The Black Athlete as "Racial Project": A Conversation on Race, Politics, and Sports with Ben Carrington

From Jack Johnson to Muhammed Ali, from Tommie Smith to Colin Kaepernick, Black athletes have played a huge role in the social and cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries.  Ben Carrington, sociologist at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, joins Then & Now to discuss the "racial project" of the Black Athlete.  He observes how Black athletes have been fetishized, commodified, controlled, and celebrated, sometimes all at once. He compares the long history of this project to the present moment, when Black athletes, both at the professional and collegiate levels, are gaining greater agency over their lives and careers.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Then and Now, brought to you by the UCLA Leskin Center for History and Policy. We are dedicated to studying change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every week we interview thought leaders, historians, researchers, and policymakers about what happened then and what that means for us now.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Welcome to Then and Now, a podcast sponsored by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. My name is David Myers. I teach in the UCLA Department of History and direct the Luskin Center. Our goal at the Center is to bring the past into conversation with the present, and in doing so to understand how we got where we are so that we can imagine alternative and better futures. Our guest today is Ben Carrianton, who teaches sociology and journalism in the Annenberg School of Communications at USC. Professor Carrington is an internationally recognized expert on the sociology of race and culture, with a particular interest in sports and the image and ideal of the black athlete. He's also a keen observer of and participant in the protest movement here in Los Angeles over the past month. Ben Carrington, it is a pleasure to have you on Then and Now. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Thank you. Thank you for having me, David.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

So one of the main areas of your research as a sociologist, Ben, is, as we said, in the study of sports and the way in which race and politics are deeply implicated in sports. Can you tell us why sport is so important to study and what really does sport tell us about society?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

I think it's a good question. So I think sports has been overlooked within the academy for various reasons. Sports tends to get relegated to the sphere of leisure, leisure activity. And so we have this kind of binary between kind of work and leisure. Work is clearly serious, work is about production, work is about the economy, you know, work is about the formation of identities, and we begin to think about questions of class and political economy. And then we have this thing called leisure. And I think so part of it is this idea that like leisures are stuff that you do after work, and we all need to work. So therefore, work by definition is an important aspect of human life. So I think there's this kind of marginalization of sport as being quote just leisure, something that lacks serious meaning, serious purpose. But of course, leisure is a key part of how we do form our identities, you know, who we are, why we are, um, you know, the kind of choices that we make in terms of questions of pleasure and joy. So uh I so actually sports is an important part in the formation of identities. It's an important part of pleasure making. Um and once we begin to think more seriously about sports, we quickly realize that sports are deeply interconnected with a whole range of other social institutions. So, you know, it's hard to think about education without thinking about the role of sports. Um, you know, especially here in the US, you know, college sports plays such a huge part on campus life. Uh as soon as you begin to think about the economy, well, clearly sports are uh a pretty big business in terms of the amount of money that's spent on them, um, you know, from going to watch games to subscriptions to TV packages, to people buying jerseys, etc. Um, when we begin to think more broadly about culture and popular culture, clearly, you know, sports dominates uh the the media, media discourse more generally. Here in Los Angeles, it seems like many moons ago, you know, but when when Kobe Bryant passed away uh earlier in in the year through a tragic uh accident with Halters and a number of other people on the helicopter, um, you know, this just generated global news. This was a uh an a professional basketball player who had retired, and yet I was getting calls from friends in England even before I had heard the news. The news traveled so quickly on the global media, you know, that as I actually drove back from uh Calabasas where he where he crashed, um, well, I played a football game that morning, a soccer game, um, friends were texting me from the UK before I got home to downtown LA asking me, had I heard the news about Kobe? So athletes themselves have become global cultural icons.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Why do you think sports touches us in that way? What is it about sports that has that deeply affective emotional impact uh that uh that that induces such uh passion and sometimes even rage on the part of uh adoring fans? What is it about sports that has that quality? Almost it's almost like a passion play of human behavior.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's I mean, so some have argued that you know, with increasingly secular societies, and there's a big debate as to whether or not how much modern societies have really become secular, but this idea of you know the kind of the kind of displacement of religion as the organizing principle of societies, that sports have a religious-like quality to them. Even if you think about the term fan, so clearly like fan plays off the idea of a fanatic, you know, the kind of the you know, the religious fanaticism when we can think about sports fanaticism. So, you know, rather than go into cathedrals, you know, to enjoy mass, you know, we're going to sports stadiums to engage in ritualistic forms of worship, except you know, the the the the icons are not necessarily religious figures, but they become the quarterback or the point guard, you know, or the or the or the striker. Um, you know, so there is a a religious like quality to mass mobilization of people who you know who and we have these lines drawn between the profane and the sacred, you know, so that the pitch itself becomes a sacred space. We have totems like we do in religion of the club symbols and logos. There's there's a kind of a hero worship that takes place with devoted followers around the world. Very quickly, you can see the kind of parallels between the kind of uh discourses that we'd normally associate with religion being transposed onto sports. So I think that that's part of it to some degree. Um, but I also just do think there's something about the human body in motion, you know, the sports center the body in very particular ways. Um, and you know, it's a way in which we can see humanity extend itself, humanity in motion, humanity doing things that kind of almost defy um, you know, defy the imagination, whether or not that's how far somebody can run, how how how you know, how far they can throw a ball or hit a ball. Um something about the embodied physicality of sports that I think is deeply human that resonates with us. And so I, you know, there's there's there's a great line in Franz Vanonin, Black Skin White Masks, where he he talks, he said, he has a line, isn't Black Skin White Masks, and also he develops this idea in The Wretched of the Earth, where he says something along the lines of you know, that the the the colonized, the native always has these kind of like muscular dreams, it's dreams of running, it's dreams of swimming, it's dreams of like of movement, of being of not being captive, of not being fixed. There's something about, I think, at the almost like a philosophical level of the human body in motion that that that embodies a sense of freedom, human, you know, human kind of art in many ways. Um, it's it it can produce forms of identification, I think, unlike other cultural forms. You know, we can be very moved by a play, or you know, there are even some people that like musicals, um, you know, or other types of cultural forms that that kind of move us, that that you know, they give us insight into the human condition. But you know, that there's something also about the mass appeal of sports. So anyone who follows the football world cup, especially the men's football world cup, you can be in many parts of the world and streets will be taken over, you know, like whole cities, you know, countries will come close to kind of closing down around the spectacle of sports. And so it's a very powerful and therefore also a very kind of dangerous cultural form because of those emotions that it can solicit.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

So um, you've mentioned um the ritualized nature of uh of sport. You've mentioned um just recently uh the mass psychology aspect of it, the the psychology of the mob, and also uh the ideal of uh bodies in motion. Um and this brings us to your 2010 book, Race, Sport, and Politics, The Sporting Black Diaspora, in which you trace the history of the idea of the black athlete over the course of the 20th century. You call this idea, the idea of a black athlete, a racial project. And I'm interested to know what do you mean by that? What are the origins of this idea, of this ideal image of the black athlete, and what role has it played in the various societies that you study?

SPEAKER_02 9:51

Yeah, so the the idea of a racial project comes out of the work of the American sociologists, um Michael Omey and Howard Wynan, who produced a book back in 1986 called Racial Formations in in the United States. And the book since 86 has gone through various new editions. And they had this idea of racial formation, which has become quite popular in trying to think through the ways in which race is socially constructed, but also that race is a political category, you know, that it's really the kind of the work of politics that makes and remakes the idea of race. The idea of a racial formation isn't really kind of new to them. Others have talked about a racial formation before, but they do have this other concept, which I think is more important but tends to be overlooked, is this idea of a racial project. So the kind of these a racial project, and they kind of define it in the book, and it's a bit abstract. So what I try to do in my work is to try to kind of you know to work through what does a racial project mean. So very generally, it's this idea that there's a kind of that racial projects connect social structures with cultural representations. So the kind of the social structures of race with the cultural representations. And the idea is that a racial project is something that kind of makes race meaningful, that gives race meaning in our lives. So I thought, well, what would it mean if we began to think about sports as a racial project? And by sports, I'm using it in a very broad way to include the actual plane of the game, so the athletes, I include the fans themselves who come to watch the games, the rules of the game, the the institutions that structure sports. So sports are interested in as a form of play because they are clearly, you know, as you know, as people like Vabe would point out, they're kind of the bureaucratic um things, you know. So people don't just play sports. Sports are in some sense sanctioned by FIFA or the NCAA or the MBA or the NFL. These are these are bureaucratic organizations that set the rules as to how to play the game of sports. And it's clearly the media that report on the sports and the and the and then you know, and then the discourse. So it's a very broad understanding of a kind of like assemblage of things that we call sport. And as soon as you begin to unpack it, you very quickly think, okay, sports is actually a lot more complex than you know we first thought.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

So some of the elements present are a hierarchy, a power structure, an establishment. And I assume into that framework uh appears the black athlete.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

Yeah, yes, you're right. So there's a and so throughout this assemblage of these different competing elements as to what we call sports or power disputes, there are power struggles as to what is sport, how sport should be played, and what is the kind of the ethics and meanings of sports. So one of the things I became interested in is so a lot of the research on sport has tended to look at racism in sports. To what extent was there racism in wider society that then impacted into sports? So then we begin to look at things like discrimination in sports or the lack of opportunities in sports or racial abuse within sports. And that's important work. But I had a different agenda. I was more interested in to what extent does sport remake the meanings of race more generally? So not just how does racism impact into sports, but how does sport remake more ideas about race in society more widely? And I so one of the ideas that I kind of work through in the book Race, Sports and Politics, is that we that that beginning in the 20th century, and I and I use the example of Jack Johnson. So Jack Johnson was the first African-American heavyweight champion, born in Gavston, Texas. Um, and up until Jack Johnson, black boxers were banned from fighting for the heavyweight championship. Interestingly, actually, they could fight for some of the lower belts, some of the lowerweight divisions. But of course, the heavyweight champion of the world is seemed to be the embodiment of masculinity. You're the baddest, the toughest guy on the planet if you're the heavyweight champ. And so that position was reserved for white boxers, you know, and and based on racism, but on the racial logic that white people were so clearly superior to blacks, physically superior, which is interesting, that it wasn't even worth us allowing white people allowing black people to fight for the championship. Now, obviously, the the symbolic significance of being the heavyweight champion was huge, especially at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, when sport is becoming a kind of a one of the first global forms of popular culture. And you have the then the the the the beginnings of a kind of a global media, especially at the beginning of the 20th century. Um, and boxing was hugely uh popular in the US, in Canada, in Britain, Australia, much of Europe, around the world. So when Jack Johnson becomes the heavyweight champion in uh 1908, December the 26th, in a boxing ring in Sydney, um, it sent shockwaves around the world. It was front-page news around the world. That, as the New York Times referred to him, the the giant Negro from Galveston was now the heavyweight champion of the world. And one of the things I tried to trace and I've looked at was that up until that moment, white supremacy was still framed around the notion that white people were intellectually superior to blacks, so the the IQ test that we see. There was a notion that white people were had greater morals and kind of a the moral compass, and that the white white culture and civilizations was at a higher level than black culture and African culture. There's also the notion that white people were aesthetically more beautiful, so that the human form embodied in, you know, the kind of the statues that we associate with kind of you know Greco-Roman art was the embodiment of whiteness. But then there was a fourth part of it, which was that white people were physically superior to blacks. Now that's interesting because by the time you get to the mid-20th century, there's a kind of white supremacy concedes the body to blacks. In fact, it flips it, it says that actually we're gonna hold white, the racial logic says we're gonna hold on to the cognitive. So we're gonna say that whites are intellectually superior to blacks, but somehow the black body is naturally predisposed to sporting endeavors, you know, and so that so that the the body, the physicality is conceded to the blacks. Uh but that wasn't always the case. So one of the things I looked at was, well, what was the impact of sports? Because racial discourse, of course, centers the body, right? That the body is the kind of primary mechanism through which race is made and understood. And of course, sports centers the body as well. So what I became interested in was this kind of convergence of the physicality of sports and racial discourse and how sports became a racial project, not just not just in terms of how racism impacted into sports, but how sports remade the idea of race more generally. And I think Jack Johnson is a pivotal figure. So around Jack Johnson's time, when he becomes heavyweight champion, we see a whole range of discourses. And this is what I refer to as the invention of the black athlete, this idea, this trope of the black athlete.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Really fascinating. A kind of decoupling of mind and body, if I understand it correctly. Um, a kind of that, as you call it, the seeding of the body to the black, um, and holding on to the cognitive intellectual uh um superiority to the white. Um, and that, if I understand correctly, that decoupling is uh at the point of formation of the black athlete as we understand it. The corporeal, uh corporealization of the black and and as you say, the seeding of athletic superiority to uh to blacks.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

Yeah, and and not just a decoupling, but they become mutually exclusive. And so so the so whereas before, you know, and and around the same time, if you go back to the 19th century, this idea of muscular Christianity, you know, the idea that to be a good Christian you had to be strong in mind and body, that actually, you know, and especially in the British context, you know, if we if the British were going to be good missionaries for the word of Christ and God, we had to have strong muscular Christians to spread the word across the globe. So actually there is this kind of linking of physicality with a kind of a white Western religiously infused idea of human superiority, which then by the time you get to the mid-20th century has been radically decoupled. So that the strong black athlete is an indication of a lack of intelligence, you know, it's a and it becomes almost like a dehumanizing discourse. So this is when we begin to see all of these similes made to animals. So black people can run as fast as cheaters, or they can have the power of a gorilla, or they can jump like a monkey. You know, you see all of these attempts to continue the racist colonial logic into the present, and sports becomes one of the primary vehicles for that articulation. So you don't have to call somebody lazy and or violent, you know, and or overly aggressive or animalistic. You can just say that they're athletic. Or the black, there's a black athlete as a trope kind of incorporates into it these 18th and 19th century racial ideas about blackness that get projected onto the black athlete.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

And then you've been born of a colonial orientalizing project uh that sort of both uh renders exotic uh and fascinating and inferior, the primal power of the native.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Absolutely, yeah. And so and it gets infused with I would also, because we have one of the other aspects of sports I often try to get my students to think about is that although, as I've said, sports centers the body, and you know, so embodiment and physicality is central to sports, I'd also argue that sports is a place of fantasy, it's a space of play and imagination. I think of many stadiums like Manchester United and others will call themselves a theatre of dreams. It's a space where we go to kind of celebrate and desire bodies in motion. So there's some interesting, I think, homosocial aspects to especially in normatively in heteronormative spaces, we have lots of men, um, often working class men, but middle class men as well, celebrating the bodies of other men in ways in which will be read as problematic outside of the sports discourse. You layer onto that a racialized discourse. So you often have, especially in you know in the contemporary West and even back in Judge Johnson's age, you know, black male bodies being celebrated, often in state of undress, this kind of lording of the black body. And so what you have interestingly is this kind of shift where previously like racial discourse defined blackness and black bodies as being subhuman, closer to primates, closer to animals. And then you have this kind of jump where suddenly the black athletic body is superhuman. You know, it can do things that regular bodies meaning white bodies can't do. So what that also makes what that paradoxically, what that kind of does is that it shifts the black body out of the category of being ordinarily human, but either subhuman, closer to animals, or we're superhuman, able to run faster, throw further, punch harder, then quote, regular human. But but but that the nor but the category of the human, it still becomes normalized as white. And so there is something about how also Brans Fanon gets to this in Black Skin White Masks, he has this great section where he talks about he has a line where he's looking at the ways in which blackness figures in the white European imagination, this kind of fetizization, as you refer as you noted the. Of exoticization of blackness. And Fanon himself says really early on, he says, of all of the forms of eroticization that have been produced in the West, it's the black athlete that's the most eroticized. Fanon himself, back in the 50s, recognized there's something about the black athlete and how it figured within the kind of white Western imagination that gave it a privileged kind of position. So for me, that means that we can't understand race without thinking about sports. We cannot have a discussion around race and racism, around whiteness, around the kind of social, economic, but also psychic elements of racism unless we centre sports. So that's one of my big claims. It's not just that sports is kind of interesting, and we can we can through sports, you know, maybe trace through some interesting kind of secondary ideas. But no, unless your racial analysis thinks through the politics of sports, then it's insufficient, which is a very big claim. It's one that I've managed to make it off so far.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

So I'm gonna keep thinking so really interesting. Um let's maybe move ahead a little bit and see what the trajectory of the black athlete is, that image in light of uh this very interesting structure of power that you've uh laid out. So 60 years or so after Jack Johnson wins the championship in Australia, um, along comes a figure named Muhammad Ali, um who, in some sense, would seem to fuse back together uh the mind and body. Um how does Ali fit into um that lineage of the black athlete? Does he completely shatter the paradigm as it developed over the course of the 20th century?

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Yeah, Mohammed Ali is a really important figure in this narrative. So just to go back historically and then to jump forward, so one of the things that happens to Jack Johnson is that there's an attempt to strip him of his title. And then the so but the problem was that Jack Johnson was a really great fighter. He's arguably many boxing historians are would argue that he was the best boxer of the 20th century, which is a big claim given that he was there at the beginning of the 20th century. Um, but he was truly ahead of his time in terms of his technique, his reach, you know, his skill level. So for seven years until 1915, Jack Johnson was undefeated. And he when he finally loses, that's when we have the reintroduction of what's called the colour line. So the colour line, the colour line is drawn. White society has learned its lesson because Jack Johnson was a he he he was boisterous, you know, he was independent, he dated white women at a time when white men, black men could be lynched for whistling at white women. Um he drove fancy, he wore big fur coats, he smoked cigars, he had the gold teeth, you know, he drove cars fast. So he was he was the original bad boy. He was you know the the the public enemy number one was Jack Johnson. And he was unabashedly independent. You know, he he refused to be constrained by the racial mores and norms of the time. And that alone was a threat to white supremacy, not just in the US but globally. So after Jack Johnson's finally defeated, um it's not until the 1930s that we have another black heavyweight champion. That's that's Joe Lewis. So Joe Louis, the brown bomber, um, comes onto the scene and his management were really clear that for Joe Louis to be accepted by the wider white population, he could not be Jack Johnson. So Jack Johnson casts a shadow over sports, over all sports, boxing in particular, but all sports, um after he retires. And so Joe Louis, when you look at photo, when you look at photos of Jack Johnson, he's smiling, he's got a big cigar, and he's got his arm around a white woman. Joe Louis's management said you can never be photographed in public with a white woman, you can't be arrogant, you have to show deference to the sport, you're going to be the good black athlete. Jack Johnson's the bad black athlete to be accepted. You need to show that you love the sport, you're not outspoken, and this will be the way in which black athletes will be assimilated into the mainstream white sports world. You jump forward. That's clearly not Muhammad Ali. Or especially as he begins to kind of transition from Incash's clay to Mohammed Ali, becomes a lot more politically aware, begins to push back against this idea that to be accepted as a black athlete, you have to be meek, you have to be humble, you have to show deference to the silent like Sonia. Ideally silent, and if you are going to speak, you speak in very hushed, respectful tones. That is not what we think of when we think of Muhammad Ali. So you're right. So Muhammad Ali, I would argue, kind of reinvigorates or contests the idea of what the black athlete can and should be. I think that's the real significance of Ali. And there would that there was interesting, there was a play that was made about Jack Johnson's life that Muhammad Ali went to see. And after Ali went to see the play of Jack Johnson, Ali said, if you change the issue of white women for Islam, that's my story. So Ali himself recognized actually that he was pushing back against the kind of narrow definitions and frame of what the black athlete could be. And also, as we think about Muhammad Ali, and to your point, he spoke out. He found his voice. So rather than the black athlete being this kind of constraining trope that fixes blackness, black identity, and black freedom, Muhammad Ali expanded the possibilities of what the black athlete could and should be. And that was why he was so threatening, and that that was why you know he gets drafted into the war. That's why he gets us for three years he can't fight at the peak of his career. Um because he understood that the black the black athlete begins to speak because of the platform that black athletes have, because of the centrality of sport within popular culture more generally, that the resonance can be huge because of the global spectacle nature of sports. So it's something that's often been used as a way to say to black athletes, don't speak out and we'll give you bigger sponsorship deals. Don't speak out and you can have a longer career. Don't speak out and you can get into the Hall of Fame. Don't speak out and you're gonna be accepted. Mohammed Ali said, no, I'm gonna speak out on these issues and I'm gonna challenge the conditions under which you allow black athletes to exist. And he wasn't just Mohammed Ali, of course, but he was so uh such a pivotal figure in that moment.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

So around Muhammad Ali's emergence as the extraordinary cultural figure uh he became, um, we have the famous case of Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where they raised their black glove fists in protest while the Star-Spangled Banner was played. Um, that would seem to be another disruption of this racial project of the black athlete. And I'm wondering where you see that. And what happened subsequent from that act, from that very demonstrative act at uh uh at the site of uh sport activity to say Colin Kaepernick's taking a knee um in 2016 on the field while the national anthem is being played. What's the fate of the racial project of the black athlete between those markers?

SPEAKER_02 29:36

This is a great question. And it's people have written whole PhDs on that on that very question. So I tried to give you Ben's version of it in less than less than 80,000 words. So you're right. So so Muhammad Ali, think think think of some of the think of some of the famous things that Mohammed Ali said. I don't have to be what you want me to be. Yeah, just think of the profound importance of that statement. I don't have to be what you want me to be. And when he says, what's my name as well, that kind of moment, so Muhammad Ali, when he changes his name from Catia's clay to Mohammed Ali, when the sporting establishment, the New York Times, and fancy Sonny Liston refuse to call him by his name Mohammed Ali. There's an iconic picture that many people will perhaps remember of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston when he beats him twice, and he's shouting at Sonny Liston as he's just knocked him to the floor, and he's shouting out, What's my name? What's my name? What's my name? You know, think how that has tied into the anti-colonial movement when nation states around the world around that time earlier, but around that time as well, are renaming themselves, you know, establishing the right to self-determination. So we also have, of course, the the 1968 Mexico Olympics, which is again arguably one of the most iconic moments in sporting history, but then becomes an important moment of the civil rights movement, you know, and radical movements more generally, of Tommy Smith and John Carlos doing the Black Love salute. Um, and of course Peter Norman, who's often forgotten. So Peter Norman is the Australian sprinter who actually finished second and ran a time that no other white sprinter got close to for almost like 30 years. It was an extraordinary one of the sad things or disappoint things about that race, it was one of the best 200-meter races in in history, and it's so over-determined by the politics. And that's coming from somebody who likes to over-determine stuff politically. That actually, we don't look at the fact that the times were just amazing in that 200-meter race. Like extraordinary if you look back at you know the the times that were run, you know, that won that race. That the Williams would have meddled every single 200 meters since, including the last Olympics. It was that fast. But anyway, that's a side for a moment. Um it's important because it shows how sports is part of a broader movement for equality, not just within sports. So the Smith and Carlos protest was part of what was called the Olympic Project for Human Rights. And the Olympic Project for Human Rights had a number of demands. One was the expulsion of South Africa from the Olympic movement, because of apartheid. One was, of course, that Muhammad Ali should get his heavyweight championship back. One was that the the IOC um chair, Avery Brundic, who was a racist and a fascist, should step down, and that there should be more um African-American head coaches, coach, coach, athletic coaches, not just athletes. And so it was a global issue. It wasn't just about African-American athletes and their rights, they were using it as a platform, speaks to these wider social issues. Of course, they were rentally attacked. So one of the paradoxes is that now that moment is lauded as a great moment in athletics, in civil rights, in American history. Um, but of course, at the time they were attacked, they were viciously attacked for quote bringing politics into sports. Um, they weren't stripped of their medals. That's often that's something people say they were, they didn't lose their medals, but they were forced effectively to leave the Olympic village. They were vilified in the press when they got home. Um, they found they found it really hard afterwards to get careers in athletics as coaches. You know, they they suffered a huge cost for that protest, which is now reclaimed by the sporting establishment and when you know as a great moment. And when we see the Olympics, probably next year in Tokyo if it goes ahead, the Smith and Carlos salute will be used as part of the montage that MBC will use as great Olympic moments. So what happens after that? Well, there's as we see with many of the more radical forms of black struggle, there's a vicious assault upon them by the state, you know, and in and not necessarily in the same maybe kind of violent way in which, say, like the Black Panthers are dealt with, but certainly there's the there's an assault on and kind of an attempt to warn other black athletes. If you speak out, this is what's going to happen to you. Yeah, you're gonna lose your careers, you're gonna lose sponsorship. So we have this kind of shift that's maybe embodied by Michael Jordan. Jordan would be maybe a good icon for what happens once we get to the 1980s. So you still have the increased elevation of black athletes and black bodies. They become even more visible in the popular realm, even more celebrated, which is remarkable to some degree. Yeah, you have this shift of not just an acceptance but a celebration of black physicality. It comes, of course, with that problematic discourse of them being friends as being superhuman. So there's this kind of exoticization, this kind of celebration that divorces the black athlete from kind of ordinary humanity. But also we see here the kind of commodification of the black athletes. The black athlete becomes a commodity sign that becomes very, very valuable to companies like Nike, you know, and these kind of attempts to kind of rebrand sports like the MBA in particular, but other sports, the NFL, um, you know, soccer around the world, in which these certain understanding of blackness as being hyper-masculine, hyper-muscular, um, is seen to be a valuable commodity because it's cool. You can you can begin to sell this on the kind of global circuits of of capitalism and the expansion of consumer culture. But the trade-off is going back to kind of Joe Louie, that you need to remain silent. You can't really speak out on, say, the actual production practices of Nike in terms of how it makes its clothing and shoes in parts of Asia, the the horrendous conditions and exploitative conditions of the workers that make the goods, that then we see Michael Jordan's icon on top of. And of course, if we think about Michael Jordan, you know, going back to your earlier point, David, he's kind of silent. The iconic image of Jordan dunking the ball. When we think of Muhammad Alibi, think of him speaking, you think of some press conference in which he's been held back and he's got a whole bunch of stuff to say. We don't think about Michael Jordan speaking, we think about his amazing, brilliant, spectacular physicality. And of course, that line that's attributed to him, and there's some discussion with us to whether or not he really said it, but I think he did say a version of it, or at least it fitted, which was when he was asked to speak out about politics in North Carolina. He said famously that Republicans buy sneakers too. In other words, I'm not going to get involved in internal politics because half of the people voting will buy sneakers. I've got an endorsement to deal with Nike. This is what has elevated me as a cultural icon and as a brand. So part of it is the kind of the branding of athletes in and of themselves. Like Jordan is actually a brand. Like in downtown LA, there's the the Air Jordan store now, not just the Nike store, but the Air Jordan store. So you think about that amazing convergence of capital, commodification, spectacularization of blackness. And this accelerates in the 80s and 90s. And part of the trade-off is you can get these endorsement deals, but you can't speak out on forms of racial politics, racial inequality. Some athletes do, we should recognize so, some athletes do, but they pay again a horrendous cost for doing so. So that kind of sets the template for many, many years, which leads people like no people like Paul Gilway and other kind of black intellectuals to basically argue that whereas once before, and Bell Hooks made made this argument, whereas once before there was a kind of counter-hegemonic, a resistant element to sports, tracing back to Smith and Paras and Mohammed Ali and others we could point to, that that'd be that had been lost, that the kind of capital would kind of have one kind of ideological battle over the black athlete, that the project of the black athlete had in some sense been constrained and had become complicit with the goals of capital. I would suggest clearly that that's not the situation today. In which, whereas in the 1980s, it would have been shocking if someone like Michael Jordan and even into the 1990s, uh leading black athletes had spoken out about questions of racial injustice. Today, if a black athlete does not speak out about questions of racial injustice, that is surprising. That's a huge shift.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

What is that shift the result of what you said? What what it is a function of the current moment, the last month since the murder of George Floyd and uh Richard Brooks? Is it the result of Kaepernick's sort of breaking through, piercing uh the veil of silence uh in the NFL? How do you see this new um this shift whereby the expectation is that black athletes will speak out?

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a key question. So I think there are a few things at play. So I trace it back to around 2012. So you have that moment in 2012 when Trayvon Martin is killed in Florida, and you had a number of the Miami Heat team, including LeBron James and a number of others, who wore hoodies. You may remember that. This is this was a really important moment on Instagram where a number of the Miami Heat players, or nearly all of the team actually, did a photograph that they posted on Instagram where they wore hoodies in support of Trayvon Martin, who you know was killed wearing a hoodie because he was seen to be suspicious by George Zimmerman and the story that played out there. I think that was significant. That was a moment, and they said specifically the number of the players, this could have been our son, in a similar way to which you know Barack Obama kind of said something similar around the same time. So you did see here a moment of one using social media, Instagram in this case, to reach the general population, to show solidarity with the killing of a young black man, and that they felt comfortable enough to do so. And I think it's interesting that it was NBA players that initially did that. Because in the NBA, the power configurations are slightly different between the owners and the players as compared to many other sports. NBA players have guaranteed contracts, there's fewer of them, and they and the star players, the LeBron James's of the world, the Steph Curry's, you know, the the um uh the the Russell Westbrooks of the world, they have much more power and autonomy to shape the culture of the team than most other athletes do. So they have a disproportionate sense of power to push back against coaches and owners, a few of the players, the top players, than in any other sports. So they were kind of empowered to do so.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

I want to just build in a little bit on this question. Is it possible, do you think, in the world of this new paradigm of the black athlete, late uh 20th century, early 21st century, to actually have agency, to take over uh the reins of control over one's destiny, to, in a certain sense, tame that uh that incredible power of uh white commodification of the black athlete? Or um is are these just occasional expressions um of descent that later become celebrated and commodified uh at a later point? Um is it possible to actually divert this power structure that you began uh at the beginning of our time together to describe uh and gain some measure of control over it?

SPEAKER_02 42:10

I I think you you win some space, as a Stuart Hall would argue that the great British Caribbean intellectual, you there's a there's a constant contestation over power, and it's not fixed. And it's and neither is it like a zero-sum game. It's a constant pushing to open up spaces where things become possible, where there is more agency, and the ever-present danger of that being commodified, you becoming complicit, it being co-opted. So night, so going back to the example of Colin Kaepernick will be a good example. Yes, so when he begins to protest in 2016, and he's now been out of the NFL for no three plus years since his protests, um, which is also a part of the owners send in a warning. One of the big things I think that that happened in the Colin Kaepernick case, which I think needs to be thought through, was the NFL owners fear the NFL becoming like the MBA, where the MBA players, as I just suggested, have relatively more power than most other athletes. Now, just we're here in Los Angeles. We should go back to the moment, I think it was 2014, when the former owner of the LA Clippers, Donald Sterling, was exposed on TMZ for making a whole bunch of like racist comments about black athletes and black people. It's such an important moment, I think, that that the the the Donald Sterling moment. And what happened within four days of the tape coming out on TMZ, Donald Sterling had been stripped of ownership of the Clippers and given a lifetime ban which from basketball in four days. And why? Not because the NBA suddenly thought, well, racism is bad, but because a number of the players got together and said this is unacceptable. We're not going to go out there and play in front of a racist owner. And they told the uh the commissioner of the NBA, if if this guy isn't gone, you might not have games tomorrow. And effectively, we're gonna go on strike. And if people were going to turn on to watch an NBA game and there will be no black players, that means there's gonna be no game. That sent shockwaves through professional sports, not just because he was found to be racist and was stripped, but the power of the athletes. So to go forward to Colin Kaepernick, I think one of the things that the NFL were worried about, if we allow to quote the president, this son of a bitch to get away with this, this main gender further forms of activism and further forms of be claim in the space of sports, and what the athlete can and cannot do.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

And what does that look like as we uh at the collegiate level, at the level of college athletics, um that that you know, that shift slow and then lurching uh uh in the balance of power between sort of the coaches and administrators or owners on one hand and the athletes themselves? We've you've traced that in in pro sports, um, mindful of the differential effects in the NBA and the NFL. What does it look like at the collegiate level where there's also um a new sense of agency on the part of athletes? We've seen that at our own local universities at both UCLA and USC, where players have demanded that the administration provide sufficient safeguards for their return to uh to practice uh in the COVID era. Um I think that's part of a larger movement on the part of collegiate athletes to uh get a share of the stake, of the gate, um uh and not consign it to um basically the white power structure. Yeah, in some sense, makes it seem as if we're still caught in uh that uh system of racial exploitation uh that has its roots in America, back to slavery.

SPEAKER_02 45:59

Yeah, that there's a book from a few years ago by the um New York Times journalist Bill uh Bill Roden called$40 million: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athletes. You know, so so Bill Roden was writing, and others have made this point for many years, yeah. That for going back to Harry Edwards, who was involved in the 1968 protest, that so what so this is a trade-off, yeah? The$40 million slave. We're gonna give you a contract for$40 million, but you're gonna be enslaved to the system, you're gonna be enslaved to the contract, you're gonna be enslaved to us telling you what the black athlete can be. One of the interesting things I think about this moment is actually some of these athletes, like the LeBron James, have actually got so much money that they can afford to speak out. In other words, they've they've managed to amass a degree of security that means that even if, and you have to be very, very good. I mean, that's that just that was the other lesson of Colin Kaepernick, which was like Colin Kaepernick was a good quarterback, but he wasn't a great quarterback. And they're basically saying, you can be good, and we're still kick you out of the league. We would rather have a lesser quarterback playing on our side. So unless you're a Tom Brady, an Aaron Rogers, a Drew Brees, which means to be white as well, and there's a whole discussion around the white quarterback, and how that's probably the last remaining vestige of kind of white masculine identification in the mainstream sports world. Like we're willing to have a lesser quarterback than you if you're gonna speak out. So that was the lesson, that was the message that was sent out. Yeah, we're gonna again to quote Donald Trump, we're gonna fire you, sons of bitches, if you dare, you know, to not follow the rules of the game. And in his credit, what Colin Kaepernick did and actually became more powerful symbolically, precisely because he was, you know, uh, you know, exercised from the game. What he also enabled, as you just to go back to your point more directly, was if you look at what would happen around that time, and again, social media plays an important role in this. And I wouldn't I don't want to overestimate it, but there's a ways in which we would then see a high school kid kneeling. Yeah, it could be cheerleaders kneeling at a football game. We would saw players kneeling at high school and colleges. And Colin Kaepernick would retweet them, it would show solidarity. So suddenly you can be a high school kid in southern Missouri, and Colin Kaepernick's gonna show formal solidarity with you. And what that did, I think, it enabled the black athlete to recognize that they did have power and agency, and not just power and agency in their physical bodies, which is how black athletes are told that their power resides in how much they can bench, how fast they can run, how hard they can punch. Actually, real power or power that affects and shifts social conditions resides in using your voice and embedding yourself within these social movements and beginning to ask questions about the very conditions under which you work and play. And that's what we're seeing now at the college level. And it's huge because there's an empowerment of athletes recognizing themselves as a class in and of and for themselves. In other words, rather than seeing themselves as an individual student athlete, they're now saying, hey, we have some kind of collective power here. And they're beginning, you know, in Marxist vocabulary to recognize themselves as a class, as as a as a as having shared interests that are maybe in contradiction to the interests of the athletics director, school, and the NCAA. And we're seeing this get played out. And the moment these athletes begin to make the demands, it's fascinating how quickly the NCAA and others are having to concede certain types of things straight up. So at USC, one of the demands of the newly formed Black Students Athletic Association, I think that's the name of the association, one of the first demands was we call upon the athletics director to say black lives matter. What did we see within 24 hours? We saw Mike Bowen, the AD of USC, do a statement saying Black Lives Matter. Like the speed at which this has happened is quite remarkable. Now, of course, that can give us a false sense of like change and urgency and shift. What would be fascinating will be that next shift in which, as I'm sure will happen, some these black athletes say, hey, we'd also like share of the money. Like we don't want to work, we don't want to play under a coach making three, four, five, six, seven, even eight million dollars a year. And you give us a stipend for about 5,000 and we have free room and board.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

You know, that that that that that's just that would be for an athletic department generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue every year on our backs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:36

Absolutely, yeah. So so the places like UT Austin, where I used to work, I think the last figures for last year show that they generated more money than any other college program, and their income was around$220 million a year. I'll just say that again for anyone listening outside of America who just fell off a chair or thought I misspoke. The football, the college program, sports program at the University of Texas at Austin, a not-for-profit organization, brought in$220 million. And that the very similar figures are found at Alabama, Texas AM, and if you come down to the USCs, you know, and the UCLA, they'll be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It's extraordinary, that amount of money. And of course, the primary laborers, the student athletes, in the two sports that generate the most money, men's basketball and men's football, do not receive wages for that. Because they are called, quote, student athletes, a phrase invented by the NCAA uh decades ago in order to reclassify them, not as workers, because that would imploke employment law, but instead as student athletes, this kind of strange uh nomenclature that we do not use for any other type of students. We have students who are brilliant musicians, we don't call them uh musician students, you know. We wouldn't have that kind of phrase or that we but there's a special category. That system is under threat right now, and it's partly because of this wider social movement, it's partly, and this comes back to this idea of the racial project. These student athletes are understanding that sports is a is a racial project, that through sports we can reshape the meanings and understandings of what race means more generally. And that this is a hugely significant moment for historically, politically, and culturally.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Right. Well, that leads to my final question. Um, and you've sort of hinted at an answer to it, but um, what do you learn from the past, um, especially in thinking of the lineage of the black athlete?

SPEAKER_02 52:35

I I mean, I I it's I start my and I'm I'm not a historian, I I would classify myself as a sociologist if forced to do so by the disciplinary logics of the academy. Um, but I start my book, as you know, David.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

For now, and I'll permit you the license to speak, at least historically, if not as an historian.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Well, I I did go to the American Historical Association conference in New York this year, and I'm I'm counting a member of the AHA, so I am claiming my history badge. Caring member, man. Go ahead. Literally have the badge. Um, I start my book in a historical context, precisely because we need to trace for if we're interested in racial formations and racial projects, we need to understand what short hall would refer to as the conjuncture. What is the conjuncture that's produced this moment? And that conjuncture is always historically framed and located. That there were these social forces that affect how we behave, how we see the kind of the social institutions, how they how they how they manifest themselves. And that absolutely requires us to avoid presenteism, you know. So, you know, even my and and sometimes it's also hard to know what the genuine historical conjunctures are, or what the contemporary conjunctures are that are really meaningful, to differentiate the epiphenomenal kind of fad of something that appears to be really, really significant. And in 20, 50, 100 years we look back and think, why were they so fixated on this thing here? Like clearly this wasn't what was matted, it was this thing over on the other side. I think that's what a historical framework gives us a chance to better understand, is to make sure that we can look back on history, but more importantly, use that kind of longer, the kind of the longer range of changes that gives us a better sense to when we do contemporary analysis to say, actually, that's like to be epiphenomenal, that's not like to have been a significant change. What lies behind it is what we need to kind of wrestle with. Um, so you know, I all of the great thinkers to my mind are deeply historicized, historicizing in their thinking, even if they're not typically quote historians. And and vice versa. The very best historians have a sociological mind in thinking through not just a narrow like dating of artifacts, you know, and accumulating, you know, raw materials and primary evidence, but always trying to think sociologically, even if they're not sociologists, about the complex social formations that produce something sort of historical facts in the first place and trying to unpack it. So, to my mind, at that level, the kind of disciplinary boundaries that we we find ourselves in because we have to be in a department and we have to get tenure and we have to associate with certain associations, that that really falls apart. We we foreground certain things. So sometimes we to my mind, this is how I think about it. I tend to foreground certain things other than others, but nothing is ever out of the picture. You know, it's always there informing. And in order to do my work as a sociologist, I have to meet historians and I have to think historically. And and you cannot understand the present moment if your timeframe is linked to like January of 2020.

SPEAKER_01 55:52

I thank you for the historian's craft, and I couldn't agree more about the importance of really um bringing together the diachronic and the synchronic as the necessary act of uh of understanding. Um, there's so much more that we could talk about. We didn't have a chance to talk about um your sense of debt to the British Caribbean Marxist tradition, though we heard echoes of it um uh throughout much of what you uh uh said. And we would love to hear your thoughts uh coming from your British perspective about what's going on in America, including on the streets of Los Angeles, where you have been uh a daily observer. Um but I think we'll have to wait for next time. Um I want to take this opportunity to thank you, Ben, for joining us today on Ven and Now. It was a really rich, fascinating conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 56:40

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. It's been it's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 56:44

Ven and Now is a production of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy with support from the UCLA History Department. Vin and Now can be found wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks to our executive producer, Maya Ferdman, and our guest today, Ben Carrington. Let us know your thoughts on this and other episodes of Then and Now by emailing us at Luskin Center, L-U-S-K-I-N-Center at history.ucla.edu. Until next time, stay safe and have a nice day.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

Thank you for joining us this week on Then and Now. Then and Now is brought to you by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, where we study change to make change. For more on our work, follow us on Twitter and Facebook at our handle at Leskin History. Our show is produced by Maya Ferdman and David Myers with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.