Lost Tribe Wandering the Conveyor Belt?

Some reflections on reading William Rhoden's 40 Million Dollar Slaves, a past-in-present perspective of the black athlete in America...  The book weaves together stories and collected evidence from under-explored sports history, news coverage, years of interviews Rhoden conducted, as well as his own auto-ethnographic reflections on life experiences growing up as an athlete-turned sports reporter & journalist.  Through these diverse narratives, Rhoden seeks to illustrate and problematize the ways that race and difference are unevenly structured in the United States, starting with the days of physical bondage and into today's increasingly global, corporatized world of inter-collegiate and professional sports.  

The institutional arrangements and accumulated wealth realized in sports through slavery, Jim Crow segregation, integration, and the recurring appropriation of black cultural aesthetics, are continually negotiated across asymmetrical power dynamics.  Elite athleticism in the U.S. thus traverses complex racialised, gendered, and hetero-masculine discourses, borders that form the foundation, process, products of the "big business" of sports in America.  We might think of the past as reverberating in the scaffolding of white-male-European-privileged social structures we still face today, structures that produce disparate circumstances, reactions, and effects, depending on one's location in these intertwined histories of difference.  

Rhoden maintains that race was the defining feature of his and many black athletes in his time sport, staying, “No amount of education, no amount of wealth, could remove the stigma of race.  The paradox and dilemma of virulent racism is that our exclusion became the basis of our unity.  The next two hundred years of our existence were defined by reacting to racism” (p. 15).  However, "today's racial realities are more complex--less black and white, if you will--than they've ever been before," a  historical moment that Rhoden sees as tragic because, he argues, elite college and pro athletes represent a "lost tribe wandering" amidst the fast capitalism of big-time sports.  This original proposed title, "Lost Tribe Wandering," represents the author's deep sadness, bordering on despair, of the black athletic "community."  The actual title, linking multi-million dollar sports stars to slavery, sought to grab headlines (which it did), sell more copies (which it did), and also crystallize the structured relations of an industrial complex that uses mostly black male bodies and identities/aesthetic towards the profit and power motivations of mostly white male ownership and governance.

The fact that some players, both black and white, are lavishly (disgusting) rewarded with wealth and privilege serves to distract  players, fans, and the public from "the reality of exploitation and contemporary colonization.  Black players have become a significant presence in major team sports, but the sports establishment has tenaciously resisted that presence percolating in equal numbers throughout the industry in positions of authority and control" (p. xi).  We might characterize Rhoden's central thesis on sports today (as they have in the past) as a social institution that promotes the individualistic pursuits of wealth and status among athletes, while simultaneously bracketing athletes from the means of production.  Commonly, elite athletes pass through and are handled by way of the "Conveyor Belt, a process by which athletic gold is mined and distributed largely to the benefit of white institutions and individuals in the billion-dollar sports industry" (170)

Rhoden suggests that the vast majority of today's superstar athletes are culturally constrained to publicly embody of a kind of false consciousness, so as to survive, financially thrive, and perform everyday in the sports-media industrial complex.  That droves of athletes have selected the course of least resistance in these dynamics is not really unanticipated, given the rugged individualism conceptually bound in the myth of the American Dream, and given the prevailing logic in America to make money money!   In the context of (a) systematic, shrewd business functions and strategy built over generations of sports ownership & control, (b) longstanding common logic of integration among black athletes in college and pro sports to toe the line (what Rhoden describes as "the Jackie Robinson model of how an integration-worthy African-American behaved; taking abuse, turning the other cheek, tying oneself in knots, holding one's tongue, never showing anger..." (101), and (c) a razor sharp focus among athletes on individually pursuing the money and courting corporate sponsorship over using sport as a vehicle for collective action and social change, cumulatively, Rhoden hopes to sound the alarm and call out to all athletes.  He warns of the missed social opportunities realized in the highly problematic sporting apparatus that aims to churn out young entitled talented gladiators, "who are so inclined become accustomed to being shepherded through the system without ever having to look out for themselves," "accustomed to hearing 'yes' all the time and having adults fawn over them" (p.177).  What are the explicit and hidden costs of building institutions and conducting cultural practices that demand focus, discipline, and cut-throat competitiveness on the court, while off the court, "young athletes are not given any restraint" (ibid).  Rhoden worries about the consequences of the Conveyor Belt, which effectively constructs players who willing and ready to sign up to become "isolated and alienated from their native networks and increasingly cloistered into new networks as they become corporatized entities... excised from their communities as they fulfill their professional responsibilities and disconnected from the networks of people, in many cases predominately African-American, who once comprised their 'community.'"  

These stars are sheltered in many ways from the outside, and provided immense privileges of the modern world, provided they maintain the graces of the owners and gate-keepers of the system.   Rhoden's analysis would have us believe that today's glittering athletes are miseducated and wholly unprepared to navigate these power bearing waters, unaware of the legacies of social protest and resistance that Muhammad Ali so typified, lacking in visionary leaders to counter social injustices or to organize some alternate business structure, as Rube Foster attempted.  Rhoden is nostalgic and perhaps unable to see the seeds of dissent within players like LeBron James, groomed on the Belt and trained in the art of not causing discomfort or distress for the land-owning and fan-consuming dominant culture. 

However, former NBA player and author Etan Thomas thinks that "this couldn't be further from the truth.  Painting the entire, illustrious roster of current black athletes with this broad brush of ridicule, one that leaves no room for exceptions, is just wrong... To say 'the contemporary tribe,' as he calls us, with access to unprecedented wealth is lost," is completely inaccurate."  Thomas cites LeBron and the Heat and other NBA players publicly responding to the Trayvon Martin shooting as example of the growing social consciousness among athletes to pressing matters of racial justice.

The elevated status and pop cultural caché of these stars means their efforts find immediate voice and salience in tradition and social media.  LeBron's limited visible protest around the Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter Movement defintiely calls into question Rhoden's label of a lost tribe wandering.  Are the tables turning?  Are we seeing a genuine movement away supposed political neutrality (epitomized by the Michael Jordan's politics of capital accumulation and brand management), as players embrace their privilege and status as a means to achieve progessive social change?  I certainly hope we see continued emergence of athlete activism.  But I'm not convinced we are there yet.  What do you say?