Touré's latest book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be
Black Now was published in September 2011.
We need an absolute moratorium on referring to professional athletes as
slaves and to owners as massas. They are not slaves or massas. When Bryant
Gumbel recently called NBA commissioner David Stern “a modern plantation
overseer,” it was needlessly inflammatory bombastic hyperbole. Making that
analogy is like throwing a verbal grenade but the explosion is based not on the
honesty of the allusion but lingering shame about slavery. It’s linguistic
fool’s gold because while it may feel empowering or subversive to say, it makes
no sense. There are little wisps of images and symbols that can make the analogy
feel valid but it’s flimsy, unearned and false because in order for it to live
you must ignore so much of the truth.
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Say the N-Word?)
Yes, pro sports gives us an almost all-white ownership class that lords over
players who, in football, basketball and baseball are predominantly Black and
Latino. (In the NBA the ownership class is diversifying, albeit at a glacial
pace: the NBA now has the second Black majority-share owner in its history:
Michael Jordan bought Bob Johnson’s piece of the Bobcats. Magic Johnson divested
from the Lakers because he’s looking for a chance to become the third. And
there’s a growing number of Black minority-share owners: Jay-Z has a bit of the
Nets, Usher has a percentage of the Cavaliers and Will Smith just bought a piece
of the 76ers.) The dynamic of wealthy whites being in charge of physically
imposing Blacks makes the slave analogy tantalizing for some. Yes, some of the
more boorish wealthy owners can evince an obnoxious imperiousness that makes you
wonder if they understand the difference between owning players and owning the
rights to players. Yes, the imperialist, screaming angry white coach can make
you wonder if they realize these are intelligent people and not chattel.
(Mercifully, that sort of coach seems to have become a thing of the past.)
But the one thing that destroys the athlete-as-slave analogy is the heaping
piles of money they get to play a game they love and choose to play. The term
“million-dollar slave” is an oxymoron. Athletes willingly, enthusiastically,
enter into the transaction and are remunerated in a manner that puts them in the
upper class. Once you’re paid six or seven or eight figures to do something you
want to do and you gain the financial power to shape your life and improve the
lives of those around you, well, then we are as far away from slave territory as
we can get. You can’t remove the financial aspect from the equation: it’s
essential. As Method Man says, cash rules everything around us. And from the
owner’s side, paying someone a truckload of money, so much that it radically
elevates the class that person is in, is the ultimate sign of respect. It’s
silly to think these players have no power at a moment when NBA owners and
players are negotiating over the future financial state of the game, months
after NFL owners and players did the same. Massas and slaves don’t
negotiate.
In theory, players lack the workplace autonomy that average American workers
have. Most players have little choice in where they work: they get drafted,
traded, cut, waived and thus maneuvered like human chess pieces. Only elites get
to shape the process and dictate where they’ll go via free agency or by outright
demand (see Carmelo Anthony and Eli Manning). Below the elite level, most
players get little to no say in where they’ll work but this is not really unlike
the experience of the average worker. Sure we don’t get drafted or traded and we
have the right to apply to work wherever we like, but in reality the job market
is constrictive. In practice most of us don’t have the ability to work wherever
we want. We work wherever we can find work and stay there as long as we can,
whether or not we like it. Especially now at a time when too many of us can’t
find work at all.
Yes, the NFL combine in particular is, for some, evocative of the auction
block with its half-naked Black bodies being examined and prodded by grim-faced
prospective white employers. But that and all the other dynamics and symbols
still leave us quite a long way from earning an analogy between the peculiar
institution and professional athletics. Ballplayers are treated very well for
doing what they do. They travel in private planes, stay in luxury hotels and
have unions fighting for their rights. They aren’t transported against their
will across oceans or state lines and don’t work inhuman hours and sleep in
shacks. Their families aren’t ripped apart. They aren’t beaten. They are
lionized by society. In many cases they’re looked at as role models or even
gods. In order to see them as slaves most of the story must be left out.
(MORE: Is
Herman Cain the Most Unctuous Black Man Alive?)
Sure athletes through history have likened themselves to slaves to make a
point, but throughout history lots of athletes have said dumb things. Athletes
also occasionally refer to themselves as soldiers and to their games as war. We
need a moratorium on this, too. At a time when we are engaged in global warfare
and Americans are dying in conflicts on foreign soil, those who play in games
and those who cover them should not refer to games where losing has no real
consequence to war, where even the victorious army will see some of its people
die.
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