“What concerns me here is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property.”
—Saidiya Hartman1
“The only difference between here and the streets is that one is maximum security and the other is minimum security. The police patrol our streets just like guards patrol here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free.”
—Assata Shakur2
“That’s what America means: prison.”
—Malcolm X3
It would be hard to refute that billionaires control American society or that the majority of American workers struggle to make ends meet. It is also public record that the United States possesses the largest prison population in the world, by a lot. Not often, however, do billionaires themselves expose all three of these “taboo” developments in one metaphorical statement. In October 2017, Houston Texans owner and billionaire Bob McNair said in reference to NFL players protesting racism and police brutality that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison.” McNair was forced to apologize for what he later called a “figure of speech.” However, his Freudian slip exposed the ways in which Black labor, pleasure, and profit are vital to the transmission of American exceptionalism through the venue of American sports monopolies.
One central pillar of American exceptionalism is the presence of billionaires who provide living proof of the American Dream. Worship of the rich is what rapper and partial Brooklyn Nets owner Jay-Z encouraged when he responded to criticisms from Black Freedom activist and singer Harry Belafonte by saying that his very “presence was charity.” In other words, the potential to become a billionaire should, by itself, motivate the American populace and uplift the poor. Billionaire worship is especially evident in American sports. After all, American sports are institutions of American culture. American culture emerged from the political economy of a nation-state founded on imperial theft, slavery, and genocide. And if cultural institutions find their basis in the genealogy of the political and economic system from which they emerge, then the pleasure and profit derived from American sports must necessarily reflect the genealogy of the racist, imperialist American nation-state.4
Black labor has always been central to white American pleasure and profit. The Black worker built the infrastructure of American enterprise as an enslaved class. Its position in American society was justified by the white supremacist logic that Black people were not workers or humans at all. An often overlooked and earliest form of domination did not occur at the plantation, the prison, or the auction block, but in the home. In her book, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Thavolia Glymph examines how enslaved black women were seen as “uncooperative” with their white mistresses demands.5 “Their manners had to be perfect, and their households had to demonstrate attention to order, punctuality, and economy,” Glymph writes. “Failure threatened their status as ladies and the institution of slavery [. . .] Success, in turn, depended on the cooperation of black women who notoriously refused to play their part.”6 It was common for mistresses to interpret Black women’s refusal to cooperate “as a refusal to be ‘better girls,’ in terms that suggested innate backwardness” and “made them unalterably inefficient, slothful, and dirty.”7 Glymph’s work on the violence of domesticity and “black women’s noncooperation” is essential for contextualizing the demand that Black athletes today should know their “place,” keep their political beliefs private, or simply “shut up and dribble.” What allows such demands to take center stage is the assumption that Blacks were inferior to whites and thus predestined for super exploitation by way of enslavement. Slavery created the economic conditions necessary to enrich a small portion of propertied elites. These elites, America’s ruling class, then developed an ideology of “exceptionalism” which justified enslavement, teaching black workers to stay in their place for the good of the “nation.”
What makes something exceptional in America is defined by its proximity to white supremacy and economic power. Modern sports are a cultural filter for American exceptionalism. The afterlives of slavery continue to haunt the legitimacy of American exceptionalism in an age where mass incarceration, poverty, health disparity, and militarized policing place Black life in danger every single day. “Even as slavery’s afterlife is crushing, visible, and pervasive, it also looks like dust floating in the air,” writes Stephen Dillon. The study of Americans’ fascination with—and investment in—sport can help illuminate what Dillon calls “slavery’s mark on the now.”8 Not only does this “mark” manifest “as the prison, as poverty, as policing technologies,” he writes, but the mark also “emerges in insurance ledgers and in the organization of urban space. It also appears in the space cleared by so much death. Slavery’s afterlife surfaces in the gaps between the recorded, the forgotten, and the never will be.”9 Sporting leagues have received large corporate investments not so much to mitigate the afterlives of slavery, but to provide an avenue of pleasure. Pleasure serves as a form of repression of Black resistance that fully maximizes white enjoyment and (white) profit at the same time. Colin Kaepernick and the other NFL players who used their platform to protest white supremacy disrupted the primary function of modern corporate sports.10 This is what prompted Bob McNair to liken them to modern day slaves (prisoners) who were threatening to run the plantation (prison).
Sports, especially the NFL and the NBA, have taken on a significant role in the regulation of Black life, especially that of Black males, in the age of mass incarceration and neoliberalism. For many poor Black men, sports are an avenue for upward mobility. Sports provide an opportunity to make a generous income from endorsements and team salaries. American disinvestment in public education, welfare, and employment and its overinvestment in policing, prison, and military weaponry has shortened the pathways to the mythical “American Dream.” Corporate sports have thus been given ample opportunity to pose as an economic pathway for Black life in a period where few exist. But as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.”11
The NFL, for example, could be considered a multibillion dollar prison industry dominated by Black players (inmates). Yet the economic conditions for prospective Black NFL players are more precarious than what is advertised in the American corporate media. Black labor in the NFL is exclusively found on the field. Numerous authors have shown that the NFL has been falsely advertised as Black America’s ticket to the “American Dream” when the reality is “best understood by the example of the plantation and its exploitation of black bodies for white profit.”12 One need only consider the nauseating optics of the NFL draft, where white owners are seen bidding on black bodies. Journalist Matt Taibbi famously described the NFL draft as possessing a “creepy slave-auction vibe and armies of drooling, flesh-peddling scouts . . . looking for raw gladiatorial muscle whose sweat-drenched faces will be hidden under helmets as coaches drive them to be rapidly ground into hamburger.” The NFL, Taibbi continues, is made up of “bloodless corporate enterprises using advanced scientific and economic metrics to measure the material worth of human flesh down to the half-pound, the 16th of an inch.”13
White enjoyment and billionaire profit masquerade as Black opportunity, even though sports leagues like the NFL resemble more so the relations of slavery. Black males provide the labor while white audiences and billionaire capitalists with the means to invest big dollars in sports shape the cultural terrain. Nearly two-thirds of players in the NFL are Black yet Black Americans only hold 28 percent of the assistant coaching positions. The situation fares no better for Black Americans the farther up the NFL ladder one goes. White Americans currently occupy 30 of the 32 head coaching positions in the NFL. Meanwhile, every majority owner of an NFL franchise is white.14 Black males therefore not only produce profit from their labor exclusively for white Americans but pleasure as well. The Bob McNair’s of the world simultaneously enrich themselves while disseminating images of Black males that ascribe to the designs of white supremacy. These images make the games especially enjoyable for white consumption. And, as Steven Thrasher explains in his article, “Super Slaves,” all aspects of the NFL enterprise are geared toward this purpose:
The NFL draft allows audiences to see physically strong black men bought, sold, and traded much as in a slave auction. The NCAA collegiate sports league allows students and fans to watch big, strong black men wrestling on mats and battling on fields, while claiming to educate them. Both allow spectators to watch one of their biggest fears—large black men—in a controlled setting. Both the NCAA and the NFL condition sports fans to see large black men as physically intimidating but also as controllable under the right conditions. These actions are examples of the theory of mandingoism, which can be applied to black athletes but also to [Michael] Brown. American consciousness of mandingoism, such as it is, is rooted in the misguided belief that slaves once fought to the death, which never happened. But that specific fantasy . . . fuels the aspect of mandingoism that looks the most like watching black football players tackle each other or wrestlers pin each other.15
When Thrasher describes how images of Black males in sports have been tailored toward white supremacist desire, he juxtaposes American sports culture with the police sanctioned murder of Michael Brown. Officer Darren Wilson was quoted as saying that Michael Brown looked like a “demon,” prompting him to shoot him in cold blood. Thrasher says that this language isn’t uncommon among “white parties in power . . . with charge over black bodies,” including many team owners, sports recruiters, and the corporate media at large.16 Whether “off the field or out of the ring,” Thrasher writes, “when a black male with a similarly ‘menacing’ large body is seen outside the confines that white team owners and spectators alike have been conditioned to expect, white men freak out.”17
Far from arguing that professional and collegiate sports merely reflect ideological culture struggles, Thrasher argues that narratives of intimidation and control found in the NFL and other sports leagues play a critical role in shaping white American perceptions of Black males, helping justify and even cement institutional white supremacy. According to Thrasher, “the link between black bodies as slaves and black bodies as carceral subjects—the link between how black bodies have been commodified in America’s most nascent and most recent days—has been bridged through sports.” Some of the largest sports enterprises like the the NCAA and NFL, he continues, “have monetized black bodies as ‘beasts of burden’ that are property, not human, kept in line for profit through the social control of sports.”18
Colin Kaepernick and allied players disrupted the disconnect between the perception of the Black condition on the field and reality off the field. By taking a stand against the racist police murders of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and the many underreported acts of state violence against women of color, Kaepernick and WNBA players like Maya Moore exposed how American exceptionalism positions the sanctity of the American nation-state and power structure against Black existence. As Andrea Ritchie argues, the “racially gendered and sexualized myths conjured to justify the brutal social control used to maintain racially gendered hierarchies” in the past “persist to this day, having transformed, solidified, and mutated over time to fit shifting realities.”19 For this reason, NFL owners like Bob McNair “freak out” over the undisciplined Black body. “This is the body that has been constructed in stark opposition to cherished white property,” writes Kelly Brown Douglas. “It is the most threatening to America’s narrative of exceptionalism and, thus, to the success of its Manifest Destiny mission.”20 As of this writing, Kaepernick remains unemployed. That Kaepernick missed the entire 2017 and 2018 regular seasons should not be seen as a coincidence, but rather the surest example of the lengths the American ruling class will go when Black athletes challenge their control over Black labor.
Some casual observers might object and say, “But didn’t Redskins owner Dan Snyder and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones lock arms with their teams during the protests?” Still others might say, “How dare you call my favorite players slaves! I love them!” But if history is any indication, it would be a mistake to view an owner’s “pat on the back” or a fan’s “high five” as anything even closely resembling love or care for the oppressed. In fact, such actions instead only mask another form of racial violence, what Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” In her book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Bernstein joins a host of cultural historians who have shown that “physical tenderness can function as a necessary component of racial domination and violence.”21 Providing a history of various “performances of play in everyday life,” Bernstein highlights the many ways in which “they stealthily reconfigured slaveholding and enslavement as racially innocent fun.”22 A careful engagement with Bernstein’s work helps us understand not just supposedly innocent calls to “protect our children” but also the seemingly innocuous calls heard around the sporting world to “Relax, it’s just a game!” This discourse, according to Bernstein, “reanimates, disguises, and draws power from old, half-forgotten contests over love and pain and fun, over the racial limits of innocence, and over the American question of who is a person and who is a thing.”23
A number of examples have surfaced that demonstrate how white enjoyment and capitalist profit are predicated upon the social control over Black athletes as “things.” Celtics forward Jaylen Brown was subtly criticized by an anonymous NBA executive for being “too smart for his own good” after deciding to enter the NBA draft without an agent or manager.24 Brown’s story, however, did not make headlines as much as LeBron James’s recent encounter with Fox News analyst Laura Ingraham. Ingraham directed James to “shut up and dribble” in response to his claim that President Donald Trump neither understands nor cares for people. In her rant, Ingraham falsely claimed that James made $100 million per year. She also discouraged youth from following the example of someone like LeBron James who left school too early. And more recently, the NCAA—a multibillion dollar industry—recently used the Thirteenth Amendment to justify why college athletes, many of whom are Black, should not be paid.25 These examples show how the American ruling class interprets any level of independence exercised by Black athletes as a significant threat to its social control over their bodies and labor, a fear similarly held by slave masters over their slaves. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “to take delight in, to use, and to possess are inextricably linked.”26
The American ruling class uses American exceptionalism as the framework to justify the demand that athletes like Jaylen Brown and LeBron James appreciate their status in society and remain silent about injustice.27 White enjoyment, then, is merely a show of mastery from the rulers of society. Black labor in America has historically been oppressed as both a commodity and the property of slave masters—now the modern day ruling class. Institutions of pleasure and leisure in American society thus reflect the longstanding need for the American ruling class to show mastery over their subjects as a means to legitimate its rule over them. Saidiya Hartman explains that during the period of chattel bondage, stupendous profits were not the only benefits that slave owners and white Americans accumulated from the institution. The Black identity ascribed to the enslaved served also as the marker from which white settlers indebted to the slave economy negotiated their power and the philosophical truths supposedly inherent to this power:
The owner’s display of mastery was just as important as the legal title to slave property. In other words, representing power was essential to reproducing domination [. . .] The innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery orchestrated by members of the slaveholding class to establish their dominion and regulate the little leisure allowed the enslaved were significant components of slave performance. Consequently, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish an absolute and definitive definition between ‘going before the master’ and other amusements [. . .] Such performances confirmed the slaveholder’s dominion and made the captive body the vehicle of the master’s power and truth.28
Hartman’s analysis places American sports in the context of the reproduction of capitalist and racist domination over Black labor. U.S. popular culture has changed in form, but not in substance, since the period of chattel bondage. No longer are Black American athletes or performers the exclusive property of a slave-owning class. However, the social relations that made slavery such a pernicious system of domination—and not merely an economic arrangement—remain firmly intact. Sports owners and the corporate media continue to exercise exclusive control over the labor of Black Americans for the purpose of extracting profit and fueling white enjoyment, even if that labor is paid. Indeed, our nation’s repeated denials about the ways anti-Black domination persists today—even after so-called emancipation—merely illustrate what Kimberly Juanita Brown describes as the “the world that slavery made: haunting, hybrid, and completely invested in memorial amnesia.”29
American exceptionalism has obscured the legacies of enslavement by focusing attention solely on those conditions of Black oppression that have been deceptively presented as opportunities to achieve the American Dream. This is why it seems crazy to most Americans to liken the treatment of professional athletes to slaves. After all, as the argument goes, look at all the money they’re making! Or, if they’re college athletes, look at the millions of fans cheering their name!! If anything, this is what makes America great! But such a reaction allows the American ruling class to assume the identity of a charitable, paternal caretaker rather than a brutal oppressor class that makes billions from the exploitation of labor and land. The work of Lisa Lowe is important here, for her use of Cedric Robinson’s term “racial capitalism” exposes the fact that the American political and economic system “expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal.”30 U.S. imperialism is one of the most formidable and deadly forms of of racial capitalism to date. Black labor, and more specifically, the Black working class, has been the central target of its exploitative, global apparatus.
It is thus no coincidence that Texans owner Bob McNair likened Black NFL players to inmates in a prison. U.S. imperialism is indeed obsessed with incarcerating people of color. Black Americans make up roughly half of the 2.3 million prisoners despite being a mere 12 percent of the population. And as popular knowledge about mass incarceration has evolved in recent years, prisons have more and more been likened to slavery. “Prison is the modern day manifestation of the plantation,” writes Joy James. “The antebellum plantation ethos of dehumanization,” she continues, “was marked by master-slave relations revolving about sexual terror and domination, beatings, regimentation of bodies, exploited labor, denial of religious and cultural practices, substandard food, health care, and housing, forced migration, isolation in ‘lockdown’ for punishment and control, denial of birth family and kin.”31
The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, famous for leaving imprisoned individuals outside the realm of “freedom” from slavery, sparked a “Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March” in August of 2017. Activists who organized the march condemned the Thirteenth Amendment as the political weight behind the continuation of slavery. Marchers connected the Amendment to the super exploitation of Black prisoners and prisoners generally, many of whom work for wages of no more than forty cents per hour. Prison labor services the massive profits of corporations like the Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Verizon. However, as Beth Richie notes, these corporations would not possess such an abundant Black labor force were it not for “the political process whereby enforcement strategies, criminal justice policy, the creation of new laws, and mass incarceration are used strategically as part of a larger social agenda aimed at maintaining the power of economic elites through the control of marginalized groups.”32
American exceptionalism and white enjoyment have historically helped justify the conditions that lead to mass Black incarceration. While President Bill Clinton passed harsh drug policies targeting Black Americans, American corporate record labels such as Universal Music Group distributed “gangster” rap music that portrayed Black American communities as criminally inclined. The passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, also by Clinton, gave corporate record labels the ability to conduct unlimited mergers and purchases of radio stations. One study found that a large reason why corporate record labels promoted “gangster rap” was due to the fact that it was wildly popular among white suburban males.33 Corporate record labels thus possessed a vested interest in promoting images of Black life that justified the “Tough on Crime” policies of their political backers.
Of course, it would be a mistake to think that Hip Hop artists, football players, and people in prison are the only targets of the state’s “Tough on Crime” policies. To this day, the policing, punishing, and disciplining of black girls underscore another afterlife of slavery—one that occurs every day in our nation’s school system. Connie Wun, in her article, “Anti-Blackness as Mundane: Black Girls and Punishment beyond School Discipline,” chronicles the stories of many young Black girls getting dismissed from the classroom for innocent “violations” like chewing gum or walking over to the trash can to throw something away. While the tendency is to focus on racial disparities in school arrests, expulsions, and suspensions, she argues, such studies shift attention away from how Black school-aged girls are vulnerable to more common forms of policing and disciplining, ones that are executed by teachers, administrators, and peers alike.34 “These practices are not generally traced within school discipline research in large part because they are not exceptional forms of discipline,” Wun writes. “Instead they are commonplace and embedded within the fabric of the girls’ everyday lives, a condition of schooling.”35 To learn of yet another “burdened subject no longer enslaved, but not yet free,” requires that we examine how exceptionalist myths of meritocracy and the American Dream ignore how even children in the nation’s public school system are not immune to the afterlives of slavery.36 As Wun concludes about one of the students featured in her article, “despite her academic achievements, Simone’s narrative demonstrated that a black female student who succeeds in school can also be subject to gratuitous punishment.”37
With one statement, Bob McNair burst asunder the illusion of Black upward mobility so critical to the promotion of white enjoyment and capitalist profit as “exceptional” characteristics of the American nation-state. Black American NFL athletes and “gangster” rappers have been heavily promoted symbols of the American Dream without any regard to the many forms of racial domination that plague the daily lives of most Black Americans. Exceptionalist narratives that construct slavery as an unfortunate—but overcome—event of the past helps maintain the entrenched power of an American racial capitalism ruled over by an overwhelmingly white elite class. The realities of American racial capitalism should prompt us to respond to Bob McNair’s statement that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison” with a strong rebuttal: Prisoners indeed will not run the prison; they will abolish it.38 Or, as Fred Moten puts it, the prisoners of American capitalism will need to focus “not so much [on] the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons.”39 NFL owners, corporate media, the police, and public school administrators consistently remind us that the problem is much larger than what the abolition of one particular institution can alleviate. As Tryon Woods observes, “The house of antiblackness can withstand renovations to its architecture as long as its fundamental design remains intact.”40