Review of 'The Passion of Tiger Woods'

A Review of  The Passion of Tiger Woods:

An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal by Orin Starn

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

For some golf is a game; for others it is leisure.  Golf, at its core, is about mastery; it’s about fantasy; it’s about fulfillment of the possibility of greatness.  It is about that hole-in-one at the local public course or the bullet drive that covered 300+ yards.  Golf provides the fulfillment of a myriad of “fantasies.” With his new book, The Passion of Tiger Woods, Orin Starn leads on a journey not to Pebble Beach or the courses of Hawaii, not into these fantasies playgrounds, but into the treacherous world and real-life drama that he describes as “Tigergate.” 

Starn starts his discussion with a foray into the sociology of golf, highlighting the emotional appeal of the game.  Describing golf as the “last chance to do “childish things” and as a cheap replacement for masculine yearning for outdoor adventures, Starn locates golf’s appeal within the mental stimulation and imagination afforded by golf’s immense challenges.  It’s appeal rests not with improved cardiovascular health, the camaraderie of pickup basketball or soccer, or even tradition (fathers and sons bonding), but with the mental stimulation; it appeal rests with its similarity to a video game rather than basketball or soccer.  “The game’s most elementary lure ... is that flush of satisfaction and even inner delight that comes from a good shot.”  The popularity of the game that Mark Twain once described as a “good walk spoiled” rests with the prospect of making “a twisting twenty-five foot put curving into the hole; a cleaver escape from under the tree.” While “none of us will ever know the ecstasy of running as fast as Usain Bolt or cutting through the water like Michael Phelps,” every once in a while, “even a rotten golfer will hit a shot as magnificent as if it had been hit by Tiger Woods” (15).

It is no wonder that golf is one of the most popular games despites its cost.  While not at the levels of baseball, football, or even NASCAR and basketball, golf is tremendously popular as a spectator sport and a leisure activity.   With over “17,000 golf courses, covering an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined” (XV), golf may not be America’s national pastime it might America’s most prominent and important hobby.  Golf is a national obsession, at least within certain (white; male; middle and upper-class) segments of the American populace. 

This analysis isn’t simply an interesting examination of golfing cultures but one that provides an important backdrop for understanding the rise and fall of Tiger Woods.  The popularity of golf, its cultural meaning, the ascendance of celebrity culture, and the increased power of new media all contributed to his ultimate tumble before the nation. 

Starn identifies the media spectacle surrounding Woods as evidence of the hegemony of the scandal industrial complex.  “Now scandal has become a multibillion dollar industry.  Talk shows and trash television, glossy magazines, supermarket tabloids, and gossip blogs power this vast and viral entertainment complex” (45).  Identifying “Tigergate” as the perfect storm, Starn argues that the media obsession and sensationalism embodied in the “celebritaization” of modern athletes.  Yet, his discussion goes beyond the missed placed priorities of today’s tabloid media circus to highlight Tiger Woods’ specific place within the American landscape.

Like the allure of the game itself, the rise and fall of Tiger Woods is equally about fantasy, about lost hope in a symbol of a post-racial America.  The passion for Tiger Woods and the anger resulting from his martial disrepair reflects the fantasies surrounding America’s most prominent multiracial citizen.  “Woods, America’s multicultural son, is a seductive element in a national image archive figured on the paradoxical claims about the nation,” writes C.L. Cole and David Andrews.  “While African American basketball players are regularly charged with violating national core values, Woods has become revered for his cultural heritage and cultural literacy” (p. 37).  As America’s multicultural son, as America’s symbol of racial progress and post-raciality, his indiscretions and the subsequent reactions not only put in question the declining significance of race, but the interest, anger, and fallout highlights how Woods did not simply betray his wife but the agreed upon narrative surrounding Woods, American exceptionalism, and the march toward racial progress. 

Highlighting the general sentiment amongst online commentators, and that emanating from the media in general, which consistently imagined Woods as one of “the last of the good ones,” as different from contemporary (black) athletes, Starn concludes that the emotional nature of the discourse highlights Woods’ meaning within the national landscape.

Many Internet posters seemed most disturbed by the hypocrisy of what they perceived to have been Tiger’s selling of a false imagine.  Tarquinis1 compared Woods to an infamous Ponzi schemer: “He’s professionally marketed himself to a worldwide audience as much more than a talented athlete but as a descent man, a family man who loved his wife and children . . . . Just how is this fundamentally different from Bernie Maddof?  Professionally marketed frauds, for the sake of a literal ocean of financial reward . . . . Many of Tiger’s former fans believed he had fallen altogether rom the pantheon.  They saw the golfer now as a “sexual psycho,” “uber cad,” or as in one’s poster thesaurus of invective, “arrogant, spoiled, bad tempered, childish, immature, foul-mouthed, whiny, disloyal, condescending, infantile, repugnant, loathsome, abominable, detestable, offensive, despicable, abhorrent, and damnable” (61).

While potentially an outlier in its anger and its verbosity, Starn makes the case that these posts, and the online discourse general, are not only a mirror into larger societal sentiments, but is in fact a better gauge.  He concludes that “racial anxiety and distrust often find most direct expressions in the surreptitious, off-stage arenas of our private thoughts … or most accessible to the anthropologist, an anonymous post on some blog, comment board, or chat room.”  (86-87).

Starn, thus, concludes that the fall of Tiger Woods and the nature of the demonization he experienced reflects the waning appeal of his narrative – the fantasy of Woods could no longer deliver.   “The amazing success of this young brown-skinned man in a formerly white sports seemed to support the familiar Fox News, Rush-Limbaugh-style view that the only real impediments to black advancement are black laziness, broken families, or … inferior genes.”  Starn sees the fallout as resulting from anger at this lost narrative: “When white fans cheered for Tiger, it sometimes felt as if they were also congratulating themselves demonstrating their own enlightened racial good will be embracing a golfer of color” (p. 73).  Tiger took this away, leading to ample anger and bitterness, highlighting that he did not just cheat on his partner but he cheated on his fans and the narrative surrounding his ascendance into the national fabric.

Tigergate also revealed longstanding anxiety over black male sexuality, opposition to black-white sexual relations, and the hegemony of racial stereotypes.  It was not just sexual infidelity from an uber sports star in an era of tabloid journal and online spectacles, but all of those things from a black male engaged in sex with white women.  From photoshopped pictures of Tiger with Snoop as dueling pimps to jokes about Tiger’s penis, Tigergate was fueled by and gave life to longstanding ideologies surrounding black male sexuality.  “Tiger’s fall from grace – in particular, the expiration of his exemption from racist hated and stereotyping” was crystal clear with ubiquitous focus on his penis and his sexual prowess.  “Tiger was cut down to a single body part by this coarse modern variant of the primordial racist trope of black savagery: the big black phallus” (p. 91).

The power of Starn’s narrative rests with its ability to explain Tiger’s cultural power (as greatest golfer and as participant in most notorious celebrity scandal) for golf fans and nonfans alike.  I don’t really like golf; I like Tiger. I would agree with George Carlin, who once described golf as less appealing than “watching flies fuck.”  They might as well rename the PGA (Professional Golfer’s Association) the TGW – Tiger’s Golf World. Despite his recent difficulties on and off the course, my relationship with golf begins and ends with Tiger Woods.  For me, my interest in golf and my love for Tiger has only increased since Tigergate.  He has faced endless criticism shaping my hope that he will soon be able proverbial middle finger to his haters.  It isn’t about redemption but rather seeing media critics, and bitter fans choke on their wars.  With each victory, with each brilliant chip shot and putt and with each step closer to history, Tiger is finding his way to silence the haters,

Golf is not simply a game; Tiger Woods is not simply a golfer; Tigergate was not simply a scandal.  Orin Starn makes this clear highlight the many ways that golf, Woods, and Tigergate offer a mirror into larger social, cultural and racial realities.  So next time you find yourself rooting for or against Tiger, or cracking joke about Eldridge Woods, remember, it is never just a game or joke.   Without basketball, my summer sports TV watching often centers around golf.  More precisely, without the NBA, I find myself watching Tiger Woods.  When he is competing, I watch golf; when he is atop the leaderboard, Tiger Woods changes my schedule in part because golf is never just a game.

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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.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press.

No Victory, No Redemption: The Continued Demonization of Tiger Woods

(Photo: Reuters / Brian Snyder)

No Victory, No Redemption: The Demonization of Tiger Woods

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

The national media experienced a major buzz kill last weekend.  Prepared to launch the “Tiger Woods redemption” tour – part celebration of his ability to persevere and make it back and bigger part jubilation for the willingness of the American public to accept Tiger back in good graces – the media found itself with Bubbha instead of Tiger.  Having won a tournament a few weeks back, his first in three years, Woods was on the precipice of receiving national absolution, through stories of redemption and forgiveness. Unfortunately for the media salivating at the prospect of celebrating itself and an exceptional American populace that can look beyond Woods’ “transgression,” Woods failed to deliver, finishing in a distant 40^th place. 

The efforts to link redemption to victory is telling in itself as it illustrates how winning and athletic success determines the narrative and value placed upon Tiger Woods within the public discourse.  When winning, he was “America’s multicultural son,” yet his fall from the leader board, even more than his infidelity and personal difficulties, is the source of both the criticism and the calls for him to redeem himself before the alter of the American public.

Worse yet, in the eyes of the media, he has continued to act not like “gentlemen.”  Calling his performance “embarrassing” and his club kicking unacceptable because of what has happened over the last three years, Michael C. Jones describes his 2012 Masters in the following way:

Woods needs to clean up his act, and he's smart enough to know that he needs to do so for more than just his public image. He's being scorned for his attitude throughout the debacle at Augusta National and rightly so. As an ambassador of the game, he's showing mental weakness that is a far cry from the signature psychological edge the old Tiger used to display during each one of his 14 major victories.

His mind is in a wandering state, and he's gotten away from having fun on the golf course. He needs to get back to that for the sake of his game. Beyond just the club-kicking, Woods' demonstrative displays of bitter anger at one of the most sacred venues in golf's history show that he has no control and no regard for the way he carries himself. If he truly means what he said in his famous apology in February 2010, then he will act accordingly and at the very least refrain from making a complete fool of himself.

The constant references to his marital situation and the club kicking is revealing because it reflects an overall subtext that imagines the world of golf as a place defined by whiteness and its upper-class identity, as a space of proper decorum, desired values, and gentlemen disposition.  “Golf has always placed a special premium on honor and good sportsmanship,” writes Orin Starn in his newly published The Passion of Tiger Woods. “You’re supposed to maintain a respectful, church-like silence every time your playing partner is about to hit a shot.” (p. 46). Reflecting the history of race, class, and notions of civilization, the culture of golf oversees its operations on and off the links.  Similarly, David Whitley, noting the ample public shaming directed at Woods in recent years, describes Woods as a 5-year who needs public scolding as part of his redemption process. 

Evident here, Tiger has failed to uphold these values; evident in his infidelity and his kicking a club, Tiger once thought to be the future of golf has betrayed this possibility.  Yet, in reading this column and others, all would be forgiven if he just won, revealing what values matter most within America’s victory culture.

What becomes clear in reading the media narrative is as follows: (1) Tiger is immature; (2) Tiger is a bad person; and (3) without success on the course, he has little appeal.  His redemption starts and ends with titles, particularly Majors.  This point was sadly illustrated in a troubling and surprising column from Robert Lipsyte, whose relationship with the likes of Dick Gregory and Muhammad Ali leaves me baffled by his piece about Woods. Entitled “The Lost Boys” (reference to Lost Boys of Sudan?), Lipsyte laments Woods’ fall from grace, linking his career to that of Tyson and Simpson:

When Tiger crashed his car in 2009 and the turgid details of his psycho sex life emerged,  I had the same thought I had in 1997 when Mike, after three years in jail for rape, bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear while losing a title fight: This is how you declare emotional bankruptcy when you’ve been conditioned to never quit, when blowing up your world is the only way out.

Maybe O.J.’s blundering kidnapping and armed robbery caper in 2007 was also a psychic suicide. It seemed too silly to be judged seriously, so I figured he was sentenced for being acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in 1995. I had been ridiculed for my theory then that O.J. was protecting the real killer, his son, knowing he could beat the rap while the kid couldn’t. I’m delighted that the theory has reappeared in a new book. O.J. is 64 and in prison until at least 2017.

Offering a less than optimistic view of his future inside and outside of golf, Lipsyte offered the following conclusion:

None of the Lost Boys was able to craft his own character, to be his own man. Cus created his son to whip the world but not to find and hold his place in it. O.J. had too many fathers – coaches, producers, directors – and he spent his life trying to please them. By the closing rounds of the Masters, it began to seem possible that Tiger was ready to hole out and join them.

America’s celebration of sports as a vehicle for the American Dream is on full display.  Linking Woods to Simpson and Tyson, Lipsyte celebrates the beauty of athletes, particularly those of color, pulling themselves to reach greatness, financial success, and cultural primacy.  Yet, each has “wasted” an opportunity for themselves, and for the nation.  Here, and elsewhere Woods faces criticism because his personal failures has set back America’s post-racial project.  According to Starn:

The amazing success of this young brown-skinned man in a formerly white sport seemed to support the familiar Fox News, Rush Limbaugh-style view that the only real impediments to black advancement are black laziness, broken families, or as a more explicitly racist view has it, inferior genes – in other words, that the blame for inner-city violence and persisting poverty lies with blacks alone.  When white golf fans cheered for Tiger, it sometimes felt as if they were also congratulating themselves, demonstrates their own enlightened racial good will by embracing a golfer of color.  By this way of thinking, those roars for Tiger provided yet more proof that Martin Luther King Jr.’s great dream of a color-blind society was close to realization, it not already realized, at last (p. 73).

Tiger’s failure to be a “good role model,” to continue to dominate the golfing world, and to now fulfill the promise of redemption impairs the ability of fans and the media to cheer for Tiger . .. err America’s post-racial utopia. 

We also see the efforts to link Tiger’s failures on the course to his failures as a husband.  His betrayal of history, the American Dream, and King’s Dream rests with his unchecked libido and temper, pathologizing his limited success over the last three years. Seemingly ignoring his physical ailments over the last three years, the nature of golf, and the difficult benchmarks he set for himself, the discourse has continually framed his struggles on the course in relationship to the volatility of his life.  Whether referencing the importance of fathers as source of discipline (prominent with Lipsyte piece) or otherwise depicting Woods as “out-of-control,” the media has used his struggles on the course to blame him for his own demise.  This leads me back to Lipsyte piece.

In linking Woods to Simpson and Tyson, we see the power and resonance in the criminalization of black bodies, particularly those seen as undisciplined and disruptive.  While Simpson sits in jail and remains guilty of murder in the minds of many, and while Tyson spent three years in prison for rape and has had countless interactions with the criminal justice system, Woods has had no such experience.  His only major public transgression (swearing and kicking a club is not a transgression) has been his infidelity, leaving me to wonder if Tiger is not either the next Rick Pitino and Elliot Spitzer, both of who have moved beyond their past sexual indiscretions or maybe he will be Brett Favre, Anthony Weiner or Mark Sanford. 

The efforts to compare Woods to other “criminals” to people who have been under the control of the criminal justice system is telling in that his body is always overdetermined by his criminalized blackness.  The antipathy and criticism he has faced reflects the unfettered desire to see Woods as a transracial figure, an illusion evident by the ubiquity of his racialized and criminalized body.  In other words, he is black because he hasn’t fulfilled his bargain of creating a colorblind America, yet another reminder that it is the media and not Woods that continues to hurl shots out of bounds.       

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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.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

Left of Black S2:E21| The Race-ing and Un-Race-ing of Tiger Woods and Contemporary Black Poetry with Orin Starn, Thabiti Lewis and Darrell Stover

Left of Black S2:E21 | February 27, 2012

The Race-ing and Un-Race-ing of Tiger Woods and Contemporary Black Poetry

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in-studio by Duke University Professor Orin Starn and via Skype© by Professor Thabiti Lewis (Washington State, Vancouver). Authors of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal (Duke University Press) and Ballers of the New School: Essays on Racism and Sports in America (Third World Press), respectively, Starn and Lewis analyze how Tiger Woods has differed from many other Black male athletes in terms of how he is un-racialized and re-racialized at various moments.  Later the scholars discuss the meaning of Woods’ identification as Cablinasian.  

Later, Neal is joined also in-studio by poet Darrell Stover who currently a program director at the North Carolina Humanities Council, a position her formerly held at the St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation| Hayti Heritage Center.  Author of  the new collection of poetry Somewhere Deep Down When, Stover considers how history has shaped the meaning of being a poet, shares his poetic influences, and discusses the importance of reaching out to the larger  community through poetry.  Stover and Neal talk about Amiri Baraka’s immersion in multiple art forms, and discuss the legacy of Gil Scott Heron.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U

Book Trailer: The Passion of Tiger Woods

Duke University Professor Orin Starn casts his anthropological eye on two topics most academics wouldn't touch: celebrity scandal and golf.

By dissecting the social, economic and political strands of "Tigergate," Starn's book The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal gets at the heart of American culture in the 21st Century.

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“Orin Starn’s excellent examination of Tiger Woods offers deep insight, original thinking, and valuable new perspectives. This book tells us a lot about Tiger, but even more about ourselves.”—Jaime Diaz, senior writer, Golf Digest

“The next time someone asks me about anthropology’s value to contemporary cultural debates, I’ll just tell them to read Orin Starn’s The Passion of Tiger Woods, a funny, engaging, readable and unapologetically anthropological take on celebrity scandal, popular culture, and American sports. From playful musings on a potentially recessive ‘golf gene’ to critiques of (wildly popular!) speculative genetic theories about black athleticism, Starn takes us on an entertaining ride through the history of a sport, the rise of its current superstar, and the media maelstrom of racial and sexual imagery that followed from a relatively minor car crash in Florida one fateful Thanksgiving night. I’m one of those people who was tired of hearing about Tigergate almost as soon as the story broke, but Starn does a convincing job of showing me why I should have been listening and watching even more closely.”—John L. Jackson Jr., author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

“I Am…”: Troy Davis, Fred Hampton and the Black Freedom Movement

“I Am…”: Troy Davis, Fred Hampton and the Black Freedom Movement

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

The State has acted in the case of Troy Anthony Davis and in many ways that was never in doubt; it acted as it has always acted.  What was never really clear, is whether we all had the resolve to respond.  The more than half-million signatures that were generated on behalf of Davis (largely via social media), the re-engagement of the NAACP under the leadership of Ben Jealous, and the stellar on-the-ground coverage of the State murder of Davis by Amy Goodman and Democracy Now are just a few examples that we still do have the capacity to build, organize and resist.  That we need to sustain these efforts on behalf of social justice goes without saying.

I was most struck though, by the many images of signs, tee-shirts and Facebook pages that declared “I Am Troy Davis”—images that circulated within logics particular to this moment of social media and the market forces that frame so much of our visual culture and our political activities.  Anybody could imagine themselves as a political progressive if they simply wore a t-shirt.   Yet, instead the invocation of “I Am Troy Davis” took me back to another historical era of mass political resistance.

Black Panther member Fred Hampton was murdered by the State, at roughly the same age as Troy Davis, when the latter was initially arrested for the murder of  police officer Mark MacPhail.  Unlike Davis, who was arguably tried in front of a jury of his peers, Hampton was gunned down by the Chicago Police Department in concert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover) in the early morning hours in what poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti has called a “one-sided shootout.”  Hampton’s crime was, ultimately, being one of the youngest and most effective organizers within the Black Freedom Movement of the late 1960s. 

The attack on Hampton, which included the use of a Black FBI informant, was intended to highlight the so-called violent nature of the Black Panther Party and was firmly in line with the FBI’s preference to remove effective local leadership, before they ascended to the national stage.  The plan backfired when the house that Hampton and comrade Mark Clark were murdered in was left open for public viewing, allowing for independent forensic experts to discover that  the vast majority of the gunfire came from the police officers; the party members in the house fired one bullet in self defense.

Though Hampton’s story was long known among Chicago residents and veterans of the Black Freedom Movement, a new generation became aware with the broadcast of the ground-breaking documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985.  The episode “A Nation of Law, 1968-1971” specifically examines the acts of repression visited upon the Black Freedom Movement by the State, including the murder of Hampton and the put down of the Attica prison revolt. 

One of the episode’s respondents, Father George Clements, had been named the first Black priest at Chicago’s Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago in June of 1969, six months before Hampton’s murder.  In the episode Clements recalls a mass he held in response to Hampton’s killing:

“in the midst of this mass, I was trying to explain to our children, we had all the school children there, all 1,300, and I was trying to explain to them the importance of Fred. And I wasn't getting through, at least I felt like I wasn't getting through. And in the midst of my explanation, I just burst into tears. And the next thing I knew was here was one of our 8th grade boys. He jumped up and he said, "I am Fred Hampton." And then a girl in the 6th grade, she jumps up and says, "I am Fred Hampton." Another kid in first grade, "I'm Fred Hampton." And before you knew it, the whole church, kids were all shouting, "I am Fred Hampton."

Father Clements’ recollection speaks to the power of the very idea of a Fred Hampton, as the late political leader was very much a prototype for the next generation of Black political leadership in the 1970s and the very reason he had to be destroyed.  By the time Hampton’s story is told via Eyes on the Prize, the Black Freedom Movement as it existed at the end of Hampton’s life had been largely—and effectively—neutralized by the very State forces responsible for his death, more formally known as the FBI’s covert counter intelligence program or COINTELPRO.

The value of consciousness raising by hip-hop artists in the 1980s, notably Black Power child, Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), was that the very practices of sampling that allowed hip-hop to mine the sonic history of American music was also used to piece together a history of Black radicalism and resistance; a generation of American youth were introduced to figures like Joanne Chesimard—Assata Shakur—and Malcolm X. 

It was this element of hip-hop that filmmaker Spike Lee increasingly made use of in his own films, and as such, Lee drew reference to Clements’ story about Fred Hampton in the closing montage of his film Malcolm X.   In scenes shot in South Africa and Harlem, NY, Lee captured young students, encouraged by the actress Mary Alice and a just released Nelson Mandela, standing from their seats shouting “I Am Malcolm X.”  It was a brilliant piece of cinematic layering that allowed for a recognition of a broader reality of Black loss and trauma.

Unfortunately in the hands of Madison Avenue advertisers, Lee’s spark of creativity was little more than a gimmick, that they later deployed in the name of a “Cablinasian” professional golfer, who had no more interest in the history of Black radicalism than he did embracing the post-racial project, even as he become the defining symbol (before our current President) for that project within a neo-liberal meritocracy.   The subsequent “I am Tiger Woods” campaign which Nike ran in the aftermath of Woods’ historic win at the Master’s Tournament in 1997, effectively silenced the voices of those girls  and boys who stood up in Holy Angels Catholic Church chanting Fred Hampton’s name, and the legacy of the movement that their voices embodied.

And yet in September of 2011, Fred Hampton is again recalled, this time in another symbol of the State’s will towards violence.  Most heartening were images of Davis’ nephew De’Jaun Correia, a reminder that the State murder of Troy Davis can serve as his generation’s River Jordan, a possibility that was also reflected in the photoof Howard University students, mouths taped in silent protest, effectively mocking the first Black President for his own silence on the matter of Troy Davis.  May a generation be renewed in the aftermath of Davis’ death.

Duke Anthropologist Orin Starn: 'The Passion of Tiger Woods: Sex, Scandal, and Racial Politics in 21st Century America'

Wednesday at the Center guest Orin Starn speaks about the press coverage of Tiger Woods' scandal and about Victor Turner's 'social drama' in relation to the scandal. Orin Starn is Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History at Duke University.

His most recent book is the award-winning "Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last 'Wild' Indian," a chronicle of the life and legend of this last survivor of California's Yahi tribe. In 2005, he won Duke's highest undergraduate teaching award and was awarded the Sally Dalton Robinson Professorship in Cultural Anthropology. Starn has served as the Director of Duke's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Duke Human Rights Centers, and chaired the Editorial Advisory Board of Duke University Press.

'The Passion of Tiger Woods: Sex, Scandal, and Racial Politics in 21st Century America' was presented by the Franklin Humanities Institute in conjunction with the Department of Cultural Anthropology, the FHI Working Group on Sport, the Department of African & African American Studies, and the Center for African and African American Research. Wednesdays at the Center is a Duke University event.