What to Me is Election Day 2012?

What to Me is Election Day 2012?

by Lisa Guerrero | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

I remember the overwhelming excitement and feeling of sanctified purpose that the 2008 election had.  I, like all other Obama supporters in 2008, was swept up in the historical meaning of his potential win.  And when he did win, it felt like both the inevitable and astonishing event that it was.  Yes We Can.  Of course, his win didn’t bring with it the end of racism and the significance of race, no matter how many people naively, ignorantly, or deliberately clung, (and still cling) to the notion that an Obama presidency equaled a “post-racial” nation.  Neither did his election to the White House transform Barack Obama into the superhero we all desperately wanted him to be.  He remained a man; one who has had remarkable moments as Commander-in-Chief, and has also had regrettable moments as Commander-in-Chief.  He is fallible and flawed, as all humans are, but our disappointments in him seem to resonate much deeper because of the unprecedented hope he and his campaign allowed us to indulge in a manner that many of us had not dared to imagine before. 

It is four years later, and though I haven’t bought multiple t-shirts to commemorate it this time, I still have hope…in him, in my fellow citizens, and in my vote.  I still, and always will feel, that my vote is a profound privilege and responsibility.

This has been a long, arduous election season; the most taxing one I’ve experienced since I have been old enough to vote.  And throughout this seemingly endless election season there's been a lot of talk about how there isn't the same enthusiasm, the same "being on the cusp of history" feeling for people, especially those who supported Obama in 2008. And that is certainly true.  But elections like that come around once in a lifetime…if you’re lucky.  And while I am happy to have been a part of that rare moment four years ago, for me, and many others, this election in 2012 is more important in many ways than the historic election in 2008.

To me this election is about women's equality, my equality; it is about keeping safe women's ability, my ability, to be able to give voice to our experiences, to determine what we do with our own bodies, and to have access to safe and affordable healthcare when we make those choices; it is about affordable healthcare for everyone; it is about supporting the right for people to love whoever they want, and to have that love be recognized as "valid" and "equal," as if those words should ever have anything to do with love; it is about saving, improving, and believing in the promise of exemplary public education and future generations' chances at having access to it; it is about taking climate change seriously; it is about being our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. It's about the people I love…my grandmother, my disabled mother, my friends whose weddings I want to attend, my fellow teachers who are constantly being told to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, my students who are given less and less each year while paying more and more, my goddaughter, my best friends, and the people who struggle to live a good life amidst daily challenges whose names I will never know.  All of that is worth my vote.

My vote also says, “Obama, you must do more.” Drones, immigration, mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, gun violence, voter suppression, systemic poverty.  “You can do better.  We want you to do better….we alldeserve better.”

But even if I didn't care about any of these things I would vote anyway...because while I recognize many things in our system are flawed, and will likely continue to be flawed after this and many other elections, I’m not convinced that the flaw is yet fatal.  Who am I, in all of my privilege, to stop believing, when so many with so fewer reasons to believe than I, did not stop, have not stopped?   People have fought, been jailed and beaten, died, and still die, for the singular right to check a box and say: "My voice counts too;" their battles mean that I am lucky enough today to sit in the comfort of my house, unmolested, unchallenged, fill out a ballot, and drop it in a mailbox, even as people are still being suppressed TODAY just for trying to exercise this singular right. 

As James Baldwin once said, “Words like ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ ‘democracy’ are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”Part of that individual effort is to vote. I will alwaysvote because my vote is not mine alone, but also belongs to those I love, to those who need help, to those who, like me, still have faith that we can love our neighbors like we love ourselves. I will always vote because it is the very least I can do to say thank you to those who came before me losing battles and winning wars, and those who continue to fight many of those same battles today both here and around the world.  I will always vote because it is also the most I can do to say I will always believe we can be better tomorrow than we are today.  Yes We Can…be bold. Be hopeful.  Be unwilling to give up fighting for change.  I’m one voice among many, and I approve this message.

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Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman, editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and author of  the forthcoming Satiric Subjectivities: Double Conscious Satire in Contemporary Black Culture (Temple University Press).

Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Death

Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Death

by Lisa Guerrero and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  While new media and social networking is “transforming” our society, in certain ways, bringing people closer together, if only seemingly so, its “newness” seems only relative to its potential as a new frontier in which to deploy and recycle the same old narratives and tropes, to continue a history of injustices that define the American experience.  As the technologies of communication appear new, the technologies of oppression are anything but.  However, as we see with “Trayvoning,” the trend that has White youth posting pictures of themselves as if they were part of the Trayvon crime scene, the marriage of communication innovation with racist stagnation does constitute something new, though not improved, in the history of the system of racism in the United States.

“’Trayvoning’ is when you get a hoodie, Skittles and Arizona iced tea, and pose like you've been shot in the chest.”  The Facebook page instructs participants in go through the following steps:

1. Get hoodie
2. Get skittles
3. Get Arizona
4. Wear hoodie
5. Go to Florida
6. Get shot :)
Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old African American male who was unarmed and got shot by a raciest [sic] Mexican American.

During Step 7, participants are instructed to post their pictures on the Internet, which has led to widespread circulation of these disgusting and dehumanizing images.

In response to reports about “Trayvoning,” Jasiri X asked on Twitter: “Trayvoning? Really? Why is our pain, suffering & death, always mocked for laughs?” This question gets to the heart of not only the efforts to recreate and  disseminate representations of the Trayvon case, but it is also a means to communicate pleasure in the murder of Trayvon. “Trayvoning” recasts and performs injustice by turning someone’s pain and suffering  into a spectacle of white pleasure that further denies the humanity of black people.  This is reflected not just in “Trayvoning” but with the Orlando businessman who has sought to capitalize by selling Trayvon shooting targets, the media that continues to criminalize and blame Trayvon, and those who have disparaged, mocked(see here for picture of someone who donned blackface), and made light of a dead young man. 

The disregard for Black life, and the disparagement of Black death is nothing new; the pleasure and joy garnered from Black suffering and dreams deferred has been central to White supremacy throughout United States history.  Evident in minstrel shows, the history of lynching, and jokes about racial profiling or the war on drugs, whites have always found joy in the violence experienced by African Americans.

The history of American public discourse is one marred with both the erasure of black and suffering, and efforts to find happiness and pleasure in the suffering of the OTHER.  We saw this during Hurricane Katrina where the sight of African Americans wading through water in search of food or medicine, or stranded families clinging to life on roof tops elicited reactions of shock and horror as well as pleasure and joy at the knowledge that could never happen to White America.  Dylan Rodriguez describes Katrina as a “scene of white popular enjoyment, wherein the purging/drowning of black people provided an opportunity for white Americana to revel in its entitlement to remain relatively indifferent to this nearby theater of breathtaking devastation.” 

Such joy  isn’t simply an outgrowth of the denied humanity of Black people or the refusal to witness and see Black pain, but it is also a celebration of, or at least the solidification of, White humanity, White power, and the protective armor that whiteness provides each and every day.   This is the story of race in America, from lynchings to Katrina, from slavery to Trayvon Martin.

But the examples of racialized disregard that have surrounded Trayvon Martin’s death, most recently exemplified in the commodification and “meme-ification” of the tragedy by various White people.  This marks a startling new mechanization of racism wherein there has been a complete evacuation of humanity…on both sides, that of people of color and other marginalized groups, the dehumanization of which is, sadly, no longer surprising, but also that of dominant groups who willfully participate in acts of oppression like “Trayvoning” whose humanity becomes increasingly and insidiously taken over by consumption and performance.  The joy historically, as well as contemporaneously, taken by many Whites in the violence against and suffering of African Americans has become nearly indistinguishable from the joy of consuming. 

The consumer market has overtaken all facets of social interaction, the good, the bad, and the very bad.  We are witnessing a descent into a “society of the spectacle” that perhaps Guy DeBord himself could scarcely imagine.  The spectacularizing of racialized events and tragedies within the 21^stcentury, while still largely constructed through sociocultural lenses of White supremacy, racialized inferiority, and histories of racial injustices and violences, allows for their translation to be conveniently dislocated from these racial phenomena and displaced onto the assumed “neutral” projects of commodity and consumption.  As DeBord stated regarding the nature of the society of the spectacle, “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images…It is a world vision which has become objectified.”

Writing about the practice of whites collecting body parts as souvenirs during lynchings, Harvey Young, in “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” highlights the spectacle of white-on-black violence and the pleasure derived from Black suffering and death.  He describes the lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, where, “the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it assouvenirs.”  Seeking to explain the unexplainable, to provide meaning to the unthinkable, Young identifies this history in the following way: “lynched black body in the aftermath of the lynching event and variously read it in terms of the souvenir, the fetish, and the performance remain.”  He argues, “that the lynching keepsake not only can be defined by, but also can exceed, each of these three terms. Containing within itself the various features of the souvenir, the fetish, and the remain, the body part recalls and remembers the performance of which it is a part. It not only gestures toward the beliefs that motivated its theft, but also renders visible the body from which it was taken.”  

It would seem that the efforts to recreate Trayvon’s death, to trivialize his death by including skittles and ice tea, and then disseminate this image within the new media sphere continues the history of rendering Black death as souvenir.   “For white supremacists, souvenir lynching photos became ways of reliving the erotic thrills of torture and mutilation produced under the guise of righteous civic actions, as well as a way of reaffirming a racial and gendered hierarchy that kept white men on top and blacks at the bottom,” writes Dora Apel in “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib.” She furthers that, “When lynching photos were transformed into souvenir postcards, they were sent to friends and family with the senders' proud boasts of having been in the mob, making blackness an exotic spectacle and privileging the ‘look of whites over blacks. Spectacle lynchings similarly relied on the look of the crowd to reaffirm notions of superior white ‘manliness’ over the stereotype of the hyper sexual black male”

In this historical example we see the explicit rendering of White supremacy.  The White supremacy and racism of the act, purposefully done as the dual act of White superiority and Black inferiority, as well as of the racist and violent talisman provided by the souvenir, was never obfuscated.  It was seen as a right.  It was claimed.  In the new millennium, a time heavily invested in the belief in its own racial progress, while remaining heavily mired in colorblind racism and reimagined racial violences, the rampant consumer society, fortified incalculably by new media, makes the claims to White supremacy, (for all but the most extreme), almost completely deniable.  The claims become subsumed beneath the “logic” of the spectacle wherein “the spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.” (DeBord)  This is the sociocultural state in which “Trayvoning” exists, the state of the self-referential spectacle.

Thus “Trayvoning” creates a community bound by whiteness and the ability to “become” Trayvon through the dehumanizing ritual, through the spectacle of Black death, and through recasting his murder apart from white supremacy and whiteness.  While his murder, his death, and the circumstances that surround the injustice are understood as a site of White ritual and pleasure, a space of White pleasure resulting from Black pain, they are not transparently claimed (by and large) as such.  While the trend can be interpreted as a new technology of lynching, its character remains separate from lynchings of the past whose act, and the dissemination of lynching photographs highlighted White power and White supremacy.

The ability to “act” like a dead Trayvon Martin only to get up and head back into White suburbia is illustrative of this same feeling of power and privilege, but invisibly so.  White people don’t take part in “Trayvoning” to “declare” White supremacy; they take part in it because the declaration has been rendered unnecessary by various sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic forces.  In fact, the absence of the explicit claims to it emphasizes the power and privilege even more.  It reflects an unstated joy at the lack of possibility of getting suspected as a criminal for merely walking to a convenience store; it reflects an unacknowledged level of pleasure in knowing that being stopped for walking while White is less likely than a visit to Newt’s moon colony; it reflects a flaunting of the power and privilege that grants Whiteness protection from armed security guards, an unwilling/reluctant criminal justice system, and a media culture more concerned with convicted Trayvon Martin than George Zimmerman.  The ability to stand up and walk away after the photo indicates the power of whiteness.

“Trayvoning” is thus akin to a history of racial cross-dressing and minstrelsy, practices that, according to Eric Lott, embodied white desire “to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line.” He writes that blackface “facilitate[s] safely an exchange of energies between two otherwise rigidly bounded and policed cultures.”   The ability to imagine and embody Trayvon in death is a source of pleasure because it not only provides whites with the opportunity to “try on” and “control” blackness but to reassert their whiteness.  Whereas Trayvon is dead, whiteness lives on.  

Much of the media discourse has likened “Trayvoning” to planking or “Tebowing,” emphasizing the phenomena as a spectacle, as yet another example of youth culture, the ease that pictures are disseminated on the Internet, or how trends come about.  Yet, while “Trayvoning” is certainly a disturbing phenomenon of spectacle, these comparisons are absurd at so many levels because neither “planking” nor “Tebowing” rely on, perpetuate, and relish in Black death; these practices don’t find recreation in the re-creation of black suffering nor do they produce souvenirs to remember the death of Trayvon Martin. 

“Trayvoning” is but another moment in a larger history of racial violence, and white efforts to establish a segregated community based on power and pleasure, commodification and deniability.  One can only hope, based on the resistance and condemnation these pictures have elicited, that those thinking about “Trayvoning” will simply skip steps 1-6 and go right to step #8: humanize death, ANY death, instead of spectacularizing it; and continue to protest racial injustice in this form…and in all its forms. 

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Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman, editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and co-author of  African Americans in Television, co-authored with David J. Leonard. (Praeger Publishing, 2009).

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.

Permanent Markers: Race & The Cultural Politics of Tattoos

Permanent Markers: Race & The Cultural Politics of Tattoos

by Lisa Guerrero and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

We’re sports fans.  We enjoy most sports, but basketball is really our true love.  And typically during this time of year love is in the air.  However, with the owners continuing to deny us our NBA (I want my, I want my NBA), we are forced to fill the void with something besides more football.  Lucky for us, we’re also what’s known in the postmodern lexicon as “foodies,” so we have been distracting our lovelorn, NBA-deprived hearts with cooking shows.  From the more competitive shows like Top Chef to the voyeuristic and instructional options on Food Network, we have found ourselves watching a lot more cooking shows than normal.   

Besides becoming formidable cooks in our own right, our increased viewing of food television programming has brought to light interesting connections between the masters of the hard wood and the masters of the hard boil.  Both are bound together by the shared creativity found in the kitchen and on the court, the competitive spirits, and the emphasis on spontaneity, but it is the prevalence of tattoos in both worlds that offers a particularly rich perspective on the popular discursive signs placed on racialized bodies, the continued absence of class in the framing of our understanding of pop culture, and the curiously linked, yet distinct place of the baller and the chef in the American consciousness of the 21^st century.   

In her 2010 storyin LA Weekly:  “Chefs with Tattoos:  A colorful rebellion against kitchen rules,” Amy Scattergood says “Cooks turn to tattoos as a preferred expression of individualism, a form of rebellion against kitchen environments that demand conformity.  For chefs, as for prisoners, soldiers, and NBA point guards, a tattoo is a mark that can be worn with the uniform.”  And interesting list of tattoo aficionados, indeed; all in various ways are linked, albeit differentially, to notions of containment and discipline.  Setting this differential aside for a moment, it is interesting to consider the sociocultural code of transgression mapped onto the very literal “markers” of tattoos.  Focusing specifically on the popular trending of tattoo art in the late-20^th century into the 21^st century, the intersecting meanings of rebellion, creativity, and individualism are framed through selective lenses depending on whois “rebelling” or asserting their “individuality,” and against or for whom.

Chefs don’t typically invoke fear in the imagination of the public at large.  Though the contemporary cliché surrounding the “chef narrative” is that they are the “new rock stars,” it is largely a romanticized version of professional chefs stoked by the ever-increasing fascination with commodified foodie culture, and is reified by a performative rebellion that isn’t linked to any substantive notions of danger (unless you count being afraid of a chef spitting in your food).  Sometrace this “bad boy” chef image to the emergence and popularity of Anthony Bourdain, whose own performative rebel persona, replete with foul mouth, cranky disposition, heavy drinking, and daredevil attitude toward food cultures, is actually elaborate window dressing for an articulate, thoughtful, passionate and skilled professional.   

But the “bad boy” chef who is rude, rule-breaking, and crass, of which Bourdain is the originator, is a much hotter commodity than the staid notion of chefs as proper, regimented, and classy.  And tattoos serve as a shorthand for this image.  When you see a sleeve of tats peeking out from the crisp chef’s jacket the popular translation is that the food is somehow more adventurous, more desirable, more creative because there’s a dash of transgression in it.  As Brendan Collins, chef-owner of Waterloo & City is quoted by Scattergood as saying:  “We’re all degenerates at heart.  If I hadn’t found cooking, I’d probably be in prison.”  But of course, he’s not.  He’s actually a classically-trained chef who, at 34, owns his own restaurant in Southern California.  A real gangster.

This brings us back to the idea of the differential relationship to containment and discipline of various tattooed populations, and the two main reasons why the commodified image of the tattooed rebel chef is problematic.  First, though it is true that many of today’s most popular and celebrated chefs have working class, hard-scrabble backgrounds, the elite training most (though not all) have, and the elite echelons they have reached professionally setting the palates of mainly monied classes, puts their tattooed markings in a very different light than those of prisoners, soldiers, and NBA point guards, just for example.  For the chefs, it becomes a little like dress-up.  Meanwhile, their rebel personas render invisible the class and labor realities of the line cooks, apprentices, and other kitchen staff who provide the central foundation for the success of the head chefs.  These behind-the-scences people, many of whom are also “marked” with tattoos, are actually positioned on the social peripheries that the head chefs play at occupying.  Paraphrasing a commenter on an online story about a reader of Food & Wine magazine being disgruntled by having to see the tattooed arms of chefs on an October 2009 cover:  if the tattoos of the head chefs are disturbing, then you definitely don’t want to see the tattoos they keep in the kitchen.  In other words, even in their imagined transgression embodied in their tattoos, the head chefs remain positioned in a privileged and respected role, unlike their support staff.

Second, not only does the larger social conception of cooking remain gendered in feminized terms (despite most of the world’s most famous and renowned chefs being male), it is also dominated by whiteness, neither of which are attached to sociocultural assumptions of threat.  That is to say that a white chef could be covered from head to toe in tattoos and never reach the discursive heights of threat and transgression that a black NBA player can reach with just one tattoo. The differential meaning emanating from ink on racially different bodies was evident from the moment players started branding themselves in ways that the corporate gatekeepers never could.

A 1997 Associated Press article explained the proliferation of tattoos in the NBA began with the following: “Tattoos always have been popular among inmates, sailors, bikers and gang members.  Now they're showing up in increasing numbers in the NBA.”  While noting that 35% of the league had tattoos (more recent reports put this number at around 75%), the article spends ample time dissecting the tattoos of Cherokee Parks and Greg Ostertag, two white players in the NBA who have “goofy” tattoos. 

Similar focus and attention has been directed at Chris Anderson’s fully covered body with a narrative that depicts him as a free-spirit, a loose cannon, or simply eccentric.  This points to the larger racial scripts operating through the spectacle of player tattoos.  In a brief 2001 article (from the Chicago Sun Times) entitled “Now NBA action is just tattoos and tantrums,” Richard Roeper elucidates the ways in which racial scripts and the signifying meaning attached to tattoos operate within both the demonization of today’s players and the celebration of players of yesteryear.

In Philadelphia, coach Larry Brown was so frustrated by his players' attitude that he took two days off. That did little to alleviate Brown's ongoing feud with scoring prodigy Allen Iverson, who has more tattoos than the average convict and is perpetually surly to fans and the media. (Iverson did nothing to help his image last year with the release of his homophobic rap album.)

The NBA is back where it was 20 years ago, before Larry Bird and Magic Johnson revitalized the game and left it to Jordan, who took it to unprecedented heights. The league has more thugs than stars, more selfish whiners than team players. 

More recently (2009), Kyle McNary lamented the ubiquity of NBA ink in “Tattoos have made NBA almost unwatchable.”  Arguing that people who get tattoos likely “lack self-esteem” and burdened by “poor decision-making skills,” McNary see the NBA’s tattoo epidemic as indicative of a larger cultural problem within the league: “Basketball, when played right, can be a thing of beauty.  But, the two-bit punk attitudes, tattoos and chest-beating has made a great sport look like a thug convention.”  The deployment of “thug” is particularly revealing given the racial connotations here, one that points to the ways in which blackness and tattoos are a troubling combination in that each confirms hegemonic stereotypes about black masculinity. 

In 2000, Allen Iverson appeared on the cover of Hoop Magazine where his tattoos and his diamond necklace were airbrushed out of sight and out of mind.   More recently, controversy erupted when Kevin Durant revealed that his back and stomach were covered in tats.  The sight of Durant, often celebrated as “one of the good ones” (in this article he is noted to be “likable” and “humble”) covered in tats brought into question his acceptance into the “good black athlete” club.  It further brought into question the continued meaning of tats within the primarily black NBA evident not only in the reaction but in the fact that all of his tattoos are concealed by his jersey. Eric Freemen reflects on the meaning of his tattoos, their placement, and the changing level of acceptance of NBA tats.  Yet, he concludes by arguing that Durant’s tats should cause little to his marketing potential and fan popularity in part because he is different.

It's tempting to say that Durant is trying to hide his tattoos to appeal to a larger market of fans, but it's possible that he just prefers to put tattoos on his torso and not his extremities. Plus, we've reached a point as basketball fans where tattoos are not an automatic sign of a thug. They're perfectly normal and a common feature of the league's most popular players. LeBron James is covered in tattoos, but any marketing issues he has are tied to his lack of a championship, not the belief that he's a gang member. That point of view is thankfully a thing of the past.

Whatever the case, Durant's tattoos prove that he's not the squeaky clean figure many people make him out to be. As I've said before, he has an edgy streak. He has a lot more in common with the rest of the NBA than many people are willing to admit.

 

It is important to understand that the NBA, as with other institutions within the United States, generates competing images of blackness.  At one end of the spectrum, we have “‘bad boy Black athletes” (Collins 2005, p. 153) who are consistently depicted as “overly physical, out of control, prone to violence, driven by instinct, and hypersexual” – they are commonly depicted as “unruly and disrespectful,” “inherently dangerous” and “in need of civilizing” (Ferber 2007, p. 20).  In other words, they are consistently imagined as thugs. At the other end of the spectrum are those players, who “are perceived as controlled by White males” (Ferber 2007, p. 20) and are thus “defined as the ‘good Blacks’” (Ferber 2007, p. 20).  Tattoos have long functioned as a mechanism of designation, a way of demarcating good versus bad, desired versus suspect, marketable versus unmarketable.  

Jemele Hill writes about the ways in which blackness overdetermines the larger meaning and implications of a tatted body:

The same goes for appearance. The Denver Nuggets' Chris "Birdman" Anderson, who is white, has so many tattoos that you can barely see his actual skin. And despite a troubled past that includes serious drug abuse, he's a fan favorite who is characterized as a free spirit. But that wasn't the way a lot of people felt about Allen Iverson, whose tattoos and diamond necklace were airbrushed out when he appeared in the NBA's publication, HOOP magazine, in 2000.

The sight of tatted black bodies, and the association to thuggery, criminality, and danger is evident here.  Here, Hill illustrates the intersection of varied meanings within tattoos depending on the attached body, with race being one element of importance.  For many, tatted black bodies signify criminality, danger, bad role models, thugs, and undesirability.  In many ways the demonization and fetishization of tattoos within the NBA points to a larger place of black bodies within American culture: as demon, as spectacle, as commodity, and as fetish.  Yet, it also points to the ways in which blackness is imagined as a polluted with the markings of a tatted black body conceived seen as a visual corrupting body to a pure NBA game.

In both the kitchen and the arena, the view of tattoos as infiltrating spaces imagined as at one time pristine and somehow honorable, is a shared myth with very different effects and different racial implications.  Today the tatted “rebels” in the culinary world typically receive buzz, accolades, and followings, while the tatted “thugs” on the court typically receive disdain, chastising, and surveillance.  It is difficult to deny that the primary difference between the two popular geographies of the chef and the baller is race, which leads us to conclude that while tattoos and race are both permanent markers, tattoos are only ever skin deep.

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Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman, editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and co-author of  African Americans in Television, co-authored with David J. Leonard. (Praeger Publishing, 2009).

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. 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.

LeBron James and the Redemptive Path to Nowhere

LeBron James and the Redemptive Path to Nowhere

by David Leonard and Bruce Lee Hazelwood | special to NewBlackMan

As Game 4 of the 2011 NBA Finals came to a close on another last second shot, Dwyane Wade and Dirk Nowitzki were praised for carrying their respective teams. The celebration of Nowitzki has been especially robust given his reported illness, a fact that has been used to celebrate his performance as heroic, as a sign of his toughness, and as evidence of his talents as a leader.

LeBron James, on the other hand, endured another bout of criticism from fans, media, and players alike. After Game 3, where LeBron had a stat line that included 17 points, 9 assists and 3 rebounds, Greg Doyle asked LeBron about his “shrinking” in the 4th quarter. Notwithstanding LeBron’s dismissal of the question,  Doyel maintained this line of criticism in his column the following day, writing:

When someone makes a movie of the fourth quarter, they can cast Rick Moranis as LeBron James and call it Honey, I Shrunk the Superstar.

That's what I'll remember about James from Game 3. His shrinkage, and how it continued a series of shrinkages. I asked him about that after Game 3. I asked him, pretty much word-for-word, how come he hasn't been playing like a superstar in the fourth quarter? What's going on with that? James played the defensive-stopper card. That's why he's out there, you know. For his defense. He's not a latter-day Michael Jordan. He's a latter-day Dudley Bradley.

Doyel proceeds to criticize James for “complaining” to referees, whining, and otherwise having a “bitter-beer face” when he doesn’t get his way on the court, only to conclude his article by highlighting an instance where James didn’t get a foul call not because there was a foul but because he isn’t a superstar: “Maybe the officials are onto something. Maybe LeBron James isn't a superstar. If the 2011 NBA Finals were the only games I had seen him play, that would be my conclusion. Doyel, especially after Game 4, is not alone in his criticism. Jordan Shultz, in “ LeBron James Shows True Colors In Game 4 Disappearance ” identifies his Game 4 struggles are not an aberration but evidence of his ineptitude and shortcomings as a player: “Wade is in essence, everything James is not. He has the will, the fire and the assassin's nature that LeBron lacks.”

This criticism is nothing new and demonstrates how LeBron James cannot win. In wins (Game 3) and losses (Game 4), he has been reduced to a failure, a punching bag for America’s sports punditry. Ever since the ill-fated “Decision,” praise for James seems to shrink every day while criticism of his game continues to overshadow his contributions to his team. In a season where perception is James is “on the road to redemption,” questions need to be asked. How can redemption be gained if he can do no right? Who is LeBron James really redeeming? And in the end, is LeBron James really trying for redemption?

Since joining the Heat, James has faced criticism at both ends of the spectrum: go for 35-12-10 and he’s hogging the ball, but go 15-9-8 and he isn’t doing enough. With Wade and Chris Bosh on the team, he either doesn’t involve the other two superstars enough or defers to them too much. He is the walking embodiment of the longstanding criticism that has always plagued black athletes living amid American racism: too selfish or unable to lead. This highlights the power of the white racial frame, one that renders black bodies as undesirable and suspect, with the impossibility of redemption. In that James will face criticism irrespective of his on-the-court performance – if he shoots the last shot and misses, he lacks the “killer instinct”/ he is selfish and should have passed the ball to Wade (this was a criticism after Game 2 where James was questioned for not deferring to Wade who had it going); if he passes the ball, he is depicted as mentally weak, scared, and otherwise unable to lead.

What is underlying much of this criticism is a false comparison to a reimagined Jordan. The nostalgia for Jordan as post-racial, as team player, as unselfish, and as God-like illustrate the impossibility of James meeting these expectations. Whereas Jordan in retirement has been reconstituted as a leader, as a fundamentally perfect player who was driven by team success and not individual accomplishment, James, as an embodiment of  Thabiti Lewis’ “baller of new school,” has no possibility of becoming the next Michael Jordan. Given the ways in which black players are scolded and demonized for ego, James, despite his unselfishness, despite his willingness to defer to Wade, pass to Chris Bosh, and set-up Mario Chalmers is unable to transcend the confined meaning of blackness. In actuality, in 2011, Michael Jordan likely couldn’t be the next Michael Jordan.

More than his “struggles” on the court, James cannot win because he cannot be Michael Jordan. And he cannot be Michael Jordan because LeBron does not fulfill a post-racial fantasy. LeBron does not embody what David Falk celebrated in Michael Jordan: “When players of color become stars they are no longer perceived as being of color. The color sort of vanishes. I don’t think people look at Michael Jordan anymore and say he’s a black superstar. They say he’s a superstar. They totally accepted him into the mainstream. Before he got there he might have been African American, but once he arrived, he had such a high level of acceptance that I think that description goes away.”

His tattoos, his decision to hire his longstanding friends to guide his career, “The Decision,”  his insertion of race into the post-Cavs discourse, his acceptance of the anti-hero role, his “What should I do?” Commercial for Nike, and even his response to Greg Doyel where he told him to “watch the film again” so he could “ask me a better question tomorrow” all contribute to a path not paved by Jordan toward racial redemption but one more travelled by many black athletes: one of derision, contempt, criticism, and scrutiny. “The irony of the connection between Willie Horton, O.J. Simpson, and Tookie Williams, and Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Allen Iverson, and Latrell Sprewell, along with most of the black NBA superstars of today is that, as easily as the first three, like so many countless criminalized black male bodies in the United States are denied social and moral redemption because of their race, their presumed inherent transgression, and the need of the American public to reify much of its racist (il)logic,” writes Lisa Guerrero from Leonard and King’s  Criminalized and Commodified. While LeBron as member of the Cavs, as a potential savior (of the NBA; of the Jordan legacy; of Cleveland) had the potential to “redeem us, to maintain our sense of ourselves as a nation that is righteous, equal, and free, and to allow us to continue dreaming the American Dream,” that potential is gone. The narrative of his “failure” redeems us; the hegemonic claims about the righteousness of others and the steps LeBron must take to be saved is a celebration of the system not him.

In terms of the second question – is this his “road to redemption”—we must be clear. LeBron James appears to be disinterested in redeeming himself – a central perquisite in the history of race in America. The parameters of his redemption have been set not by James but by the media and fans. With this in mind, it then becomes impossible for James to gain redemption in the public eye because he will never buy into the parameters set before him. LeBron James is in the continuous struggle of playing by his rules on a court/in a society where everyone but him is setting the rules of the game. Worse, yet, the rules change with each game. “If, as today’s writers lament, LeBron doesn’t want to take over the game, that should be praised, not derided,” writes  Dave Zirin . “Basketball at its best is a beautiful game: a team game. As long as LeBron keeps playing the game as it comes, he will be a champion. He doesn’t have to settle for being the next Jordan.” Irrespective of whether he takes over a game or not, James will be criticized because he can’t be “like Mike” – on the court, maybe, but in the national imagination, never!

For LeBron James, there is no need for redemption. In his eyes, he did what he wanted to do and there is no regret. He wanted to play with his friends and he ended up signing with a team allowing him to do this. While many black athletes strive to reach the summit of Jordan-like acceptance, they fail to see even what Jordan failed to see: no matter what they do or how much money or how many endorsement deals they sign or how they make their respective leagues profitable with immense cultural capital, they are still black bodies in America. James made clear last year that there is little he can do to redeem himself as Michael Jordan. In his “Rise” Nike Commercial, he asks,

What should I do?

Should I tell you I’m a championship chaser?

I did it for the money, rings?

Maybe I should just disappear

As evident in LeBron’s inability to outrun the leadership and selfish trope that defines America’s sports racial history and thus his inability to find solace on a path to redemption, there is nothing LeBron can do. His experiences demonstrate that so long as (white) fans and (white) commentators resent his talent, his choices, his attitude, his swagger, his motivations, his blackness, he is dammed. Not only cannot he not be Michael Jordan or as good as Michael Jordan (sorry Scottie Pippen) in the national imagination but he will continue to face a barrage of criticism for his every move. The black body is continuously subjected to mainstream notions of what it means to be black in a white society all while managing how and working to control those same bodies. Championships or not; 45 points or 8; 25 assists or 2, LeBron James will forever be remembered with the sentence, “Yeah, LeBron could ball, but…”

Post-script 

Despite securing a triple double in game 5, the criticisms directed at LeBron continue to mount. Described as hallow, disinterested, quiet, and otherwise ineffective, securing the 29th triple double in NBA final history did little to silence those critics who continued to focus on his leadership and play in “clutch minutes.” Treating the 4th quarter like a game of “Hot Shot,” where the points are worth double, these critics ignores LeBron’s success throughout the game in an effort to undercut his contributions all while advancing a narrative about his lack of leadership, mental toughness, and “the clutch gene.” Makes one wonder what the critics would say if he did not score, rebound or get his teammates for the first 42 minutes of the game only to amass 17-10-10 in the final 6 minutes. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic 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. 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).

Scripting King James: The LeBrons and a Discourse of Blackness

Scripting King James:
'The LeBrons' and a Discourse of Blackness
by David J. Leonard

Before the initial episode of LeBron James’ new web show – The LeBrons – begins viewers get a clear glimpse of the show’s purpose: advertizing. However, it isn’t the typical web commercial but one that has a character from the show – Biz LeBron – using the newest HP tablet from to coordinate his fashion style. The efforts to blur the line between commercials and the show itself are revealing. This would of course not be the only instance of product placement. Within this short almost seven minute web show, NIKE, whose commercial The LeBrons is the basis for the show, is visible, as are Dr. Dres’ Beat headphones, interesting given that the show is suppose to be about LeBron’s childhood.

More centrally, the show is selling LeBron, a “brand” that has certainly faced criticism in recent months. By focusing on a young man growing up in Akron, the show not only tries to reestablish his roots in Ohio, but to humanize LeBron by highlighting his background, where he came from and the trials and tribulations he faced growing up before stardom. This is made clear in the show’s catchy opening theme song :

You see the lights, the fame, you see the bling, but you should meet LeBron before he came king. Yeah, this is a story kind like then; my little homie kid growing up in Akron, trying to be an athlete. W e can all witness, hoping he can grow up right, handle business. Gotta show love to his friends and fam, world on his back, like an old man. ‘cause if you think he’s just a ball player, you got it wrong, player. For real. Life isn’t fun and games. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, LeBron James. It ain’t easy . . . .

Promising viewers a behind-the-scenes narrative of a less than glamorous childhood, The LeBrons works to reconstruct LeBron – through Kid LeBron – as a normal, average, kid working hard to live the American Dream. While imagining LeBron as 4 distinct personalities, the primary vehicle for moral lessons and engagement is Kid LeBron.

Yet, the show isn’t a crass infomercial for LeBron and his corporate sponsors. It is a commercial with a narrative and a lot of moral lessons (isn’t this true of all commercial popular culture). The initial show – “ The Lion ” – in fact begins with James asking viewers (with a nod to Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids), “Ever heard the saying two wrongs don’t make a right.” Providing pedagogical context for both the episode and the show itself, we initially meet Kid LeBron and his neighborhood friend as they ride their bikes, only to be chased by a vicious pit bull owned by Ray Johnson.



Terrorized and fearful of this blood thirty dog, the kids enlist the help from Biz LeBron. Athlete LeBron who is seen shooting baskets cannot be bothered to protect the boys because he is too focused on perfecting his game. Biz, describing the dog as a “gangsta,” a “punk” and a “thug,” leaving me to wonder if this dog represents not a Cleveland Cavaliers ticket holder as one blogger postulated, but a criminal element threatening an otherwise tranquil community. The use of racialized and racializing terms are revealing in this instance. To describe a dog as “thug” and a “gansta” plays on accepted racial language of black criminality. It reflects a process that not only contributes to “black social death” but “is characterized by the seemingly instantaneous social alienation of a delineated category of racially pathologized people” (D. Rodriguez, 2007, p. 134, from “The meaning of ‘disaster’ under the dominance of white life” in What lies beneath: Katrina, race, and the state of the nation ).

To combat the gangsta/thug threat, Biz gets a lion from the pet store to protect Kid and the other innocence within the community. Lion confronts the dog (we see the Lion in what appears to be an interrogation room), protecting the kids from future harm. Yet, Kid expresses discomfort upon learning from Wise LeBron that Lion (a natural predator) will likely kill the dog. He and his friend wonder if this is just as wrong as the dog inflicting violence on the kids in the neighborhood: “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Whether a message about gang violence, war, or a jab at Dan Gilbert (the Cavs owner who infamously publicly denounced LeBron for “taking his talents to South Beach”), it forms the crux of the moral message in the show about turning the other cheek and doing what is right irrespective of the behavior of others. Sandwiched in between advertizing, it encompasses the purported agenda behind the show: “to show youths of all ages how to be a good person.”

More subtlety, The LeBrons, with its deployment of 4 distinct identities – Wise LeBron, Kid LeBron, Biz LeBron, and Athlete LeBron – attempts to challenge the hegemonic process that reduces and flattens black identity. In introducing the show, LeBron notes “It goes back to the four characters who I feel like I am on a day-to-day basis.” It represents LeBron as encompassing multiple identities in an attempt to elucidate the diversity of blackness and challenge what constitutes an authentic black identity. Greg Tate encapsulates the context here:

Perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation. If Afro-Americans have never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon them – from chattel slaves to cinematic stereotype to sociological myth – it’s because the black collective conscious not only knew better but also knew more than enough ethnic diversity to subsume these fictions” (Quoted in R.D.G. Kelley, “Looking for the ‘real’ nigga: Social scientists construct the ghetto,” 2005, p. 119)

At a certain level, the representations available stand in dialog with a hegemonic paradigm of racial authenticity, which as argued by John L. Jackson in Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity functions as a “restrictive script” that “limit[s]” an “individual’s social options” (2005, p. 13). At another level, the narrative choice to construct LeBron as four distinct identities constitutes a certain level of fragmentation, whereupon individual identities are compartmentalized and treated in isolation. Imagining Athlete LeBron apart from Biz and Wise LeBron reifies hegemonic stereotypes about blackness by maintaining the binary between intelligence and athleticism. More importantly, it undermines his own humanity by erasing his complexity and assigning individual identities to individual bodies.

Like Nike’s commercial, the 2011 web show is hyper commercial. Like its predecessor, it gives viewers a lot to think about in terms of black identity, commodified and otherwise. “The Nike series shows the LeBrons in a characteristically “black” behavior from signifying stories, or ‘baldheaded lies’ as they’re called, at the dinner table, to macking in the mirror, to dancing to Rick James’s “Superfreak,” including the requisite performance of the robot by the older LeBron brother,” writes Lisa Guerrero from Leonard and King’s Criminalized and Commodified . “It represents LeBron as not only “hardwood maestro”; he’s also funny, entertaining, and can dance well; the unstated implication being, ‘just like all black people.’” Yet, “He remains ‘safe’ because he exists in an immovable racialized space created by the public and the market culture that manages racial panics by locating blackness in confined performative geographies like athletics and entertainment, in other words, in a world of blackness that is understandable because it is the one that exists in the national imagination.”

While challenging hegemonic ideas, LeBron, as child, as moral, as just an average kid, reifies dominant ideas about a pathological underclass as well. He is imagined as the same – like many idealized white suburban kids, he once played in the neighborhood, dreamed of a better life, and worked hard as he in spite of moral challenges to make it. Yet, he is also different from both a white normative ideal, as a fragmented, hyper-black body, and the pathological black other, represented by the pit bull.

The Lebrons thus highlights how new media technologies provide modern black athletes (among others) tools to define their own image and message, partially apart from those “restrictive script” yet bound by the dominant discourse and accepted images. In the coming episodes it will be interesting to see how the show further deals with the complexities and dialects that exist between those restrictive stereotypes and the freedom afforded by this space.

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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.