My overarching ambition of this book is to challenge us to rethink imaginations of modern sport as the model for a post-racial or better yet a post-racist society, but to see how racial inequity is preserved and perpetuated by our beliefs, policies, and practices. The Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century has spawned widespread protests in cities all across the nation.7 We have witnessed evidence of this movement from marches in the streets to the words I can’t breathe printed on shirts worn by athletes during game warm-ups. The evidence of the movement has been reflected by Colin Kaepernick and other athletes, professional and collegiate, protesting by taking a knee during the national anthem. The study of black experiences at the intersections of sport and higher education provides a lens to critically interrogate the contradictions of our ideological politics and the sociocultural logics embedded within intercollegiate athletics. Seated by traditions of thought examining sociocultural productions of power and knowledge, identity and resistance, and pedagogical insights meant to enrich the holistic education of black collegiate student athletes, I draw upon the conceptual framing and analytical tools of critical race theory to study how the relationship between race, sport and higher education is constructed within the logics of neoliberalism. Demonstrated through research conducted at multiple institutions of higher education, and given the paucity of the pages of any book, I attempt to illustrate how the experiences of black athletes should not be merely reduced to the inherent consequences of structural arrangements but must be realized as part of the projects of ideology and complexities of a paradox.
NOTES
1. The terms “black” and “African American” are used interchangeably throughout the text to refer to both the racial and ethnic group in the United States (Cooper, Cavil, & Cheeks, 2014).
2. The Institute for Colored Youth (later renamed Cheyney State University) was founded in Pennsylvania in 1837; this was followed by Ashmun Institute (now known as Lincoln University of Pennsylvania) in 1854 and Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856 (Redd, 1988).
3. Most of these institutions were established in the southern states under the auspices of the federal Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (or more commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau), black churches, and white philanthropists. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped to establish several colleges, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., Atlanta University now known as Clark Atlanta University, St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Churches such as the American Missionary Association, the Disciples of Christ, and the Methodist Episcopal Church founded colleges for religious education and training, such as Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama (Brown & Davis, 2001; Redd, 1988).
4. The first black public college established with financial resources allocated by the Morrill Act of 1862 was Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later renamed Alcorn State University), founded in Mississippi in 1871 (Redd, 1998).
5. Tygiel (2008) describes how a “gentleman’s agreement” to exclude blacks from major league baseball was championed by white players, including Cap Hanson of the Chicago Black Sox at the time. Major league baseball gentle agreement to ban contract offerings to black players fall in line with history of efforts that promote racial progress followed by retrenchment.
6. Biddle College is presently known as Johnson C. Smith University.
7. The Black Lives Matter movement unfolded after George Zimmerman was found not guilty on all charges in a Florida court room having shot and killed seventeen-year-old, Trayvon Martin, on February 26, 2012, as he walked through a community in Sanford, Florida. In response to this trial verdict, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors created a call to action in the form of an open letter linked to a social media banner which they named #BlackLivesMatter (Carney, 2016; Lebron, 2017). The mantra of Black Lives Matter served as a mobilizing force for many people across the nation to take to protest as well as initiate programs to address social injustices that have rendered black lives disposable to violence and death.
In the dawn of the twentieth century, and as Jim Crow beget the social and political mores that bound ideas of race, class, and gender, black athletes emerged from a black populace subjected to the ravaging conditions of racial discrimination and segregation. The first generation of blacks American born as free men and women were coming of age at a time when prominent black thought-leaders, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, publicly contested their own ideologies and philosophies, policies for negro advancement, as well as strategic pathways to actualize racial equality and full citizenship for blacks. At the same time, the prevalence of lynching as a form of political and social dominance threatened the lives and communities of all black persons (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). To be black in this era meant to be all too familiar with the racial terror of lynching. To be black in the shadows of this era was to be constantly reminded of your life’s entangled reality with the threat of the most horrid sight of strange fruits or the frightening scene of the ashes of flesh drifting in the wind through your community. To be black during this time meant, also, to be absorbed by the unimaginable rise and rousing affairs of a new negro who challenged the sociocultural constraints of white supremacy (Gates, 1988) with his gloved fists at center ring and his ostentatious lifestyle taunting twentieth-century imaginations. To live in the dawn of the twentieth century, as man or woman of any race, meant to know of the provocative life and stimulus of dynamic debate, widely known as the boxer, Arthur John “Jack” Johnson (Ward, 2004).
The Book of Johnson
The title of the world’s heavyweight champion was reserved for white men only. That was, until 1908. The wall of white reluctance to entertain the notion that a black challenger be fit to oppose a white boxer for the symbolic title of ultimate manhood and physical superiority came down as Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns stood upon the same boxing canvas December 26, 1908. For the first time, the world’s champion would be black. On the heels of Johnson’s overwhelming victory over Burns, the search for a “Great White Hope” ensued (Roberts, 1985; Ward, 2004). The phenomenon of a search for a white hope was characterized by a rampant quest for any white challenger to unseat Johnson from his title as champion. At the core of this quest was a national plea to return the champion status back to the white race. White optimisms were hopeful that the dethroning of Johnson would also restore the natural order of race relations aligned with racist theology and biological rationalizations used to defend the ideas and racial projects of white supremacy. The racially motivated search and auditioning of white boxers would lead to a face-off with Jim Jefferies, a retired heavyweight champion. Jefferies had retired undefeated six years earlier, in 1904, but seemed by many to be the greatest hope to dethrone Papa Jack (Roberts, 1985).
The Johnson verse Jefferies fight in 1910 took place under a summer’s sun on the 4th-of-July in Reno, Nevada. The fight was publicized as the “fight of the century” (Burns et al., 2005; Gates, 1988). Implications of this unprecedented fight reached far beyond individual aspirations of each fighter to be crowned the undisputed champion. So much more was at stake. The symbolic burden of an entire race resting on the shoulders of the respective fighter was likely visible to every witness within eyeshot of center ring. For whites, Jefferies was, at once, a physical and figurative representation of white hopes to safeguard white superiority. He mirrored their deepest fears of losing a seemingly tangible stronghold on the sovereignty of racial superiority. He was also the physical manifestation of their fears that the unrestrained retributions of blacks would be enthused by a black victor. Johnson, however, was a representation of the black optimism to expose the distortions of white superiority. Some feared the repercussions that might be taken out on black communities if Johnson were to lose. But, most fears among black Americans were quelled by the reverberating hope among many blacks that his victory