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the modern athlete, hip-hop
and
POPULAR PERCEPTIONS OF
BLACK MASCULINITY
by
THABITI LEWIS
___________________
Thabiti
Lewis teaches English/Comparative Ethnic Studies and
American Studies at Washington State University Vancouver. He
is the author of several essays on African American literature
and race and sport in American culture. He is also author of
Ballers
of the New School: Race and Sports in America.
We
come from a time when rap
used to agitate the mainstream,
now it represents the mainstream.
Ice T
The
bad man motif figures prominently in black American folk culture
as a symbol of resistance to racism and white oppression. From
Stagolee to Shine this subversive figure has been part of the
cultural rituals and symbols of black American of resistance.
At the turn of 20th century these bad men were known to play
blues or jazz music and wear zoot suits. Novelist Ralph Ellison
aptly depicted such a figure in his Harlem character Rinehart
in his famous novel Invisible Man. Perhaps the most
notorious bad men in athletics were the black heavyweight boxing
champion Jack Johnson and the Negro League baseball phenomena,
Satchel Paige who insisted on playing by their own rules. In
the modern world the dark, abiding, ‘BAAD’ bad blues/jazz
presence of Johnson and Paige has been supplanted by the likes
of the 1990s Dennis Rodman and Latrell Sprewell, and Terrell
Owens, Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson, Randy Moss, of this
century. Perhaps the ‘baddest’ man of them all is
Barry Bonds, currently facing an indictment for alleged perjury.
Indeed, the image is re-conjured in the board rooms of music
executives and played out in professional sports, spawning new
and improved bad man in the world of music and sports. Unfortunately
the cool guise or cool posing central to hip-hop’s core
is seized upon and shaped by media, professional sports leagues,
and leading sports apparel companies to construct the negative
stereotype of bad black men. Sports and other popular media,
as well as the marketing companies that feed them, attribute
these qualities to narcissism, questionable values, poor sportsmanship,
as well as a propensity for crime and violence. This is how
21st century black masculinity struts across television screens
and popular culture.
The
negative image in popular music and sport has a profound influence
upon modern athletes’ self-perceptions and racisms cruel
persistence in our society. The performance of realness is reshaped
into a heavy trafficking of and literal sale of hard, dark hued
bodies that are not cerebral. The bad man motif is exploited
and sold without any explanation or recognition of either the
history of resistance to oppression that is so central to its
genesis, or the reality of the Ku Klux Klan, Timothy McVeigh
and countless other bad white men who bomb, kill, or insight
malicious expressions of racism.
Unfortunately what we do see in popular culture is the next
phase of 1980s backlash politics aimed at demonizing black males
(single black mothers too) -- and their deficiencies. What is
obscured is a history of American violence and a fascination
with gangsta. Nor is much attention paid to the role of an increasingly
violent American culture, rife with gangsters, guns, drugs,
and social and economic policies that produced many of the ills
the bad men get credit for creating. In popular sports and entertainment
black men often emerge as inherently visceral, irreverent, bad
people without a cause. The popularization of hip-hop via a
gangsta emphasis on violence, explicit sex and drug use have
blurred the unknowing eye from seeing hop-hip as the formidable
force of peace and self-expression that is its genesis.
What is also obscured in popular representations of hip-hop
and the athletes that exude its values is a clear sense of its
origins as a maligned form of urban cultural expression. Its
status as an illegal culture struggling over public space and
access to commodified materials is bastardized to sell sodas,
sneakers and tickets. Avoided is how it fits into a legacy of
the descendants of the formerly enslaved that migrated to the
North and had to deal with control of Euro Americans via segregation,
racism, discrimination, dislocation, displacement and assigned
place in society.
Everyone knows about rapping, but what is known about hip-hop’s
ideology of perpetual creativity, innovation, inspired art that
is nurtured via being lived and performed daily, or the attitude
of doing what feels natural? How much attention is paid to core
concepts and aesthetics like layering, ruptures in lyrical,
musical, visual art and dance that is predicated upon circularity
and rhythmic motion, space and social dislocation? (cf. Tricia
Rose in Black Noise). Thanks to the gangsta bad niggzas
motif, hip-hop has emerged as the top choice among teen music
consumers. It is estimated that rap music generated roughly
$3 billion in sales. But at whose or what expense has it raised
to such heights of popularity? While it is quite clear who controls
the music and image making, it’s impossible to avoid critiquing
the complicity among artists and athletes that allow these images
to breathe.
The
hard guise associated with bad men and expressed in hip-hop
culture is appropriated by popular culture, what is often lost
is that hip-hop is an expression of young peoples’ despair
and resistance. The hyper-masculine representations in hip-hop
narratives and athletes’ playing performances and personas
are also a direct response to a repressive culture; a response
to, or attempted compensation for a perceived loss of power,
potency, or manhood in the wake of the real perceived power
that controls their worlds. But this is rarely articulated.
Many modern athletes, whom I call Ballers of New School (BNS),
engage hip-hop’s ethos of doing what feels natural in
how they play, dress, talk and think. Some understand such core
elements better than others, but the symbols of resistance and
rebellion find voice in rappers’ lyrics, cool posing,
dress, break-dancing, graffiti and dejaying. However, the only
performance that consistently gains attention is that which
can be translated into exaggerated symbols of black male hyper-masculine
and violent performance as reality. In sports culture it is
manifested in celebrations on fields of play, improvised style
of play (that breaks set plays), style of dress both on and
off fields of play, and sometimes manifest itself in the literal
choking of a coach who verbally berates them or a fan who douses
them with water. All acts are about being true to the natural
self and demanding respect. But instead of contextualizing BNS
as post-Jackie Robinson “hold back and chill for the good
of your people,” what is performed in the popular sphere
is a reification of the bad man that has spiraled far out of
bounds.
WHITE MASCULINITY NEEDS BAD BLACK MEN
I see depictions of black men as bad men as essentially performances
that reinforce notions of white supremacy and masculinity. In
the wake of the disappearance of the white majority within American
professional sports -- a sign of the physical defeat of the
white male body in sports culture -- American definitions of
white masculinity are resurrected using these constructions
of black men. I view these images as falling within the history
of the late 18th and mid-20th century Europe and American celebration
of humanity and culture, ideas and values that ascribed to their
own national culture distinct from the Orient and Africa.
Although black males participate in and dominate the most visible
or high profile sports, they struggle for masculine existence
in a world that has historically viewed black males as the female
of races. What we see in the depiction of modern black male
athletes and entertainers is similar to the alleged European
universalism that positions other literatures and societies
as inferior or of transcended value. Cultural critic Edward
Said informs us in his monumental work, Culture and Imperialism,
that culture and cultural perceptions are understated, ignored,
yet essential components of sustaining any empire. The popular
music and sports perceptions of black manhood enhance notions
of imperial white masculinity. A brief examination of the recent
NBA dress code presents a similar conflict and example of sustaining
empire. Because the current crop of young stars are part of
a generation that holds its own standard of what looks good
(not suits and ties), what feels good, what plays good on the
field and what doesn’t, NBA commissioner David Stern was
forced to institute a dress code. Media, coaches and fans marveled
at how well dressed was Michael Jordan, and then they looked
at Iverson in his sweats, retro hats, jewels and other accessories,
and regarded him as inappropriately dressed and detrimental
to the image of the league, because he was projecting a gangsta
image in a society that certainly has nothing to do with gangsters.
No one cared that Iverson’s gear (clothing and accessories)
costs as much as and sometimes more than Jordan’s suit.
In fact, for the job he performs, sports gear is actually quite
appropriate attire.
I see the cultural language of history, literature, music, sports
and ethnography as equally connected to the official ideology
of empire. Those who control and project images of ‘good’
and ‘bad’ style, and are capable of asserting their
moral codes and aesthetics as the only aesthetic of merit have
an advantage in making villains. Black men in loose jeans, caps
and big jewelry are associated with bad gangsta men, while all
‘others’ or those who wear suits and ties are deemed
good. The message: the only valid moral and empirical epistemology
and procedures are those in the image of or articulated by whites.
And who decided that anyway? Basically culture conceived in
this way helps maintain the empire via what philosopher Charles
Mills terms the Racial Contract (1997), which“requires
its own peculiar moral and empirical epistemology, its nouns
and procedures for determining what counts as moral and factual
knowledge of the world”
It is imperative to consider the role of the popularization
of bad black men in the erection of white masculinity in a society
that relies so much on sports for manhood. What do these images
do for the imagination and behaviour of those who consume and
perpetuate it, as well as those who protect cultural borders?
What does the perpetuation of these images and limiting standards
of normalization reveal about the nature of American cultural
whiteness? It certainly speaks volumes about the state of race
in America.
Although
an African presence is mostly absent from discussions of how
the American body politic was shaped as well as most other aspects
of its life and culture, it has historically manifested as what
the writer Toni Morrison has termed a “carefully invented,
Africanist presence.” This presence has been imaginatively
used to connote blackness in negative if not confusing ways.
Through the simple expedient of dark, abiding, demonized ‘BAAD’
men in sports and rap music, a dark, abiding black presence
has been reified in the popular culture. The success of hip-hop
in popular culture relies on reinforcing the stereotypical images
of ‘BAAD’ men, which runs counter to hip-hop’s
complex and varied history as modern urban folk art of resistance
and free expression in confined and oppressive urban space.
These stereotypes reveal the modern American psyche that needs
negative depictions of black men. Actually bad men and bad boys
in athletics are nothing new but as hip-hop has emerged as one
of the most influential cultural influences of our time, images
of athletes as negative and confusing bad men get performed
over and over again.
To keep it real, the question that must be answered is: What
makes the white moral epistemology the empirical norm for the
world? These same mythologies invented Orients, Africas and
Americas. According to Charles Mills it was achieved using:
correspondingly fabricated population . . . inhabited by people
who never were -- Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos
-- but who attain a virtual reality through their existence
in travelers’ tales, folk myths, popular and highbrow
fiction, colonial reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema,
living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on
their alarmed real-life counterparts.
In the modern world of television, cable and Internet, images
of bad men emphasize the notions of moral, superior white masculinity.
For black men in popular culture -- especially sports -- the
white imagination spins the simple image of the Calibans, Tontos
and Sambos that are violent, savage, philistines. Indeed modern
media and the sports industry work hard to keep these negative,
inferior images alive by placing white males at the forefront,
in leadership roles such as coach or general managers of the
‘natives.’
So the division
we see in the world -- men against natives -- is perhaps more
pronounced in sports, which is a direct reflection of American
culture. The influence and growing popularity of hip-hop styles
and black culture is perceived as a direct challenge to whiteness;
if it prospers white identity will be lost. Although the racial
strife was more overt five decades ago when pioneers were making
strides in baseball, basketball and football it continues to
rear its ugly head.
The sad irony is that many companies sell sodas, candy etc.
with hip-hop badness, deliberately excluding any meaningful
cultural context, acknowledgement, history or embrace. The NBA
is a prime example of this disrespectful relationship. The NBA
bans hip-hop inspired clothing and asserts a dress code while
using hip-hop to boost its popularity among young fans by playing
rap music at games and promoting street-inspired fashion such
as throwback jerseys. In the absence of Michael Jordan's ‘classic
elegance,’ America is thriving with a hipper, edgier persona
that sports tattoos, baggy shorts, a thumping beat and a defiant
attitude. But in truth the image is simply a ghetto-centric
futility that confirms white stereotypes of African Americans
restyled in the form of sexually potent, heavily armed, gangsta
outlaw. What this does for the white imagination is to resituate
whiteness as superior in the American cultural landscape, while
confirming blackness as violent and negative.
Although in the modern world there is often resistance to discourses
on race or its constructions, race dominates American sport
culture. Contemporary representations of black masculinity suggest
as much. Race is considered a taboo subject to be foreclosed
or plagued by silence and evasion. As Toni Morrison ingeniously
points out in Playing in the Dark, “ignoring
race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal
gesture,” to which silence allows “the black body
a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.”
We are deluded if we think that the images projected in the
popular spheres of music and a hip-hop influenced sports culture
in a racialized society are merely coincidental. We have to
intelligently scrutinize how these black bodies are allowed
to participate in the dominant cultural body when black male
bodies dominate physical games that are representative of masculinity.
The political and social meanings inscribed on black male bodies
in popular culture preserve notions of cultured, mannered, white
morality that values sportsmanship and cooperative individualism.
All things black male bodies can only hope to achieve.
When
I think about this generation of athletes and entertainers I
am reminded of Robin D.G. Kelley’s discussion of the zoot
suits, or what James Baldwin called the sharpies of the 1930s
and 1940s, who were associated with jazz and resistance to the
war. They talked jive, revealed a modern black masculinity that
attempted to construct itself on its own grounds. Ralph Ellison
focused on them in his novel Invisible Man as the unmarked
African American potential unfettered by passive Christian resistance
or narrow bourgeois. In the contemporary world black bad men
are marked-up in cartoonish proportions.
In American society white masculinity has historically been
predicated upon attacking and exploiting men of colour. Sadly,
for this generation the expressive black youth culture represented
in hip-hop has (as Ice T suggested) devolved from agitating
the mainstream to representing the mainstream imagination of
a mythical bad man. However, there is a legacy of American struggle
for control of the spiritual self in urban spaces from spirituals
and work song to gospel, blues and jazz. These expressions have
always represented avenues to maintaining control of self-identity
and self-worth in urban America. The struggles of young African
Americans, particularly males, are complicated in the face of
failed post-civil rights promise of equality and progress.
There is hardly enough outrage over corporations marketing black
men in sports as selfish individuals replete with edginess,
violent toughness that can also perform high flying dunks. Oddly
what is sells best (excessive celebrations, fights and obscene
gestures to unruly fans) is used and then critiqued. This is
why Dennis Rodman was so popular. His outrageous antics earned
him millions because media embraced the stereotype of bad men
that so many have come to find comfort in. And Rodman is not
the first to understand how to play racial stereotypes all the
way to the bank. Sports culture takes these gross exaggerations
and scores racial stereotype after stereotype of angry, yelling,
belligerent men gushing with uncontrolled rage, lusting after
white women, and anarchy. The media depictions and public performances
of bad black men (like T.O. who exercised in his driveway for
members of the media in Philadelphia) are used to confirm cultural
inferiority vis-à-vis white males who rule, run, direct,
prod, inspect and determine which black male bodies are suitable
for public performance.
UNDERSTANDING THE BAD MAN
Historically bad men represented subversive resistance rooted
in African American folk songs, stories and legends of tricksters.
Bad men have always been capable of subverting hierarchical
structures via signifying, wit, persuasion, brawn, sexuality
and violence. The problem is that this tradition in popular
spheres such as entertainment and sports is packaged to negatively
misrepresent black men and black culture. African influenced
spoken word traditions and music important to the creation of
African American music (spirituals, gospel, blues and jazz)
were used by black Americans to assert some facet of control
over their urban space.
Gangsta
is clear example of how to distort folkloric transmissions of
bad men. One need only glance at its reified stereotypical,
exaggerated characterizations of black men as ‘BAAD’
men who are innately bad for the sake of being bad. Rather than
emphasize the historical impetus of bad men (like Stagolee,
Shine, and Railroad Bill), whose myths arose during antebellum
America as figures fighting back against oppressors, disdainful
of social conventions, unafraid of standing up to white authority,
violating taboos, and other acts of courage or badness in the
face of racial oppression that made him/her a folk hero, we
instead have gangsta and other distortions distract from America’s
shortcomings, its neo-slavery in post-civil rights America.
Modern bad men in sports embody commercialized images of black
males who are narcissistic, violent, visceral. The black male
sports body is constantly exploited; white men who select the
hardest ones for performance in the public sphere to be consumed
by a predominately white viewing public. The irony is that young
white males gravitate to these images, sometimes mimicking them,
while white women and men desire them. The white males in control
(apparel companies, media, owners and league officials) want
to profit from the hip-hop constructed black masculinity in
American sports culture while ignoring their cultural roots.
Neither Allen Iverson nor Randy Moss have been endorsed by Madison
Avenue -- and neither of them care.
The
truth is that black masculinity has historically been framed
in notions of Brute Negro, Stud, noble savage, Uncle Tom and
Bad Nigger. In the modern world, sports culture and music frame
black masculinity as Hustler, Militant/Bad Nigger, Super Jock,
or womanizer, lazy, flashy, greedy, violent and dumb. Consistently
ignored is how the bad man has always confronted tyranny, racism,
oppression, using his lawlessness and violence to claim victory.
The construction of contemporary black athletes and entertainers
as bad men is a delicate undertaking. Many of them are unaware
that the bad man motif is a response to oppression, as well
as the subtly guile, passive aggressive confrontation victories
of the trickster. This hip-hop driven generation seizes upon
the bad man motif as a response to the failed promises of the
civil rights movement, but the expression plays into the hands
of racists images. Meanwhile, young blacks and whites consuming
these images without protest or question retard the efforts
of previous generations.
Indeed, the depictions of modern athletes in popular culture
as hyper-masculine ‘BAAD’ men whose cock-sure sway,
realness, brashness, insistence upon reinventing themselves
via the games they play and self-presentation do not translate
into a positive public reception. Robyn Wiegman points out in
her essay, “Feminism, ‘The Boyz’ and Other
Matters Regarding the Male,” that hip hop’s hyper-masculine
façade owes a debt to the Black Power movement which
defined the politics of race within the metaphors of phallic
power.
In the rules of the ‘racial contract,’ philosopher
Charles Mills notes that many athletes carry onto fields of
play an idealized model of masculinity: exaggerated hardness,
icy cool, physical strength, the need for respect and power.
Some of it is real and some of it is performance. But what is
real is an unwillingness to appease the public, media, teams,
coaches, or fans on the terms met by a previous generation.
Sports leagues like the NBA grin and happily bear the hip-hop
generation bred modern athletes, as long as they can depict
them as immoral philistines.
American
culture’s insistence upon embracing black male distortions
of the bad man motif presents challenges that are nearly as
distorted as the film Birth of a Nation (released by
D.W. Griffith in 1915) that popularized negative stereotypes
of Black men as hyper-sexed and violent.
Even when real black masculinity rears its head in sports culture
it is cut off. Abdul Rauf (formerly Chris Jackson) was vilified
for his ‘manly act’ of refusing to stand during
the star spangled banner.
Make
no mistake about it, race is real in the world of sport, and
littered with formal and informal agreements or meta-agreements
between one subset of humans and another, giving one the class
of full person and the nonwhite a different and inferior moral
status, tantamount to a subordinate civil standing in white-ruled
polities. A Charles Mills points out in The Racial Contract,
all whites are beneficiaries of the contract not all whites
are signatories. It is our duty to examine constructions of
racial borders that have drawn dividing lines between Americans
and erase them. The general purpose of this contract is the
maintenance of the status quo that privileges whites as a group
with respect to nonwhites as a group, the former’s exploitation
of the latter’s body, land and resources, the denial of
equal socioeconomic opportunity. This is what makes real bad
men stand up and speak out against.
Ballers
of the New School: Race and Sports in America
Publisher: Third
World Press; 1 edition (Nov 30 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0883783118
ISBN-13: 978-0883783115
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