectives and practices that seek to define and redefine the exceptions of black athletes. This chapter explores how the rehearsal of black American exceptionalism and the exceptualization process of black athletes brands them incongruent anomalies at the poles of a continuum compared to the rules of a neoliberal, color-blind state. The notion of black athlete exceptionalism is framed by a review of the circumstances and course of events surrounding the protests of former NFL quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, from his bended knee while the American national anthem plays and its connection to the discourse racial progress evidenced by black athletes. From here, I tell the stories and counter-stories of several of the black student athlete participants in this chapter to show how each has contested the oversimplifications and distortions of black exceptionalism.
The final chapter of the book begins with a reflection upon a question of when “we” can expect to realize our dreams of “freedom.” I argue that for an alignment of all of those imagining ways to achieve their American dream and those dreaming of an equitable freedom in a just world is predicated on who we can imagine ourselves to be beyond the post-ideological politics of neoliberalism. More precisely, the aims of my argument in the context of the study presented require a critical recognition and a collective reorientation of how the ideological forces of neoliberalism normalizes the concept of intercollegiate athletic realism. I contend the research can stimulate communities of sport scholars and sport practitioners to reassess how programmatic designs, policies, and practices aimed to advance the holistic development of black student athletes are implicated in a neoliberal project. In closing, I offer a pedagogical north star