Black Collegiate Athletes and the Neoliberal State. Albert Y. Bimper Jr.

strategy intended to safeguard free-market values and impart an economic rationality that warrants the privatization of any and all public goods for the purposes of capital accrual. The neoliberal agenda turns education, once considered a public good, into a private good of the market for which one must make certain investments based on personal cost-or-benefit analyses. As all public goods become private goods of the marketplace under this agenda, all individuals and institutions are made rational economic consumers and investors into the labor market.

      Black athletes participating in intercollegiate athletes of the twenty-first century present a uniquely intricate case for which to make sense of the intertwining of race, the culture and industries of sport, education and society. It is certainly no easy feat to fully understand the plight of the black athlete without consideration of the overlapping and interwoven contexts and conditions for which they have been and are being constructed. All the while, these contexts and conditions contain an element of permanence, yet still are fluid. The search for deeper understandings of the plight of the black athlete of the twenty-first century requires a heightened caution toward analyses that solely rely on invoking a metaphoric imagery meant to explain how people are situated by a relic of the past. One of the greatest challenges to critically see and make sense of the experiences and construction of black athletes in the twenty-first century is to not only look to ‘explain how people are situated, but also how and why people make decisions to treat and respond to one another (Perry, pg. 19).’

      My endeavor to study neoliberalism and education germane to the plight of black athletes draws from a tradition of critical inquiry that seeks to interrogate the manufacturing and standardization of the figured worlds for which we live. Such climates and conditions of peoples’ lives are often normalized to the extent that any doubt of them is almost immediately labeled foreign and unfounded. Examining the experiences of black athletes constructed within and about institutions of higher education offers an ideal platform to narrowly interrogate the hegemony of ideology, the brokering of both power and opposition as the productions of a sociocultural matrix between environment and actors are covertly normalized by post-ideological politics and rationalities. More importantly, I seek to better understand the neoliberalization of education that significantly impacts black athletes not simply because it is transpiring in institutions of higher education, but precisely for the fact that the neoliberal project is perpetually dynamic and not readily realized as happening.

      In the next chapter I will introduce the student athletes and athletics administrators from each of the sites where I conducted my study. Each student athlete is introduced through a personal vignette. My aim for introducing each student athlete in this manner is to present a rich illustration of who they are contextualized by their background of lived experiences before entering college, how each has sought to construct and reinscribe their own complex sense of self, and their efforts to pursue a personally meaningful education while a student athlete. A biographical sketch of each of the four athletics administrators is presented to give some context of their personal backgrounds, their beliefs about education as well as their viewpoints and perceived roles in the education of black intercollege student athletes.

      NOTE

      1. A resurgence of debate over the athletic superiority of black athletes occurred in the 1930s as a result of key performances by black athletes at 1932 Olympic Games. The discussion was further fueled by Jesse Owen’s record breaking performances at the Big Ten Champions in 1935 (Wiggins, 1989). Several early twentieth century scientists, including Eleanor Metheny and Laynard Holloman, researched physical differences between the race of athletes, specifically white and black, to make conclusion of any possible effects and or advantages that a race in athletic performance. William Montague Cobb, a famous black physical anthropologist from Howard University, also conducted research on the physical constitution of black people and black athletes. Cobbs research, some of which published in The Journal of Health and Physical Education, argued there to be no particular advantaged gain by an athlete based on their race that could suggest any particular race be superior to the other (Wiggins, 1989).

Chapter 2

       Architecture of Dreamers

      In chapter 1, I discussed the shifts from an old to new racism charted by the lived experiences of black athletes at the intersections of society and its social institutions. My aim to explore how the neoliberal agenda shapes the experiences of black athletes in the twenty-first century begins with contextualizing the six student athlete participants within my fieldwork. In this chapter, I introduce each student athlete through a personal portrait drawn from interview data and campus observations. The composition of their portrait profiles includes a description of their personal backgrounds mapped onto a unique experience of each participant. By using this method of portrait description, I offer insight into the tensions and opacities each has grappled with while pursuing their own ambitions within the paradox of the dream. The personal vignettes presented in this chapter serve to illustrate the architecture of these black dreamers by centering them in a study that seeks to make sense of how black athletes are impacted by the praxis and contradictions of neoliberalism within the prisms of higher education and intercollegiate athletics.

      What Is Architecture?

      The architecture of Black people is sui generis.

      This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved.

      —Nikky Finney, from Finney, N. (2011)¹