Blaming Hip-Hop for Hate Rock?

Blaming Hip-Hop for Hate Rock?

David J. Leonard & C. Richard King | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

              

Little says more about the state of racism and the centrality of the white racial frame in the USA today than the rapidity with which pundits transformed a conversation about white power, racialized violence, and hate rock into a critique of hip-hop.   Indeed, a number of discussions of the spree killing at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee, echoing broader political currents, reference the evils of hip-hop as both a defense and a scapegoat. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, in The New Republic, John McWhorter rehearsed this well worn conversation to turn the killings into another referendum on hip-hop.  “It has been fashionable,” he asserts, “to speculate on whether the White Power music he [Wade Michael Page] listened to helped stoke him into the senseless murders he committed...such speculations,” he suggests are both “incoherent” and “pointless—and they are marked, above all, by a cloying air of self-congratulation.”  To “prove” his point, he invoked the tried and tested “hip-hop” comparison as if it represented mainstream rap,  failing to note, of course, that he is specifically talking about a small  subset of hip-hop music):

A comparison with another musical genre helps put the debate into relief. Indeed, in assessing White Power music’s influence on Page, it helps to acknowledge that rap music—savored by people of all colors, ranging in age from “youth” to middle-aged—has its own tendency to celebrate the indefensible. Some practitioners casually boast about hurting women—whether attacking a partner during intercourse (Cam’ron, “Boy, Boy”), or kicking a woman in the stomach to make her abort (Joe Budden, “Confessions II”) and, of course, all varieties of maiming and murder.

However, nasty as all of this is, and whatever one might say about its implications for the street culture that produced it, it’s all symptom rather than cause. Those who listen to rap—including myself—are not passively consuming its message, but actively seeking it as a release. Indeed, last I heard, the enlightened take on rap lyrics is that their violence must be taken not as counsel but as poetry, poses of strength from disenfranchised people—“Black Noise” as Brown’s Tricia Rose calls it. Other academics, priding themselves on their connection with the music, crown the makers of violent rap as “Prophets of the Hood” (Imani Perry, Princeton) or “Hoodlums” (William Van Deburg, University of Wisconsin), the latter meant as an arch compliment to men celebrated for speaking truth to power.

And there is more than a little bit of truth to this treatment of rap’s violent strain. It is, indeed, an attitude that functions as a response to the frustrations of everyday life. In that light, rapademics have been fond of noting that old-time “toasts” among black people had their violent strains as well. Despite the prevalent anxieties in the 1990s about the social consequences of rap music, evidence that the music causes actual violence never actually surfaced.

These arguments are as tired as they are simplistic; the failure to see any difference between rap music and hate rock is absurd on every level. Yet, they keep getting published. Yet another failure to account for white supremacy. Importantly, invoking the purported ills associated hip hop simultaneously recycles dangerous stereotypes about blacks and lets whites off the hook.  Indeed, it encourages white readers to misrecognize the force of white racism and dissociate themselves from deeper structural arrangements, while essentially giving a pass to the violence, antipathy, and dehumanization at the core of white power music specifically, and white powerthinking more generally.  It is as if McWhorter would like to conclude: there are haters everywhere, stop picking on isolated whites who do bad things and pay attention to the ubiquitous threat of black pathology.

Responding to the work of Robert Futrell and Pete Simi, whose analysis of “spaces of hate” offers an important context for understanding Wade Michael Page, Cord Jefferson writes an apologia for hate rock.  His “In Defense of Neo-Nazi Music,” a title which summarizes the security and vulgarity of white supremacy today, dismisses any focus on his relationship to music as akin to those who blame video games or rock music for violence:

People like Futrell and Simi try to avoid sounding like the neo-Tipper Gores that they are by not condemning the neo-Nazi music itself and instead saying that it's the culture around the music that's dangerous. It's the "spaces of hate" they're after, they say, not the art. But then they expose their anti-free speech leanings by finger-wagging and threatening that we shouldn't be surprised if another white-power maniac kills people thanks to this hateful music scene. That—and I'm so glad I work at Gawker now so I can say this—is a total crock of shit.

To follow Futrell and Simi's logic, let's fight drug culture by cancelling the Electric Daisy Carnival, a massive electronic music festival that's become as synonymous with MDMA as it has dubstep. Let's also cut down on drunk driving by banning football games, at which tailgaters young and old get blotto all day before getting in their SUVs and driving home. And, of course, let's eliminate violence in the inner city by totally banishing hip-hop from our nation, which, as Tipper and her ilk argued for years, is the real reason young black men kill each other at heartbreaking rates.

In such analysis, history and context do not matter; ideology has no connection to action.  In Jefferson’s world, we are all the same, all equal, all individuals who have free will to act of our own accord without reference to social location, dominant frames, or the burdens of the past.  Such free agents animate the new racism of 21st century America, mobilizing white privilege under the cover of abstract liberalism and individual liberty.

Responding to some comments from readers, Jefferson invoked hip-hop as part of the defense of his defense of hate music.

I can see where you're coming from to a degree, but I worry that it's splitting hairs. I'm almost positive that there are people in this world who have listened to NWA's "Fuck the Police" or Ice-T's "Cop Killer" and later attacked cops, and those are only the songs that really go in on police. Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of other rap songs either lightheartedly disparage cops or outright fantasize about cops getting killed. If we're talking about fictional distance, you run into a problem when it comes to hip-hop and the police force. The same goes for hip-hop and misogyny. 

In other words, it's as if rap music isn’t blamed for violence against the police, which it has been, and one familiar with Tipper Gore (to take one example he himself invokes) should know this.  And more, if many people can listen to it without engaging in violence, then the music is irrelevant, which again runs selectively counter to the demonization of blackness and hip hop.

Revealing a lack of understanding of the role of hate rock and other forms of white nationalist popular culture in terms of recruitment, identity formation, and in the formation of an imagined community, Jefferson replicates the narrative that hate rock is just music; forgetting or not knowing that centrality of white racism to the development of popular music over the past century, to the cultivation of taste, to the creation of styles and audiences, to the production of objects of adoration, consumption, and identification.   Clearly hip-hop music or action films don’t foster identity, community, and a sense of belonging based on violence, a sense of superiority, and a culture/ideology based in hate.

There is much to be critical about in terms of some rap music, some action films, some video games, but none of them compare to the soundtrack to white supremacy.  Different game . . . different planet . . . different reality.   Do these genres of popular culture function as propaganda?  Do they produce revenue for organizations committed to white nationalism, retrograde racial politics, and even the coming race war?  Do they play a leading and self-conscious role in the recruitment of youth to advance these projects?  Efforts to reimagine hate rock as simply popular culture, applying the debates commonplace to the culture wars and ubiquitous in regards to the first amendment, fails to see how this music (as with other forms of white-nationalist produced popular culture) operates as propaganda, as an assault on truth. 

              

Maybe Cord Jefferson and others needs to crack open history books to truly understand the music.  In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, who was the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, initiated “synchronization of culture, by which the arts were brought in line with Nazi goals.”  Was this just popular culture; was opposition to their propaganda akin to Tipper Gore?  Was the Nazi’s party use of newspapers and film simply a cultural production (see here for examples)?   I wonder if those who dismiss any discussion of the music, of the video games produced by white supremacist, of the various videos, would be so quick to dismiss the posters of Nazi Germany or the ways that Al Qaeda has used video games?  Would the discussion be “did these posters or video games” cause terrorism?  Why are we not examining the ways that white supremacists use the music to recruit, to disseminate a worldview based in violence, hate, and white supremacy?  

Yet, Jefferson and McWhorter trot out the same old tired arguments about free speech, about the number of individuals who have listened to the music without committing violence, and how there is no casual proof.   He might as well have argued that guns don’t kill people, music doesn’t kill people, bad people kill people:

Because the truth is that thousands and thousands of people just like Wade Page have for decades been listening to the same kind of hatecore he enjoyed, and yet very few of them have done what he did. In the same vein, neither will most Marilyn Manson fans go on a shooting rampage like that of his late fans Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who executed a host of their classmates at Columbine High School.

Over the past few days, Wade Page's friends and family have shed some light on his recent history: Page was an alcoholic who was discharged from the military in 2001 for showing up to a formation drunk. He was then fired from a trucking job in 2010 because got arrested for a DUI. After that, he found work hard to come by, and the bank foreclosed on his house in January of this year. By then he was 40 and living with money, no job, no family, and few ways to escape his alcoholic haze. It would certainly be tidy to say that the music made Page do it, but that neglects to acknowledge that hate, rage, and the eagerness to implode are also emotions every broke alcoholic probably feels, neo-Nazi or no. Interestingly, End Apathy put out one record before Page died. It was called Self Destruct.

The failure of people to look at the ideology, at grammar, and the message within hate rock is revealing. The discussion cannot and shouldn't just be about does "hate music" lead to violence? White supremacy leads to the violence; it leads to the music; it leads to  video games from white nationalists that encourage players to take pleasure in killing people of color. The discussion needs to be about how the music contributes to a worldview, how to represents an epistemological challenge to truth, how the music reifies a belief that whites are victims, that civilization is under attack. It is propaganda and therefore it is important to examine how it compels action, how it dehumanizes people of color, how it solidifies bonds within white nationalist communities through construction of the Other, and how it other spreads a narrative of white victimhood, dangerous criminals of color, threatening Jews, and a society that is increasingly inhospitable to white America. 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

C. Richard King is Professor of  Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

In the Army Still? White Supremacists and the American Military

In the Army Still? White Supremacists and the American Military

by David J. Leonard & C. Richard King | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Increasingly since 9/11, American political discourse and popular culture has acknowledged, if not celebrated, the sacrifices of members of its armed forces.  The often self serving praise of the service of others, which so few with privilege have ever seriously contemplated, has not resulted in heightened care for soldiers and veterans, nor deeper reflection among many on those who opt to serve, and what their service might mean for American democracy. 

Unfortunately, Wade Michael Page likely will not foster the needed conversations about these issues, but instead prompt attention to the dispositions and drives that led to Page to commit what has repeatedly been described “as a senseless act.”  Yet, as noted by Rinku Sen in Colorlines, these murders “are neither senseless nor random, and the vast majority of such incidents here involve white men. Racism holds a terrible logic, for a concept with no grounding whatsoever in science or morality, yet too many white people don’t see any pattern.” Equally powerful, Harsha Walia reminds readers to break down the walls between extreme and mainstream, between individual and societal, between civilian and military, to look at this violence not as yet another instance of a bad apple but yet another of the rotten tree(s):

The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions and do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic forms of racism. People of colour face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated and excluded from equitable access to healthcare, housing, childcare, and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; are over-represented in heads counts on poverty rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, and high school dropout rates. Colonialism has and continues to be shaped by the counters of white men’s civilizing missions.

To our minds, if this properly projects the arc of media coverage, until the next trauma or panic, we fear we will have lost real occasion to put into dialogue two key elements of Page’s biography: he was a veteran and he was a white supremacist.  We do not know how these elements of his identity and experience interfaced with one another, though apparently his general discharge in 1998 was not related to bias. We do know, however, that thinking about the connections between white nationalist groups and the U.S. military, between the mainstream and the extreme, will help us better apprehend the shooting in Wisconsin, and more engage their implications more sensibly. “It would be a mistake to dismiss Page was an isolated actor from a lunatic fringe disconnected from the mainstream of U.S. society.  In fact, the reality is that white supremacy is a persistent, tragic feature of the American cultural and political landscape,” writes Jessie Daniels.  “The extreme expressions of white supremacy – like this shooting, or like some of the violent images and messages previously circulated in print and now online – are part of a larger problem.  White supremacy is woven into the fabric of our society and it kills people.” We see this fact in the relationship between white supremacy and the U.S. military.

This is not a new issue, but it one that continues to resurface, often in association with tragic acts of violence.  Nearly 25 years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought to the attention of the Reagan administration that “active-duty Marines at Camp Lejeune, NC, were participating in paramilitary Ku Klux Klan activities and even stealing military weaponry for Klan use.”  Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger acted decisively, clarifying for members of the armed forces that involvement with “white supremacy, neo-Nazi and other such groups...[was] utterly incompatible with military service.”

A decade later, a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads, members of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, NC, killed a black couple.  The Department of Defense again issued a directive reminding enlisted personnel that extremism had no place in the US military.

In the official report about the killing, the DOD highlighted the broader systemic threat. “The threats posed by extremism to the military are simultaneously blatant and subtle,” the Defense Department study continued, “On the one hand, high-profile terrorist acts and hate crimes committed by active and former military personnel can have seriously detrimental effects on the civil-military relationship as well as on the morale and security of military personnel. On the other hand, even the non-violent activities of military personnel with extremist tendencies (e.g., possessing literature and/or artifacts from the extremist 'movement'; dabbling in extremism through computerized telecommunications activities; proselytizing extremist ideologies, etc.) can have deleterious consequences for the good order, discipline, readiness, and cohesion of military units.”

White supremacist organizations have been known to target Special Force soldiers as they have been trained in everything from combat demolitions to urban warfare.  “Hate groups send their guys into the U.S. military because the U.S. military has the best weapons and training," said T.J. Leyden, who while a member of the Marines recruited his white brethren to join the  Hammerskins, a renowned and violent skinhead gang that has been linked to Wade.  

According to Leyden the military was not just a perfect place to recruit but a perfect space to train fighters for the race war: “Right now, any white supremacist in Iraq is getting live fire, guerilla warfare experience,” he concluded. “But any white supremacist in Iraq who's a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or Marine Recon, he's doing covert stuff that's far above and beyond convoy protection and roadblocks. And if he comes back and decides at some point down the road that it's race war time, all that training and combat experience he's received could easily turn around and bite this country in the ass.” Leyden was not alone. Steven Barry, a former Special Forces officer, encouraged members of the National Alliance to enterthe Army and request entry into light infantry units:

Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war. It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed. As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood.

Given the concerted effort to recruit white soldiers, given the decision of the military to ignore hate-related activities/signs, and given the ways that racism has operated within the history military, it should come as no surprise that people like Wade and McVeigh would be produced in this context.

Despite countless events and reports, the response has been minimal. In 2006, The New York Times reported how the acceptance of racism within the military ranks: “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.”  On the one hand, we should ask ourselves how those individuals whose follow the ideology of white supremacist group, who profess allegiance to organizations committed to a racial war, who engage hate crimes and other forms of racial violence, are not seen as “gang members.” On the other hand, we have to wonder that had violence been perpetrated by “gang members,” and given the racial meaning conveyed within such a term, would the media and public be in such a rush to individualize this crime, to turn into a conversation about him rather than the broader social and political context.  Would there be a push to look at links and connections, to rid the military of white supremacist.

The shooting in Wisconsin is tragic, even shocking, albeit not surprising given the history of white supremacy, given the look the other way approach from a military in search of bodies, given the violence that has been central to white supremacy throughout history.  It marks another dark day for the country, reminding us once more how powerful intolerance and anger continue to be. It is perhaps predictable that a mass killing of South Asian immigrants would be at the hands of active advocate of white power.

While comforting to see his actions as that of an “extremist” the seeds of anger, the seeds of racism, and seeds of violence were sown within countless mainstream spaces.  And, in light of this history, it perhaps less surprising that the shooter was a veteran. “Today's white supremacists in the military become tomorrow's domestic terrorists once they're out,” noted Scott Barfield, an investigator with the Department of Defense. “There needs to be a tighter focus on intercepting the next Timothy McVeigh before he becomes the next Timothy McVeigh.” Or the next Wade Michael Page. We fear that if the military fails after a quarter century of incidents and reports to root out neo-Nazis and white supremacists, this will not be the last such attack.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

C. Richard King is Professor of  Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

Business as Usual: Big Time College Sport and Inequality

Business as Usual: Big Time College Sport and Inequality

by Richard C. King and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

On December 6, 2011, amid the jubilation of students and alumni, fanfare from the marching band, and media hype, Washington State University (WSU) presented its new football coach to the public.  After four losing seasons, the announcement that a proven winner would take the helm had Cougar nation in a frenzy, excited by the high scoring offense and return of fun to the Palouse.  Much of the media coverage echoed fan sentiment: With headlines like "Why Mike Leach is Awesome” and “Leach is a Dream hire,” journalists and pundits alike celebrated the bold decision making of Athletic Director Bill Moos and the promising future of the once great program.   

Apparently, the unfolding sex abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse, the play of Ndamukong Suh, and the NBA labor agreement have exhausted the always-limited critical powers of the sport media and sport fans alike. Even in a social moment seemingly primed for connections between sport and society, few, if any public voices seemed willing or able to do so: the short lived outrage sparked by Taylor Branch's “The Shame of the Game” a scant two month earlier had no lasting resonance, no place in public discourse. In fact, when framed critically for students on campus, our classes reacted with indifference, if not hostility. 

Two fundamental issues are lost in the hype, pleasure, and possibilities surrounding the new hire: the racial politics of college athletics and the increasingly inadequate resources devoted to higher education.  Indeed, the hiring of Mike Leach exposes the workings of higher education in stark terms, highlighting the ways in which the status quo simultaneously perpetuates economic and racial inequality and masks structures of power.

   

Fifty years after integration of it began in earnest, big time college athletics remains one of the clearest of examples of racial inequity and racist exclusion in the United States.  Historically white colleges and universities exploit black bodies for publicity and profit.  Although black athletes have dominated football for decades, few coaches and fewer administrators are African American.  Efforts by organizations like Black Coaches and Administrators have made a difference to be sure: African American head coaches have rise from 1 in 1979 to 25 at the start of this season and today 31 of 260 offensive and defensive coordinators (11.9%) are black.  The recent firing of Turner Gill at the University of Kansas not only reduces the total number of active head coaches, but reminds us how limited the success of black coaches is: only one black coach (Tyrone Willingham) has been hired after being fired as a head coach (see here for additional information). The hiring of Mike Leach thus fits a broader pattern.  Historically white universities headed by white Athletic Directors, such as Bill Moos at WSU, tend to hire white coaches. 

Arguably more troubling is how Leach was hired.  The search committee appears to have been Moos, who wanted to make a bold statement about Cougar athletics, increase attendance and alumni interest, and make the program relevant again.  This too resonates with prevailing practices in college athletics, ranging from unilateral hires to selecting internal hires groomed for the position, and virtually ensures the unbearable whiteness of college coaching, where the failure to take measures to cultivate and promote a diverse athletic leadership, it is unlikely it will ever materialize.  This has nothing to with overt racism and isn’t a question about the intentions of any individual.  Rather priorities and preoccupations render such questions largely unthinkable, and when asked they are deflected by defensiveness about “how race doesn’t matter” and how he was “best qualified person.” In the end, don’t we need to reflect on why, how and the significance of candidate pool being overwhelmingly white?

In its most recent Annual Hiring Report Card, the BCA gave WSU a C for its hiring practices. No doubt, the fait d'accompli hiring of Leach would receive an F. But one might wonder when did grades ever stop fans and alumni from enjoying college football.  As with the larger shifts in our society that has resulted in further economic inequality, even more evident as we examine persistent and worsening racial inequality, we are struck by the symbolism here of the a millionaire white coach profiting off the labor of black players even while the students, faculty and staff at the university are left behind by tuition increases, worsening working conditions, and a culture defined by budget cuts.        

As with much of the 1%, Leach’s salary far exceeds that the 99% of faculty and staff at Washington State University.  Earning an astounding 2.25 million dollars per year, Leach is set to become the third highest coach in the Pac-12.   Compared to the average associate faculty members’ salary, who makes $74,700, the disparity in income is significant.  The gulf between faculty and college football coaches is a relatively new phenomenon.  For example, in 1969, the head coach at Oregon State University earned $24,000, while the school’s president earned $34,500 and the dean of the college education brought home $29,760.  As of 1986, salaries had not increased significantly, with the average NCAA football coach earning roughly 150,000.  Beginning in the 1990s, this changed with the norm slowly becoming over 1 million dollars.  Obviously faculty salaries have not increased on similar levels.  The income gulf evident between football coaches and faculty is emblematic of larger inequality that defines that relationship between the 1% and the 99%.  In “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Joseph E. Stiglitz reflects on this historical shift 

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

The same shift and income inequality that is evident in society at large is visible with the income gap between college football coaches and everyone else. 

According to the Sports Business Journal, the athletic budget for Washington State University increased from $37.0 million in 2010 to $38.5 in 2011.  For 2012, the budget was set at $39.3 million, representing a +6.2% increase.  And this was all before the hiring of Mike Leach.  If we can examine these numbers within a larger history, it is clear that a disproportionate amount of revenues and much of costs are associated with the football program.  Michael Oriard, in Bowled over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, Washington State football generated almost 10.5 million in revenue (as part of 38.2 million in total revenues for all of athletics), yet it spent 7.5 million (the athletic department spent 38.2 million).  And that was before Mike Leach. 

On the heels of endless chatter about overpaid NBA players being tone deaf to the economic difficulties facing the NBA and the nation at large, the absence of a conversation about the salaries of college football coaches is particularly revealing.  On the heels of widespread demonization of teachers and other public employees as overpaid and pampered, the absence of a sustained discussion of investment of public colleges and universities for football coaches is telling.  Like state investment in prisons (in California, the 5 highest paid state employees work in prisons), the investment in collegiate sports is a testament to our collective priorities. The expenditures and the silence from the citizenry, media, and institutions illustrates the values of a society, one that puts profits over people, that puts victories over education, and one that puts the potential of a successful football program ahead of anything else. 

While the hiring of Mike Leach focuses our attention, to make this about Leach or even WSU is to miss the point, misconstrue our analysis and misdirect our energies.  The erasure of context, the dissolution of structure and power within media spectacle, and the seeming impossibility of critique are systemic and systematic, just as with the case in the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.  In the end, this is not a commentary of Leach or other individuals but instead priorities and values, inequality and divisions.  It is as much about a media that flocks to campus for a press conference while failing to give attention to the meaningful issues facing of all us.  It is about a campus that unreflectively celebrates what it all means for us, that rarely is encouraged to think about us beyond the sport team and never asked to determine what it all means. It is a reminder that amid the 99% at America’s universities, football coaches are the 1%. 

 ***

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Could Dr. King Watch Big Time College Sports?

Could Dr. King Watch Big Time College Sports? Race Beyond Shame

by David Leonard and C. Richard King | NewBlackMan

In “Shame of College Sports,” legendary American historian Taylor Branch turns his college sports in this month’s The Atlantic.   Focusing on the profits generated through college sports, the lack of power available to student-athletes, and the absurdity to claims of amateurism and student-athletes, Branch exposes the exploitation and hypocrisy that is as much part of the NCAA experience as March Madness and Bowl Games.   Almost hoping to disarm critics who often scoff at ‘slavery analogies,’ Brand avoids that comparison instead embracing one that centers on colonialism.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

Providing readers with an amazing history, including the origins of the term student-athlete (as part of a systematic effort to avoid paying workers’ compensation claims for injured football players) and illustrating the methods used by NCAA and its partner schools to maintain the illusion of amateur sports all while raking in the dough, Branch surprisingly avoids the issue of race.  The colonial analogy notwithstanding, there is virtually no discussion of the racial implications in this system, the larger history of the NCAA in relationship to race, and the ways in which white racial frames help to justify an acceptance of such a system.  

Branch seems to point to the racial implications here in a section entitled, ““The Plantation Mentality,” where he quotes Sonny Vaccaro:

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

The reference to the “Plantation mentality” and the explicit acknowledgement that the bulk of profits are generated within sports that in recent years have been dominated by African American athletes generates surprisingly little discussion of the radicalized political economy of college athletics today.  Over a decade ago, D. Stanley Eitzen observed

These rules reek with injustice. Athletes can make money for others, but not for themselves. Their coaches have agents, as many students engaged in other extracurricular activities, but the athletes cannot. Athletes are forbidden to engage in advertising, but their coaches are permitted to endorse products for generous compensation. Corporate advertisements are displayed in the arenas where they play, but with no payoff to the athletes. The shoes and equipment worn by the athletes bear very visible corporate logos, for which the schools are compensated handsomely. The athletes make public appearances for their schools and their photographs are used to publicize the athletic department and sell tickets, but they cannot benefit. The schools sell memorabilia and paraphernalia that incorporate the athletes' likenesses, yet only the schools pocket the royalties. The athletes cannot receive gifts, but coaches and other athletic department personnel receive the free use of automobiles, country club memberships, housing subsidies, etc.

To our minds, then, Branch clearly  misses an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the system is built around generating profits through the labor of young African American men.  Those profits – the billions of dollars earned through television contracts, merchandizing, video game deals, concessions, booster donations, ticket sales – find there way into the hands of overwhelming white constituency, coaches and athletic directors, in support of a largely white establishment. 

Much of the money generated by football and basketball programs funds those other non-revenue generating sports; those that are not only overwhelmingly white but also reflect a larger history of segregation and inequality.  That is, the labor of black student-athletes pays for sports that many African Americans have no chance of securing scholarship in because those sports are not available in high school.   

In “The Color Gap in Girls' Sports,” Sara Clarke Kaplan highlights this inequality, comparing the sports offered at Washington D.C. schools compared to those Arlington County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, concluding that whereas D.C. (and most urban school districts) offer “varsity basketball, volleyball, softball, and track for girls” those neighboring suburban districts offer the “big 4” along with “soccer, field hockey, tennis, swimming, gymnastics -- even crew.”  According to studies, roughly 85-95% of suburban youth play sports, compared to 15-25 percent of those living in urban areas.  EuroAmericans play high school sports at far greater levels (more sports=more opportunities) than African Americans and therefore have a greater chance of securing a scholarship.  According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, “African-American females represent less than 5% of all high school athletes, less than 10% of all college athletes.”

We can see a similar reality with boys sports, with golf, tennis, volleyball, baseball, lacrosse, and countless others.  The pipeline to a college scholarship comes from America’s suburban public school and private school; yet, it is the profits generated from football and basketball that pays the ticket for those other athletes.  Indeed, without the labor of black athletes in college football and basketball, support and subsidies for other sports would wither away.  Importantly, it is this radicalized labor, moreover, that enables more elite or rarefied sports to thrive on many Division I campuses: on the one hand, black athletes subsidize white privilege; on the other hand, they make it possible for many schools to recruit and retain white student-athletes, arguably making historically white institutions more competitive in their efforts to attract white students.

And here, the historian of Civil Rights Movement misses a fundamental connection between those struggles for freedom and the bondage of the black student-athlete.  The most prestigious and profitable college sports programs in the country are all historically white institutions, some which resisted for decades efforts to integrate them. Now, ironically, even as these ivory towers remain disproportionately white, they happily exploit those too long excluded and marginalized.  Moreover, these white dominated institutions of higher learning still refuse to properly educate African Americans.  Where, historically, it was the color bar, Jim Crow, and separate-but-equal that enabled them to avoid their obligations, today, it is the primacy of on-field performance, overt and covert efforts to discouraging thinking and learning, and the threat of losing one's scholarship.  Graduation rates for black athletes should remind us how little interest or care most institutions of high learning have for their black student-athletes: it as if most colleges and universities regard them as chattel that can be easily replaced with another disposable body.  This pattern of denying access and blocking education attainment, same as it ever was, multiplies the exploitation. 

Big time college sports feeds on a system of primary and secondary education that under-educates African Americans, skimming of the most talented, while rarely giving the communities from which they corm and to which they will return a second thought.  The NCAA has structured a system in which coaches, scouts, and administrators are all too happy to channel the dreams and desperation of young black men who often have no other options and nothing to fall back upon but their bodies.  In the process, they not only reinforce tacitly the notion of black physicality--in contrast with white intellect, but they also strengthen racial hierarchies, including the barriers that have kept African Americans from participating fully as students and as athletes.

But then, perhaps, this should not surprise us.  The very notion of amateurism and its later complement, the student athlete, emerged as meaningful social and political forces during an era in which intercollegiate athletics were almost exclusively white only spaces--and in the case of amateurism elite white spaces.  And importantly, both constructs took shape to contain threats to big time college sports: amateurism to rebuff scandals and corruption, the latter to squash the rights of athletes.  The invocation of the ideals (if that is the right word) often works to contain threats to the status quo and do so by cleansing or forgetting the radicalized history of the NCAA and sport more generally in the USA. 

In post-Civil Rights America, African Americans now find themselves awkwardly crowded under ill-fitting ideas of the past, but try as it might big time college sport cannot hide the proliferation of racial hierarchy.  One need only glance at studies of stacking and until recently the paucity of black quarterbacks to see the truth; but it is perhaps more visibly seen in the small numbers of African American coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents.  Big time college sport may be one of the few domains in American life where the people with most experience in pursuit have the smallest representation in its management and leadership.

In responding to Branch’s piece, Kenneth Shropshire points to the missed opportunity in expanding upon the colonialism analogy when he writes, “Colonialism was shrouded in, "Europe knows what's best for Africa, and by colonizing them we will guide their savage ways toward ours."   The ubiquitous references that celebrate college sports as a place of discipline, as a place of teaching values, “seasoning,” maturation, enlightenment, and otherwise HELPING student-athletes points to a larger history encapsulated by the ideology of white man’s burden.  The celebration of college sports as a vehicle to secure the “American Dream” and to secure the requisite skills and discipline needed to excel in society reeks of colonialism and race given that (1) it is so often used in reference to African American athletes, and (2) because it is used as evidence of the compensation provided to those excelling in revenue sports. 

White owners and overseers then, white administrators and coaches now: in both cases systems of slavery.  To return to Eitzen,

Slaves, by definition, are not free. The slaves of the antebellum era did not have the right to assemble or petition. They did not have the right to speak out or freedom of movement. Those conditions characterize today's college athletes as well. The NCAA, schools, and coaches restrict the freedom of the athletes in many ways. By NCAA fiat, once athletes sign a contract to play for a school, they are bound to that institution. They make a four-year commitment to that college, yet the school makes only a one-year commitment to them. If an athlete wishes to play for another big-time school, he is ineligible for one year (two years if his former coach refuses to release the athlete from his contract). Yet, if a coach wants to get rid of an athlete, the school is merely bound to provide the scholarship for the remainder of that academic year. Coaches, on the other hand, can break their contracts, and immediately coach another school… The right to privacy is invaded routinely when it comes to college athletes…Freedom of choice is violated when athletes are red-shirted (held from play for a year) without their consent. Athletes may have little or no choice in what position they play. They may be told to gain or lose weight, with penalties for noncompliance. Coaches may demand mandatory study halls and determine what courses the athletes will take and their majors.

While we, with Eitzen, acknowledge that the analogy between athletes and slave can be "overdrawn," we remain mystified that did not foreground the racial politics of big time college sports.  Even if only an element in his larger analysis, discussing race would surely have produced a more hostile reception and may have led some to dismiss his reading of the NCAA now.  As it, "Shame of College Sport" affirms common sense understandings of the racial contours of contemporary American life, allowing most Americans, the NCAA, and sport off the hook precisely when we should insist on engagement, equality, and inclusion.  Dr. King would expect nothing less of us.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

Decoding the Curse: The Racial Subtexts of the new Face of Madden Football

Decoding the Curse: 

The Racial Subtexts of the New Face of Madden Football

by David J. Leonard and C. Richard King

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are pleased to announce this year’s cover for Madden 2012: Peyton Hillis. Who? Peyton Hillis. No, not Peyton Manning.  He’s a great player, but didn’t have his greatest year in 2011. Right, the running back. No, not Walter Payton (RIP).  Not Sweetness; not Gary Payton; Toby Gillis, or any other sport celebrity that might immediately come to mind. 

Peyton Hillis, drafted in the seventh round of the 2008 NFL by the Denver Broncos, had a break out season after being traded to the Cleveland Browns and stepping up to replace the injured rookie Montario Hardesty.  He rushed for 1,177 yards and scored 11 touchdowns in the 2010 NFL season, becoming a cult hero for many fans.

Following in the footsteps of Eddie George, Michael Vick, Ray Lewis, Donovan McNabb, Shaun Alexander, Vince Young, Brett Favre, Larry Fitzgerald, Troy Polamalu and Drew Brees, Hillis will become the latest NFL player to appear on the cover of this flagship game.  Unlike his predecessors, Hillis is neither a perennial star nor a household name.  His selection, however, speaks volumes about sport celebrity, new media, and old racial politics.

In a canny marketing campaign, EA Sports teamed up with ESPN to stage its own “March Madness,” a 32-person bracket that allowed fans to select the athlete to be featured on the cover.  This system played to national fantasies about meritocracy and free democracy.  The Bleacher Report described the approach in the following way: “Each player will go against an opposing player to see who gets the most votes. The one who gets the most votes will move on to the next round and face another player. The selection process with go under those terms until a winner is chosen. Be sure to vote each week for your favorites to find out who will be on the Madden 12 cover.”  After successive rounds that saw several potential NFL stars, including Adrian Peterson and Drew Brees, lose their bids to appear on the cover, voters were left with two choices, Peyton Hillis and Michael Vick. 

At a certain level, the differences between these two men wrote the narrative itself: Vick, the former first-round pick who has long dazzled fans with his brilliance on the field; Hillis, a relative unknown drafted in the seventh round out of University of Arkansas; Vick, the odds on favorite, against Hillis, the underdog, seeded tenth in the bracket, who had already beaten Matt Ryan, Ray Rice, and Aaron Rodgers; Vick, whose legal troubles made him a media pariah; Hillis, described as “the common man.”  Yet, each also fit into the media’s narrative obsession with redemption with Madden affording Vick the opportunity to solidify his comeback and Hillis the chance to prove himself. 

In the final vote, Hillis dominated Vick, securing 64% of the vote.  While it may be tempting to see the results a mere popularity contest, they say more about the significance of race today than the appeal of individual athletes.

At a certain level, it is easy to think about Vick’s loss in the final (he had won in previous rounds) as confirmation of the difficult path toward redemption for contemporary black athletes.  Like Vick’s persistently low-q score, Hillis’ annihilation of Vick suggests that he may be branded forever as a convicted felon, thug, dog fighter and gangster.  It demonstrates that whereas whiteness in a sporting context continues to reference the hard-working, cerebral hero, blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140).  In this regard, Vick is unable to transcend the scripts that limit his public identity.  As such, many fans took to the Internet to confirm that this was a referendum on Vick, underscoring that he did not deserve the cover because of his past behavior.  For example, the following was posted on ESPN.com:

Vick is scum! Vick's dog fighting was the least of it. Vick killed thirteen dogs by various methods including wetting one dog down and electrocuting her, hanging, drowning and shooting others and, in at least one case, by slamming a dog's body to the ground. He forcibly drowned a pit bull! Can you imagine the struggling dog in his hands, drowning?!?! What kind of person does this? A sick, evil person, who is now free in society. Vick also thought it "funny" to put family pet dogs in with pit bulls to see them ripped apart. Is this a man you think should be free to roam in society? He didn't make a mistake. He did this for five years! He is the scum of earth. Think of what's in his brain? He is beyond evil. If a person had done these same things to a human, we would say that they are beyond help, and would never be allowed back into society, but if you do it to a dog, then rehabilitation is fast and easy, and all is forgiven and forgotten very quickly. He's healed? Is he eff !!!!

Many others followed suit, taking this as an opportunity to further punish and discipline Vick for his past.  Yet, to reduce Hillis victory to the disdain for Vick/unredemptive possibilities for transgressive black bodies is to ignore the broader issues at work here. 

At one level, the arrival of Hillis illustrates the celebration of whiteness and nostalgia for a different era in sports.  It represents a moment where sports fans symbolically took the sport back.  He was the underdog who miraculously beat Michael Vick.  This evident in comments like this: “Peyton Hillis is a monster! Who doesn't want a white guy at running back in the NFL, goes back to the old days of football.”

In reading website comments and reviewing various commentaries, it becomes clear that many fans find in Hillis an opportunity to reengage the NFL through what Joe Feagin dubs the “white racial frame.”  To this constituency, following C.L. Cole and David Andrews (2001, 72) take on the NBA in the closing decades of the 20th century, Hillis offers football fans in the 21st century a “breath of fresh air for an American public ‘tired of trash-talking, spit-hurling, head-butting sports millionaires.’”  He provides a racial time machine to an imagined period of sports where (white) male heroes played the right way; he is constructed as a clear alternative to “African American professional basketball players who are routinely depicted in the popular media as selfish, insufferable, and morally reprehensible” (Cole & Andrews, 2001: 72). 

At another level, Hillis’ victory can be read as something of a triumph for the backlash against racial justice and for the usefulness of sincere fictions in a society of spectacle.  When asked about whether or not other players used race as part of trash-talking Hillis stated: “Every team did it. They’ll say, ‘You white boy, you ain’t gonna run on us today. This is ridiculous. Why are you giving offensive linemen the ball? All kinds of stuff like that you hear on the field, but I use that to my advantage. I kind of soaked it in, ate it up a little bit, because I enjoyed it.”  Despite his focus on racially-based trash-talking, the media discourse pivoted, focusing on reverse racism and systemic racism. 

In “Racism Alive and Swell in NFL,” LeCharles Bentley, a former NFL center, argues that Hillis, who isn’t the prototypical “chocolate bruiser” is the latest victim of the color bar of the NFL.  “Apparently a white running back who struggled because he was pigeon-holed as a fullback isn't as valued as a black running back with multiple knee injuries. This is eerily similar to the early years in the NFL when black players struggled with typecasting but kept their mouths shut for fear of being labeled a ‘troublemaker.’  The argument here is simple: Not only did Hillis face difficulty in securing a job because of prejudice, but compared to backs like Knowshon Moreno and Correll Buckhalter, among others, he received little recognition and media exposure despite his success.  And while Bentley links the positional segregation to a larger history of anti-black racism, the linear narrative offered reinforces that idea that the tables have turned and now it is white players that suffer because of racial stereotypes.  

Similarly, Josiah Schlatter, takes up this question in “Was Peyton Hillis subjected to reverse racism for being a white running back?” He thinks so,” gives voice to the problems faced by Hillis because of race.  Focusing on “racist linebackers,” and while arguing that the racial epithets directed at Hillis are little more than trash-talking, the premise/title of the argument reinforced the idea behind the discriminated white athlete.  Add to this, many of the comments focused on the double standards and how racism directed at African Americans would never be tolerated.  It was yet another example of how the system was rigged against white men.  In a world that purportedly privileges and benefits black athletes, the recognition afforded to Hillis represents a victory for the white minority in football.  Indeed, many of the online comments celebrating Hillis and his victory underscore Kyle Kusz’s findings in his monograph, Revolt of the White Athlete: white masculinity is framed as battered, besieged, and belittled by the media, black athletes, and the masses; this marginal position affords white men an alternative space in which to recapture the center under the cover of victimization as it encourages the formulation of romanticized identities and seemingly revolutionary images that counter progressive reframings of race, gender, and sexuality.

This past season, Derron Synder took up the debate surrounding white guys in the NFL, interrogating the arguments put forth by caste football, a website connected to the white nationalist movement.  He noted the pride white players in the NFL evoke in white fans in oddly empathetic terms:

Nonetheless, I understand why some white folks lament the NFL's lack of white halfbacks, receivers and defensive backs while championing the select few that exist. That's kind of like black folks complaining about the NFL's lack of black quarterbacks while cheering on the handful who make it. I certainly also understand the sense of pride that (white) New England Patriots halfback Danny Woodhead generated with his breakout game against the Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football. Likewise, I understand why (white) New England Patriots receiver Wes Welker fosters the same feeling. I'm sure that Woodhead and Welker are inspirations to every young (white) football player who is being conditioned to believe that certain positions at the major-college or NFL level are beyond his capabilities.

The problem here is that the history of white and black football players, just as in the larger society, are defined by racial segregation, inequity, and privilege. The instances of primarily white coaches and general managers converting white running backs to fullbacks or tight ends because of stereotypes about black and white physicality is not the same as these same gatekeepers questioning the intellectual readiness of black players to excel at quarterback or middle linebacker.  Likewise, the celebration of Danny Woodhead, Wes Welker, or Peyton Hillis means something different than Warren Moon, Doug Williams, or Donovan McNabb, precisely because such celebrations occur in a social milieu anchored in and animated by white supremacy.  Even conceding certain elements of physical prowess (such as speed) to athletes of African descent only affirms the superiority of EuroAmericans--fans and athletes--whose intellect, culture, and character transcend the banality and vulgarity of the body.  As such, celebrating Woodhead, Welker, and Hillis is to celebrate the core values of white supremacy, while championing Moon, Williams, and McNabb calls into question those values and the regime of racial discrimination that still favors the commodification and criminalization of black bodies to the recognition of shared humanity.

***

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.