2 - Broken Teeth: Race, Bodies, and Sport SF

Summary

In April 2008, Vogue magazine featured a photograph of basketball player, LeBron James, one of the few African Americans to grace its cover in a long history of publishing. Unfortunately, it also featured fashion model Gisele clutched in one of his arms, a basketball in the other, while he is clearly roaring in mock ferocity. The controversy that ensued, according to W. Scott Poole, ‘making use of the imagery of King Kong and Fay Wray … reminded observers of the secret history of racial imagery in America and its tendency to transform African American men into monsters with white female victims’ (98). Poole's analysis, however, focuses on the racist origins of the King Kong story, whose ‘use of symbolisms of African American men, sexual desire for white women, and folklore about monster apes tapped into racist roots going centuries deep in the American experience’ (98–100). While it is certainly important to connect such imagery to the very American tendency to create racialized monsters, as Poole does, it is also important to dwell on the image itself a moment, in particular in the present moment. This temporal specificity is important in the context of the present text's attention to intersectionality, because ‘Race, class, and gender still constitute intersecting oppressions, but the ways in which they are now organized to produce social injustice differ from prior eras’ (Collins 15). Other than the obvious difference between the tenor of James's Blackness and the racist vehicle of the giant ape, there is one other major difference between the Vogue image and the King Kong poster: one of the ‘monsters’ is dribbling a basketball.

The intent here is not to replace race with the category ‘athlete’ or to displace the history of racial injustice in America by shifting the focus to athletic identity. On the contrary, it is to posit ‘athlete’ as a potential component of intersectional identity, and one in particular that lends itself to examination of the power structures that abject and exclude certain configurations of race. Again, this intersectionality is not precisely that of the Black feminist tradition, but also should not be taken as being at odds with that tradition.