What Happened to Post-Blackness? Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

What Happened to Post-Blackness?

Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In the current issue of ESPN: The Magazine, Touré, author of the forthcoming Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, jumps into the discourse about race, Michael Vick, and his larger significance as we enter the 2011 football season.   In “What if Michael Vick were white?”, which includes the requisite and troubling picture of Vick “in whiteface” (“Touré says that picture is both inappropriate and undermines his entire premise”) Touré explores how different Vick’s life on and off the field might have been if he wasn’t black.   

While acknowledging the advantages of whiteness and the privileges that are generated because of the structures of American racism, Touré decides to focus on how a hypothetical racial transformation would change Vick’s life in other ways. “The problem with the ‘switch the subject's race to determine if it's racism’ test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone's race changes his entire existence.,” notes Touré. Among others things, he asks “Would a white kid have been introduced to dogfighting at a young age and have it become normalized?”  The answer that Touré seems to come up with is no, seemingly arguing that his participation in dog fighting results from his upbringing “in the projects of Newport News, VA” without a father (he also argues that his ability to bankroll a dogfighting enterprise came about because of his class status that resulted from his NFL career, an opportunity that came about because he like “many young black men see sports as the only way out”).

Here, Touré plays into the dominant discourse that links blackness, a culture poverty and presumably hip-hop culture to dogfighting, thereby erasing the larger history of dogfighting.   According to Evans, Gauthier and Forsyth (1998) in “Dogfighting: Symbolic expression and validation of masculinity,” dogfighting “represents a symbolic attempts at attaining and maintaining honor and status, which in the (predominantly white, male, working-class) dogfighting subculture, are equated with masculine identity.”  Although the popularity of dogfighting has increased within urban communities, particularly amongst young African Americans, over the last fifteen years it remains a sport tied to and emanating from rural white America. 

It should not be surprising that six (South Dakota; Wyoming; West Virginia; Nevada; Texas; and Montana) of the seven states with the lowest rankings from the Humane Society are states with sizable white communities (New York is the other state).  Given that dogfighting is entrenched and normalized within a myriad of communities, particularly white working-class communities within rural America, it is both factually questionable and troubling to link dogfighting to the black community.

Touré moves on from his argument about a culture of poverty in an effort blame Vick’s family structure for his involvement in dog fighting  “Here's another question: If Vick grew up with the paternal support that white kids are more likely to have (72 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers compared with 29 percent of white children), would he have been involved in dogfighting?”  Having already taken this argument apart in regards to Colin Cowherd’s recycling of the Moynihan Report, let me recycle some of my own words:

The idea that 71% of black children grow up without fathers is at one level the result of a misunderstanding of facts and at another level the mere erasure of facts.  It would seem that Mr. Cowherd is invoking the often-cited statistics that 72% of African American children were born to unwed mothers, which is significantly higher than the national average of 40 %.  Yet, this statistic is misleading and misused as part of a historically defined white racial project.   First and foremost, child born into an unmarried family is not the same is growing up without a father.  In fact, only half of African American children live in single-family homes.  Yet, this again, only tells part of the story.   The selective invoking of these statistics, while emblematic of the hegemony of heterosexist patriarchy, says very little about whether or not a child grows up with two parents involved in their lives.  According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a sizable portion of those children born to single mothers are born into families that can be defined as “marriage like.”  32% of unmarried parents are engaged in ‘visiting unions” (in a romantic relationship although living apart), with 50% of parents living together without being married.  In other words, the 72% says little about the presence of black fathers (or mothers for that matter).  Likewise, this number says very little about the levels of involvement of fathers (and mothers), but rather how because of the media, popular culture and political discourses, black fatherhood is constructed “as an oxymoron” all while black motherhood is defined as “inadequate” and “insufficient.” 

In other words, as illustrated Roberta L. Coles and Charles Green, The Myth of the Missing Black Father, “non-residence” is not the same as being absentee; it says nothing about involvement and the quality of parenting.  As such, the efforts to links the myths and stereotypes about black families to explain or speculate about Michael Vick’s past involvement (what is the statue of limitations of writing on this subject?) with dogfighting does little beyond reinforcing scapegoats and criminalizing discourses. 

The argument here that race matters in Michael Vick's life feels like a cover for rehashing old and tired theories about single mothers, culture of poverty, and hip-hop/urbanness as the root of many problems.  Of course race matters for not only Michael Vick but also everyone else residing in America.  This is America, arguments about post-racialness notwithstanding. 

Race mattered during the coverage of dogfighting and continues to matter for Vick in this very moment.   It also matters given history.  As Melissa Harris-Perry notes, race matters in relationship to Michael Vick (and the support he has received from the African American community) in part because of the larger history of white supremacist use of dogs against African Americans.

I sensed that same outrage in the responses of many black people who heard Tucker Carlson call for Vick's execution as punishment for his crimes. It was a contrast made more raw by the recent decision to give relatively light sentences to the men responsible for the death of Oscar Grant. Despite agreeing that Vick's acts were horrendous, somehow the Carlson's moral outrage seemed misplaced. It also seemed profoundly racialized. For example, Carlson did not call for the execution of BP executives despite their culpability in the devastation of Gulf wildlife. He did not denounce the Supreme Court for their decision in US v. Stevens (April 2010) which overturned a portion of the 1999 Act Punishing Depictions of Animal Cruelty. After all with this "crush" decision the Court seems to have validated a marketplace for exactly the kinds of crimes Vick was convicted of committing. For many observers, the decision to demonize Vick seems motivated by something more pernicious than concern for animal welfare. It seems to be about race.

Just as when Tucker Carlson said Vick should have been executed, or when commentators refer to him as thug, race matters; it matters in the demonization he experienced over the last 4 years.  It is evident in the debates that took place following his release from prison, especially given the lifetime punishment experienced by many African Americans (see Michelle Alexander) or the very different paths toward forgiveness available to Vick (and countless other black athletes) compared to their white counterparts.

Race and racism have impacted his life in a myriad of ways.  The continue significance of race matters in the ways in which this article plays upon and perpetuates cultural arguments that seemingly erase race, replacing it with flattened discussions of culture. The power of white privilege and the impacts of racism, segregation, and inequality are well documented, leaving me to wonder if the point of Touré’s piece is not that race matters but rather that culture matters.  And this is where we agree because culture is important here; a CULTURE of white supremacy does matter when thinking about Michael Vick or anything else for that matter.   

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Special thanks to Guthrie Ramsey, James Peterson, and Oliver Wang who all, in different ways, encouraged me to write a response. 

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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.

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.

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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.

 

Why Obama Weighed in on Behalf of Michael Vick

Why Obama Weighed in on Behalf of Michael Vick
by Ezra Klein | WashingtonPost.com

The weirdest story of the morning is President Obama's call to Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the NFL Eagles. Two things apparently happened during the call: Obama praised the team for giving Michael Vick a second chance, and then he asked some questions about the Eagles' plans to use alternative-energy sources to power the stadium. Now the White House is spinning the call as the sort of everyday inquiry the president makes into eco-friendly architecture. "The president did place a call to Mr. Lurie to discuss plans for the use of alternative energy at Lincoln Financial Field, during which they spoke about that and other issues," Bill Burton told Mike Allen.

That explanation makes a lot less sense than the one Lurie himself offered, which was that Obama is "passionate" about the fact that "it's never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.''

Patting Lurie on the back for playing Vick might give the White House communications shop some headaches, but it's also worth doing: About one in 100 Americans are currently behind bars, and more were behind bars at some other point in time. And as this Pew report (pdf) shows in grim detail, the punishment doesn't stop when convicts leave prison: "Serving time reduces hourly wages for men by approximately 11 percent, annual employment by 9 weeks and annual earnings by 40 percent." And those numbers hide a serious racial tilt: "Incarceration depresses the total earnings of white males by 2 percent, of Hispanic males by 6 percent, and of black males by 9 percent."

Then there's the downstream effects on children and families ("Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration"), and on cities with a high population of ex-convicts, and so on. As you might expect, the recession is making all this even worse.

That Obama would think it important that an NFL team made a major statement about the employability of ex-convicts makes sense. That he'd want to take a risk and throw his weight behind the decision by making that call is admirable. But for the White House to now say that the call was really about energy efficiency in stadium design both makes Obama look a bit Carteresque -- does he really have time to be worrying about the energy efficiency of football stadiums? -- and blunts whatever impact the call itself could have had. That was a call either worth making or not worth making, but it definitely wasn't worth making if the president wasn't willing to stand behind it.