The NFL or The Hunger Games? Some Thoughts on the Death of Junior Seau

The NFL or The Hunger Games? Some Thoughts on the Death of Junior Seau

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

Last weekend I saw The Hunger Games.  When I walked into the theater, I could not have told you one thing about the film, and if not for the uber publicity, I likely would have thought it was a show on the Food Network.  While there is much to say about the film, I was left thinking about how it merely recycled the common Hollywood Gladiator trope.  Mirroring films like The Running Man and The Gladiator, The Hunger Games highlights the ways that elite members of society make sport and find pleasure out of the pain and suffering of others.  That is, they find arousal and visceral excitement in watching people battle until death.  Within such a narrative trope is always a class (and at times racial) dimension where those with power and wealth (the tenets of civilization?) enjoy the spectacle of those literally and symbolically beneath them fighting until death.  The cinematic representation of the panopticon, whether within the past or in futuristic terms, allows for commentary about the lack of civility, morals, and respect for humanity amongst the elite outside of our present reality.   As these morality tales take place in the past (and or future), they exists a commentary about our present condition, statements about how far we have evolved and/or the danger of the future. 

Yet, what about The Hunger Games in our midst?  What about the NFL, a billionaire enterprise that profits off the brutality, physical degradation, and pain of other people?  What about a sport that celebrates the spectacle of violence? Unlike The Hunger Games or Gladiator, films that depict a world where people bear witness to death, hungrily waiting the next kill, football and hockey fans sit on the edge of their seat waiting for the knock out hit, the fight, and bone crushing collision.  The game doesn’t end with death but death results from the game. Out of sight, out of mind, yet our hunger for games that kill are no different.

Junior Seau committed suicide today; he shot himself in chest.  While his death certificate will surely say “self inflicted gun shot wound,” it might as well say death by football.  He, like so many former NFL players, have fallen victim to football-induced death.  The links between suicides and concussions, between obesity and heart disease, and between drug abuse and post-NFL physical pain, are quite clear.  The NFL Games are killing men before our eyes; yes, death is not taking place on-the-field with fans screaming from the rafters or the comfort of their couches, but make no mistake about, death is knocking on every player’s door.  “Suicide, drugs, alcohol, obesity—are ailments the National Football League is getting to know all too well,” writes Dave Zirin.  To him, Seau is yet another reminder of the brutality of the NFL and the callousness to this epidemic.  He continues:

These are issues NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the various team owners are loathe to discuss, but with Seau, they won’t have a choice. In Seau, a larger than life Hall of Fame player, we have someone with friends throughout the ranks of the league and especially in the media. It will be incredibly difficult to keep this under wraps. People will want answers. Over the summer, former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson took his own life with a gunshot to the chest so his brain could be studied for the effects of concussive injuries. Junior Seau now joins him, a gunshot to the chest. There is a discussion that the NFL is going to have to have with a team of doctors, players and the public. Right now, this is not a league safe for human involvement. I have no idea how to make it safer. But I do know that the status quo is absolutely unacceptable.

Lester Spence also pushes us to think about suicide as a potential consequence of NFL/NHL careers. 

The first thing we should do is think about Wade Belak, Rick Rypien, and Derek Boogaard. They were three NHL enforcers (people who made their hockey careers through their fists rather than through their sticks), who committed suicide over the past year. Each of them had a history of concussions. Boogaard made the courageous decision to offer up his brain to science. The results suggest his suicide may have been the result of brain damage.

It is only after thinking about Belak, Rypien, and Boogaard, that we have the medical context to understand Seau. Not so much to understand why he committed suicide–if there were a simple relationship between concussions and suicides the suicide rate of former NFL/NHL players would be far higher than it is. BUT to understand how his suicide may be at least a partial function of his NFL career. 

 

It is hard not to think about the consequences of sporting violence.  It is hard to deny the implications here when NFL players commit suicide at a rate six times the national average; it is hard not to think about a rotten system when 65 percent of NFL players retire with permanent and debilitating injuries.  It is hard not to think of the NFL and NHL as a modern-day gladiator ring where our out-of-sight childhood heroes are dying because of the game, because of sport, because we cheered and celebrated brutality and violence.  It is hard not to think of the NFL as nothing more than the real-life hunger games, our version of death as sport, when we look at reports following suicide of Dave Duerson:

This intent, strongly implied by text messages Duerson sent to family members soon before his death, has injected a new degree of fear in the minds of many football players and their families, according to interviews with them Sunday. To this point, the roughly 20 N.F.L.veterans found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy — several of whom committed suicide — died unaware of the disease clawing at their brains, how the protein deposits and damaged neurons contributed to their condition.

How much data do we need; how much proof; how many suicides, how many twenty-something football stars need to die with chronic traumatic encephalopathy before we see a problem; how many ex-players need to die, only to find out that football had left their brain “consistent with that of an 85-year-old man” until we demand change?  How many more deaths before we realize that the hunger games aren’t in the future but it is are our current national pastime.  How many families need to lose a father and brother, son and husband, before we stand-up and walk away because death should never be sport.  That seems to be the message of The Hunger Games; one can only hope we can catch up to the future. 

***

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.

Death Without Sanction or Ceremony

Hank Willis Thomas

  
Death Without Sanction or Ceremony

by Minkah Makalani | special to NewBlackMan

Watching Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin fight back tears and struggle through an unimaginable range of emotions in talking about their son Trayvon Martin’s death, I recognized an expression I’ve seen only once before. It was the same look on my mother’s face nearly twenty years ago, when my brother died after being shot: empty, confused, lost. Like Trayvon’s parents, my mother had no reference for how to handle that depth of pain, for how to help her other children confront the unimaginable, while simultaneously planning a funeral and having to wrap her mind around never seeing a son she had seen nearly everyday for eighteen years.

Trayvon Martin’s killing at the hands of vigilante George Zimmerman, and my brother’s murder, are similar yet quite different. Both were teenaged black boys, and both of their killers remain free. Both were adored by their families and friends, had gregarious personalities, and their losses have left loved ones searching for answers to explain the fulsome lives cut so horribly short. And their deaths have revealed to those closest to them the fabric of a social order where the loss of black life figures less as a rupture than as an intricate weave in the pattern.

Treyvon Martin’s killer was an overzealous, self-appointed neighborhood watch captain apparently intimidated by a black body in a hoodie and in possession of processed sugar; my brother’s killer a neighborhood thug who, loosing a fight, decided killing someone would restore his twisted sense of manhood. Both killers claimed self-defense, twisting the details of their respective nights so as to tap into a reservoir of racial images where black men are perpetual threats to social order, life, and morality. That Zimmerman is a white Latino and my bother’s killer black does not detract from the similarities of their stories of fearing for their lives. Nor does it matter that as much as Trayvon Martin’s and my brother’s deaths resemble one another, they are qualitatively different. Indeed, despite the differences surrounding their deaths, that their killers drew on identical modes for devaluing black life raises the most troubling questions about the American racial imaginary.

I must admit to being somewhat troubled by the national response to Trayvon Martin’s death, specifically, how that response has hinged on the same racial ideology that guided both Zimmerman and my brother’s killer. For me, their cases raise uncomfortable questions not so much about their killers, but the measures by which a black life might, in one instance, warrant national outrage, and in another might be better left on a pile of unprosecutable cases.

I share the outrage that has prompted scores of blacks, Asians, Latinas/os, and whites to don hoodies in protest for justice and the arrest of Treyvon Martin’s killer; the Million Hoodies for Trayvon Martin in New York; students in south Florida high schools walking out of class and forming human TMs on their football fields; the Miami Heat posing for a hoodied photo, with various other NBA superstars and the NBA Players Association following suit and demanding justice for Trayvon; and the scores of other Million Hoodies protests taking place across the country. Our collective outrage grows from the frustration of knowing that Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a vigilante frustrated because someone he assumed was on drugs and up to no good would be yet another “a**hole” who would get away.

But what if Trayvon Martin had not been a “good” kid? What if he had a juvenile record? What if he had a felony assault case pending against him? What if all these were true, and he still only had Skittles and a bottle of iced tea, feared the man pursuing him, and cried out for help until he was killed? Fortunately, these counterfactuals are not the case, and we can have such a widespread discussion about racial violence, stereotypes, and their real life consequences. We can have these discussions because Trayvon’s character allows for such outrage.

But when a black life does not fit the script of the proper, respectable black who does not deserve such violence, such killings rarely spark moral outrage. Black life remains in its place outside the judicial order, stripped of all sacramental qualities. The killing of black people no longer requires, as it once did, the ceremony of the lynch mob, nor the sanction of guilt by a court of law. It has long since become routine, mundane, ubiquitous.

At the risk of a sacrilege, at issue is not whether Zimmerman was racist or hated black people. Outside the hate crime provision that would allow federal prosecution, whether he used a racial sluris largely irrelevant to the question of where and how black life fits into the structure of race in America. The claims and convoluted reasoning of Zimmerman’s father, lawyer, and friends that he is not racist, even if true, do not change the fact that Zimmerman operated within the matrices of race that deems black life a perpetual threat which only deadly force can halt. That Zimmerman was a vigilante helped bring this case into our national consciousness. But as Mark Anthony Neal explains, rather than an individual act, at issue is “the way that black males are framed in the larger culture…as being violent, criminal and threats to safety and property.”

Had George Zimmerman been an undercover or off-duty police officer, I seriously doubt the outrage would be so widespread and morally persuasive. Is this overly cynical? Perhaps. But the outcry over Sean Bell and Oscar Grant, both unarmed when they were killed by police officers who were subsequently acquitted of wrong doing (though the officer who killed Bell has been fired, a far too belated and inadequate response by the NYPD), extended little further than the cries for justice coming from black people in New York and Oakland.

The family of Ramarley Graham, the unarmed Bronx teen killed by a NYPD officer in his grandmother’s bathroom, has said that they will hold marches every Thursday until a movement mounts around their son’s murder. The family of Byron Carter, Jr., is currently suing the Austin police department for his shooting death, pointing out that he was unarmed, sitting in a car, and had committed no crime. Bell, Grant, Graham, and scores of others have all been tainted with a tinge of guilt, not because of anything they were doing or had ever done in the past, but largely because the police are always already seen as justified in using deadly force again black bodies. Any imperfection in the black body’s past merely helps complete the sovereign cipher.

Black women fare no better in this racial matrix. As we have seen recently, medical practitioners and police often neglect black women’s medical concerns and emergencies, assuming either they are engaged in illegal activity, as when Anna Browns was recently arrested in a St. Louis hospital emergency room for trespassing and died shortly thereafter in police custody, or are dismissed as mentally unstable, as when Esmin Green died on a Brooklyn hospital waiting room floor, where she was laying for over an hour before anyone even checked on her.

My brother was not, by the measures that sparked outrage over Trayvon Martin’s death, a “good” kid; put differently, by the cruel calculus that requires black people approach sainthood before garnering national sympathy, he fell short. He lacked the framing to make his murder anything more than a family tragedy — gang violence at worst, in the wrong place at the wrong time at best. And while his killer was neither a vigilante nor law officer, that same calculus and limited moral imagination operated to make his death merely another tally in a tired and statistically misguided argument about “black-on-black” crime. My brother’s killer was another young black kid. It is a story so common it is largely unremarkable as a cause for outrage, outside the black community.

When something like Trayvon Martin happens, a question I always hear, without fail, from other black people is why don’t we make the same noise when the killer is black. It is a question born of such frustration that it belies its own reality. Black people do raise their voices in protest when we kill one another, we demand justice, we march, we protest. But young black men killing other young black men is no longer compelling like in the 1980s and ‘90s, when it fit a script of broken black communities and homes, absent black fathers and endangered black men. What was rarely heard and remains little discussed (though not among black people) is that such deaths are routine because they are irregularly punished. Black men who kill other black men (or put more accurately, black people who commit violent crimes against other black people, especially domestic violence and rape) often know they have a greater a chance of escaping prosecution.

It is important to remember that the very racial elements that made Trayvon Martin’s killing tragic and cause of national outcry are the very elements that render invisible the killing of less “respectable” black men by vigilantes, police, American citizens, and other black men. The racial imaginary that prompted Geraldo Rivera to blame Trayvon’s sartorial choice of a hoodie as equally responsible for his death as Zimmerman, that prompted Sanford police to accept an armed vigilante’s claim of self-defense, that prompted St. Louis police to arrest a homeless black woman seeking medical attention, is the same logic that locates a black person killing another black person at the margins of the judicial order, prompts judges to sentence black defendants more severely when their victim is white. It is the same American racial imaginary that convinces black criminals that they are far more likely to get away with killing a black person than with killing a white person.

If Trayvon Martin’s death sparks a serious discussion about the dangers of stereotypes, hopefully that discussion considers the default settings of race in America where blackness correlates as criminal, ignoble, predator, guilty, and whiteness as noble, honorable, defender, innocent. Hopefully it goes beyond a mere concern for how stereotypes mistakenly implicate decent young black men, honor students or college graduates, professionals and dedicated family men. Hopefully we begin to challenge the view of black women’s bodies as lascivious, available, innately criminal, simultaneously diseased and impervious to pain and violence. Though I am doubtful, hopefully it brings into focus how those stereotypes, how the structures of racial oppression sanctions the death of black kids with juvenile records, who have poor grades, who buck authority, who are angry because of their life circumstances, who are too easily reasoned away as deserving death. I’m too cynical to believe it will happen in my lifetime, but I hope there emerges a world moral imagination equally as outraged at the racial structures of feeling that would sanction my brother’s death as Trayvon Martin’s, that would be equally moved by my mother’s tears as by the Sybrina Fulton’s outrage, conviction, courage, and compassion.

***

Minkah Makalani is a historian and assistant professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (University of North Carolina Press) and co-editor (with Davarian Baldwin) of the forthcoming Escape from New York!: The New Negro Movement Re-considered (University of Minnesota Press)

What to Make of the Hazing Crisis at HBCUs

Professor James Braxton Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University  speaks with Dr. Boyce Watkins and political analyst Yvette Carnell about the hazing situation with the band at Florida A&M University after the death of Robert Champion.

Coming Home: On Returning to A Parent’s Final Place of Rest

Coming Home: On Returning to A Parent’s Final Place of Rest

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

In my mind home had always been that place where my parents resided.  This is not to say that I don’t have a home that I share with a wife and two daughters, but that the very idea of going home—to some mythical, long past moment—was always concretely related to the place where my parents resided.  I can’t say that my home as a child was particularly warm; more functional than anything, and that is not to say that I didn’t know that I was loved, since I was indeed Arthur and Elsie’s baby-boy and only child.  My father’s matter-of-fact way of going to work, six days a week, without comment or complaint (and in the shadow of my mother’s out-sized personality) continues to color my workman-like approach to everything from writing, to cooking Sunday morning breakfast (as he did), parenting and marriage. 

The sensibility that my father bequeathed to me, his son, may have been his greatest gift in the months immediately after his death.  He died in his sleep one February night, with his 73^rd birthday a few months on the horizon, as matter-of-factly as he lived, with little fuss.  In the spirit of my mother and father’s ying and yang, meant that I was left with ying, unhinged by the death of her mother and husband a month apart that winter.   And unhinged is how I might have described my own state in those months following my father’s death, my untreated hypertension out-of-control, closing out what had been nearly three-years of sleeplessness, in which I slept no more than four hours of sleep a night. 

The closeted demons in my head that I kept at bay, by staying awake as often as physically possible—and by always punching the keys—were loosed sometime in the spring after my father’s death, when the reality hit, that my mother could not take care of herself anymore; the demons have not returned to their closets. Even when I slept, I cried, lamenting my inability to care for my own mother, putting her in a nursing home, with the faint voices of elders suggesting that Black folk don’t do that.  It was all that I could do to keep my sanity.

My penance would be having to destroy my home—the Bronx apartment that my parents shared for the final thirty-two years of their marriage and that my mother barely survived five months in without her husband.   That home had become the site of a few bad memories, baby-boy spreading his wings in a career and life, that nobody in that little project apartment could have imagined when the three of us moved there in the spring of 1976, from our tenement building in the South Bronx that happened to also house a yet unknown Hip-Hop feminist.   I suspect that my mother expected that I would always have a presence in that apartment, she wanted to keep me as close to her, with the same force, that she fled her own mother’s home, at age sixteen, leaving Baltimore and settling in New York City, returning occasionally for short family trips, almost always without my father who was, of course, working. 

When I chose to fly or flee, my mother laid the blame initially at the feet of the woman who would marry her son and finally at the feet of that son and his ambition, an ambition that she indeed cultivated, not quite knowing it would reproduce in me (and later her grand-daughters) the very independence that kept her and her own mother at arms length until that last phone-call, literally on the eve of my grand-mother’s passing.  I have also come to understand that the dementia that would ravage my mother’s mind like wildfires in August, might have already been at play; I was too ambitious to notice.

And so in the spring of 2009, thirty-three years after I first walked into that Bronx apartment, it became my punishment to throw away the life that my parents had built for a son (and perhaps his family), who had little interest in coming home.  It was a sad joke to hear the unknowing and the never knowing, ask if I was gonna hold an estate sale, not quite understanding that my parents stuff—piles and piles of shit really—were the kinds  things that no one wanted, even their son.  Even the stacks of vinyl records that were once the greatest bond between a father and a son, had given way to new technologies. My father was never gonna listen to those Mighty Clouds of Joy albums that I had digitized two years earlier.  Piece by piece, over several months, and with a little help from my wife and a best-friend, whose friendship was even older than the time my parents spent in that apartment, I gutted that apartment; gutted my home.

I periodically dream that I am back in that apartment, aged 16, my wings about to take flight, windows wide open and both my parents are there with me, and Isaac Hayes’s Black Moses in playing in the background.  There are also dreams of some breezy future that will never happen, where we are all wearing white, their grand-daughters bringing them scones and real cream for their coffee, sitting in a house that looks quite like the one I live in now.

Truth is, when my mother finally went home in the summer of 2009, I matter-of-factly marked the occasion, as my father might have, had he been as ambitious as me.  My blood pressure dropped twenty points the day after. I had been mourning the woman that had been my mother since my father’s death; the last time she remotely resembled that woman.  Fittingly, my mother died and was buried in Baltimore, the very place she fled from  as a teen-ager exactly fifty-years earlier, only to be buried next to the woman she had fled from in the first place, along with my father’s remains.  I had stopped calling New York—The Bronx—my home, I had no home, and no parents to return to, something the younger, more ambitious version of myself could have never fathomed.

On a recent October morning, I returned to that cemetery for the first time since my mother was lowered into the earth.   Though my trip to Baltimore had been planned months in advance and I had already made arrangements to spend some time with one of my aunts, the thought of visiting my parents’ gravesite  never once crossed my mind. Yet as I drove into the city from the airport, I could hear my parents calling to me; they wanted me to visit.  As if choreographed in advance, I spent several minutes trudging in the wet grass, searching for their stone markers.  It was only as I complained out-loud that it was typical of them to put me through such changes—I was checking my watch for a presentation that I would never make—that I stumbled over their marker. 

It was a matter-of-fact reunion—reinforced by the auntie, who later in the car asked me more than a few times if I was okay—as I told them how proud they would be of their grand-daughters, both of whom possess their grandmother’s spirit, to my daily dismay.  I thanked them, for imagining a future for their baby-boy, that none of us could have ever expected, but that they had indeed planned for, not with money, but rather matter-of-factly.  I cleared their stones of cut grass and that of my grandmother, and was back in the car minutes later;  back to my ambition.