The 2017 college football season begins today with a few televised games and — in the following weeks — there will be a glut of games every weekend until January 8, 2018 when the top two Division I teams meet for the National Championship in Atlanta, GA. Like Professor Erin Tarver this blogger is not at peace with football. However, his reasons — prior to reading her disturbing essay — were grounded in the effect of brain injuries among peewee players in elementary school all the way to the National Football League. Now, this blogger is unsettled by Tarver's connection of football with white privilege. The problem isn't just Confederate statuary. Instead, football — especially college football — sustains and encourages white privilege. If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment of racism (both subtle and overt), so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
College Football Is Here — But What Are We Really Cheering?
By Erin C. Tarver
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
It may be a sweltering August day in the Deep South, but football fans across the region are readying their RVs and face paint, making plans for the tailgate feast and nervously reading injury reports on their team’s star players as they prepare for the opening of the college football season. I grew up in south Louisiana, where the weeks leading up to Louisiana State University’s home opener always felt like an extended night before Christmas: a combination of giddy excitement, nostalgia and anxious anticipation of a day that seemed it would never come. Football was life; the rest of the year was just biding time.
Though I moved away from Louisiana long ago and developed an appreciation for other pursuits, I still feel a rush of excitement at the approach of football. But now I wonder how long I will be able to continue to watch.
Many football fans today know well enough to be concerned about the game. Beyond what increasingly appear to be the inherent and horrifying physical effects of long-term play on its athletes, there is the unavoidable fact of their exploitation: College players go uncompensated by rule, while TV networks, coaches and apparel companies make money hand over fist on the players’ talent. Then there are the cover-ups of cases of sexual assault by star players, the cheating scandals and the enormous financial costs to institutions whose mission is ostensibly the provision of higher education (most of them do not turn a profit on their football investment).
All of this is old news. But we fans keep watching, waving our foam fingers and cheering like our lives depended on it. Why? What are we cheering? Who are we, that we continue to feel such anxious attachment to college football even as we acknowledge that the game, at least as it is currently played, is ethically suspect?
This attachment is less surprising when we consider that sports fans typically use their fandom as a means of telling themselves who they are. Sports fandom has become, to borrow a term from the philosopher Michel Foucault, a practice of subjectivization — a phenomenon in which individuals subject themselves to a set of behavioral regulations, and by doing so, acquire a sense of their own identities.
Just as a practicing Christian may create and obtain new forms of self-knowledge through confession, prayer and the observance of Lent, a sports fan can come to understand himself as a particular sort of person — a Southerner, for example, or a “real man” — by adhering to certain rituals, like reading the sports page and watching ESPN every day to gather more and more knowledge about his team, by talking with other fans about that team in the right ways (and proving that he knows more than them), by learning and participating in the songs, chants, dress, tailgate rituals, game-day traditions and home décor choices of its fans.
The extraordinary reach of football into fans’ lives makes perfect sense when we see it for what it is: the most popular mechanism in contemporary America for cultivating a sense of self that is rooted in a community. In a world of uncertainty, fragmentation and isolation, sports fandom offers us clear winners and losers, connection to family and community — and at its best, the assurance that we are really No. 1.
Yet this “we” of fandom ought to give us pause — perhaps just as much as the scandals, the violence and the exploitation that surround the game.
Over the course of college football’s history, the “we” it celebrated has been more or less explicit. In its early days at Harvard, football was openly hailed (by Teddy Roosevelt, among others) as a mechanism to cultivate masculine hardiness and pugnacity in both athletes and spectators, precisely because it was violent. Many who extolled these “virtuous” effects of football also, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, explicitly embraced the eugenicist argument that the cultivation of such traits in sport was essential for “breeding a race fit for hardship and command.”
Amateurism rules required by the NCAA and its predecessors were instituted in college football in the midst of a debate about how to maintain the gentlemanly character of such competitions. An 1897 New York Times editorial decried even the practice of paid ticketing as “not quite nice” and ill-befitting “young gentlemen.” The crisis that precipitated the formation of the NCAA was partly concern about the danger of football, but also significantly (as Kate Buford put it in her biography of Jim Thorpe) about the pressing question of whether young men “not of a decent sort” should be allowed to compete. Well into the 20th century, fans and sportswriters in the Deep South openly hailed the success of all-white teams like the one at the University of Alabama as vindicating the Confederacy and as a symbolic victory for white Southern-ness more broadly.
And like the Confederate monuments across the South whose construction spiked under Jim Crow, Confederate imagery made its way most fully into Ole Miss fandom, from the Confederate flag to the adoption of “Dixie” as the unofficial fight song — in 1948, as the segregationist Dixiecrat party was ascendant. As if to make their meaning perfectly clear, in 1982, as The New York Times reported, “about 100” white Ole Miss fans walked out of James Meredith’s speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of his integration of the university and performed the “Hotty Toddy” cheer (usually reserved for sporting events) outside. Like the “heritage” lauded by white nationalists and the president, the “we” called upon by these images is quite clearly nostalgic for an era of (even greater) white domination.
Today, the NCAA defends its amateurism rules as a means to “protect” student-athletes rather than to exclude the wrong sort of people, and open defenses of segregated teams are treated as embarrassing historical footnotes. Philosophers and fans alike have thus suggested that today’s sports fandom — which brings together diverse populations and encourages fans to cheer for athletes who don’t look like themselves — as evidence that we are moving toward colorblindness. If white football fans can cheer for the success of majority-black teams in the once officially segregated South, surely racial equality is not far behind?
Yet we should not be so sure that white fans’ willingness to support black athletes on the gridiron entails a genuine acceptance of racial equality, nor their inclusion of black people more broadly in the “we” that is supposed to be No. 1. Indeed, white acceptance of black entertainers and white exploitation of the physical labor of black persons long predates the civil rights movement and has been perfectly compatible with anti-black racism.
Moreover, many contemporary white fans’ responses to players of color — when those players express political views (like Colin Kaepernick), behave in ways that make them uncomfortable (like Richard Sherman) or make mistakes (as Tyrann Mathieu did when he lost his eligibility at Louisiana State University for testing positive for marijuana) — are telling. Many are content to identify with black football players for as long as they are useful on the field, to imaginatively project themselves into the physical power and hypermasculinity that (fans imagine) they embody, and to discard and denigrate them when they don’t play their parts as expected — to treat them, as Malcolm X put it when describing his own experience as a popular student and athlete in a predominantly white school, like mascots.
Mascots may occasion feelings of affection, but they aren’t part of the community they serve. No one is inviting tigers into their home, no matter how much they like the idea of their ferocity on the field. As Malcolm X explained in his autobiography, no one would tolerate him dating the white girls in his class or becoming a lawyer in his childhood community, regardless of how loudly they cheered for him on the basketball court. Too often, many white fans’ treatment of black athletes suggests that the most accurate first-person plural for their relation is not “we” so much as “ours” — a relation of commodity rather than community.
There is little reason, in short, to be optimistic about the general transferability of white fans’ positive feelings about (some) black athletes to the ordinary black folks in their own communities. In fact, there may be reason to suspect the opposite — namely, that some white fans’ expectations that young black men deliver on-field wins and the vicarious experience of greatness, dominance and success result in greater backlash when the team, or the young men of color who populate it, fail to provide them with good feelings. In other words, when they lose.
There is evidence for this disturbing effect in a study by the LSU economists Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, who analyzed more than a decade of juvenile court records in south Louisiana to demonstrate that judges imposed harsher penalties on black defendants in the weeks following upset losses by the LSU football team. Controlling for the type of offense and examining judicial behavior in each week that followed an LSU football loss in a game the team had been favored to win, Eren and Mocan found that judges imposed “excess punishments of juvenile defendants in Louisiana by a total of more than 1,332 days.”
The harshest of these effects occurred in weeks that the LSU team was ranked in the Top 10 and failed to win games it was favored to win. (Of the 207 judges Eren and Mocan studied, 88 percent were white; the statistical effect of disproportionate sentence length was traceable to those judges in the sample who received their bachelor’s degrees from LSU.)
Remarkably, although this excess in punishment was inflicted specifically on black juveniles, it was not reducible solely to racial animus, since comparably disproportionate punishments were not present in weeks other than those following an LSU football upset. Rather, as Eren and Mocan put it, “the burden of the emotional trauma generated by the upset loss seems to fall on black defendants.” In other words, black children unlucky enough to appear in juvenile court in the week following a bad football game are treated as scapegoats on whom adult sports fans can work through their own negative feelings.
The racial integration of Southern collegiate athletics, which began in 1967 and which was not completed until Ole Miss integrated in 1972, has certainly transformed its explicit function. But given that the ritual of Saturday football now involves the spectacular display of majority- black teams playing a dangerous, violent game for the pleasure of a majority-white fan base — and with overwhelmingly white coaching staffs, administrative structures and media companies — the idea that racism has evaporated from it is dubious. Eren and Mocan’s findings show what happens when the racial tension just under college football’s surface bubbles up and spills out onto the real lives of black children.
In his 1908 Harvard Illustrated essay “Football and Ideals,” the philosopher Josiah Royce demanded of fans, “What does this enthusiasm make you do?” Although Royce’s contemporaries extolled the values that football supposedly taught, the way fans behaved once they left the stadium made him deeply suspicious of such claims. “These players are setting you the example of loyalty. They risk their bodies, they devote their toil, they suffer and endure — for their cause,” Royce wrote. “But on the whole [football’s] prevailing influence will have been to enervate you, the spectator, to make you less, not more loyal, for all your cheering. For you have gloated over the sacrifice of others, and yourself have sacrificed, and intend to sacrifice — nothing.”
The crowds and the teams they cheer no doubt look different today than in 1908. But fans today would do well to take a hard look at ourselves, asking not only Royce’s question, but also a more fundamental one: What are we cheering, really? We cheer ourselves, our teams, our communities, to be sure. But that hard look should not avoid confronting the “we” that is actually glorified — and asking whether under its team colors, it hides something much more sinister. # # #
[Erin Tarver is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Oxford College of Emory University (GA). Her areas of competence are History of Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Philosophy of Sport, and Logic. Tarver's first book is The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity (2017). She received a BA (philosophy and religion) from Palm Beach Atlantic University (FL), an MA (philosophy) from Boston College, and a PhD (philosophy) from Vanderbilt University (TN).]
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