Sports and Identity

New Agendas in Communication

Barry Brummett, Andrew Ishak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317918370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume of essays examines the ways in which sports have become a means for the communication of social identity in the United States. The essays included here explore the question, How is identity engaged in the performance and spectatorship of sports? Defining sports as the whole range of mediated professional sports, and considering actual participation in sports, the chapters herein address a varied range of ways in which sports as a cultural entity becomes a site for the creation and management of symbolic components of identity.

Originating in the New Agendas in Communication symposium sponsored by the University of Texas College of Communication, this volume provides contemporary explorations of sports and identity, highlighting the perspectives of up-and-coming scholars and researchers. It has much to offer readers in communication, sociology of sport, human kinetics, and related areas.

PART I

Sport and Race

1

BRAWN, BRAINS, AND THE DEARTH OF BLACK NFL QUARTERBACKS

Luke Winslow

Sport in the United States has become arguably the most important modality through which popular ideas about complex social, political, and economic issues are contested, struggled over, and affirmed. Sport is not a totally unique institution in that sense; it does not operate in a vacuum. Rather, sport shapes and reflects larger patterns of social interaction and structural significance (Carrington, 2010, 2011; Manga & Ritchie, 2004). In this way, sport provides a context for the critical examination of dominant cultural practices and the ideological struggle over the institutions that construct hierarchies of power (Hawkins, 2010). A useful critical examination of these practices requires a broadly synthetic look at the historical, cultural, and discursive conditions at work just beneath what can appear to be grown men playing children's games in matching costumes.

No issue exemplifies these struggles as well as race. Take for example the number of black men playing quarterback in the NFL. Ninety percent of the skill positions – running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs, quarterbacks–are black. Only a fifth of quarterbacks are. This disparity points to some fascinating implications related to how we make meaning out of race, identity, and power.

No position in all of team sports is as important as the quarterback. In what is now a pass-dominated league, the quarterback is the only player who passes. The quarterback calls the plays in the huddle and assumes a coach-on-the-field role. The quarterback is usually the face of the franchise and the team's highest paid player.

If black players have proven they can dominate the other skill positions, why are so few playing quarterback? A legacy of blatant and genteel racism is certainly to blame. But now, in a supposedly post-racial world, where black folks are increasingly appearing in the highest places, what else can account for this fascinating confluence of race, identity, and power? The purpose of this chapter is to look closely at these underexplored questions and offer a fresh account for the social, material, and political implications contained therein reverberating far beyond the football field.

I begin by assuming that becoming a starting quarterback in the NFL requires a unique combination of physical, intellectual, and interpersonal characteristics not found in any other position in any other sport. At the highest levels of competition, a quarterback's ability to learn from failure is one of the most important characteristics. But I identify a deeply embedded racist ideology woven throughout scientific discourse and popular culture which hinders effective response patterns to failure by perpetuating the myth that black athletes have innate physical abilities superior to that of other races.

I proceed by, first, situating the dearth of black quarterbacks into the larger discursive and ideological context of race and identity in the United States. I then shift my focus to the social psychology research that uses fixed and incremental response patterns to failure to offer an account of underlying personality variables. I then identify some important connections between the fixed response pattern and the myth of the innate physical superiority of the black athlete. Finally, I close by discussing the implications of that alignment.

Race, Sport, and Identity in the United States

Race in the United States is our most intractable social issue. It follows that free and open discussions of racial matters are difficult. But sport offers a unique opportunity to explore racial issues that many Americans would rather avoid (McDonald, 2005). Racial struggles come into being by connecting structure (i.e., the rules of the game; actions of players, fans, and coaches; sports media; institutional governing bodies) to representation (i.e., meaning-making and meaning-transmitting processes produced through images and discourse). In doing so, sport has become the central discursive site for the affirmation and contestation of dominant ideas about race in the United States (Hylton, 2009).

Sport has the potential to be a unique bastion of a post-racial, equal opportunity in a country deeply scarred by a white supremacist history (Birrell, 1990; Cahn, 1994; Schultz, 2005; Spencer, 2004; Vincent, 2004). For many black Americans, when access to more formal institutions of legal, political, and social power are closed off, sport offers an opportunity to assume the breadwinning role that is fundamental to the masculine identity. Even if very few ascend to the professional ranks, sport enables many black athletes to momentarily transgress the racial constraints imposed on their lives, and in so doing, redefine black political claims to freedom, equality, and material success (Carrington, 2010; Wachs et al., 2012). We must also appreciate the way sport fulfills one of the most important requirements for redressing prejudice, stereotypes, and bigotry in white Americans: direct interaction with people who do not look and act like they do (Henry & Hardin, 2006; Turner et al., 2007).

The larger symbolic significance of this process should not be underestimated. Media coverage of sport in the United States provides a rare context in which black men disproportionately dominate other races and ethnicities. Several studies have found the sports section of the newspaper represents an especially important outlet for representations of black men as newsmakers that is not inherently negative (Niven, 2005). This is especially important given that one of the other contexts in which black men are prominently featured is in crime reports. Ben Carrington, professor of sociology at The University of Texas, goes further; he connects Barack Obama's ability to transcend the highest levels of power in a deeply racist society to Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan first conditioning white folks to accept the possibility of black accomplishments as desirable (Carrington, 2011). Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan were able to make blackness acceptable to white America because, like many forms of popular culture, sport does its rhetorical heavy lifting when our critical radar is down. When I was a child, I put up a large poster of Michael Jordan in my room. It was not until my grandmother pointed it out that I became aware I had a giant picture of a large black man hanging above my bed as I slept. Jordan's jump shot mattered to me more than his race. It follows that those little victories occurring in millions of white children's bedrooms across the country would add up to a level of familiarity and acceptance when black Americans transcend the arena of sport and break into more traditional avenues of power (Brummett, 2010). By operating in a space outside the formal demands of politics and questions of authority, power, and ideology, sport is able to symbolically impact racially constructed hierarchies of power, in large part, because sport can claim to be a space removed from power (Adair & Stronach, 2011; Brummett, 2006; Hartmann, 2000; van Sterkenburg, 2011). When looking for power struggles, sport seems to say “Move along. There is nothing to see here.”

Much ideological work has been necessary to promote the optimistic and widely accepted view that sports are a bastion of racial equality. A more critical look reveals a less optimistic perspective. From this angle, sport derives much of its appeal from cleverly disguising the same racist ideologies that prop up white supremacy in education, employment, housing, policing, and the legal and political systems. Sport serves a more subtle and nuanced hegemonic function that seems to look nothing like the monolithic and blatant bigotry of Wells Fargo's racist home loan practices or the NYPD's stop-and-frisk procedures. Hierarchies of power don't last as long anymore when it is clear all they do is oppress (Foucault, 1977). Sport can construct particular images and create “normal” representations of racial categories that appear to be affirmative and unquestionable. In this way, sports discourse follows the pattern Stuart Hall identified by ruling out, limiting, and restricting the ways social issues can be talked about while simultaneously ruling in other preferred ways of talking (Hall, 1997; van Sterkenburg, 2011).

Despite its significance, sport is often bereft of serious critical examination. Any meaningful discussion of race and sport is often lost in the cracks between high-brow academicians who would rather analyze obscure Polish films, and– on the other end of the continuum–the dolt-filled, hyper-commercialized sports machine of ESPN, mindless blowhards on sports talk radio, and fawning and naive sports journalists content to reproduce cliché soundbites about “executing game plans” and “taking it one game at a time” rather than cover anything of social significance. The gap between critical, sociologically-informed, rhetorically-nuanced scholarship, and mainstream commercial sport discourse is wide. I hope my chapter offers a unique opportunity to bridge that gap.

As communication scholars, this book is concerned with the language used to create meaning through the agency of individuals in the context of sports. The meaning-creating and meaning-transmittal process can be emancipatory, playful, liberating, or oppressive. Whatever it is, we know it matters. Although we often communicate without thinking, when we look closely, we know that some words are better than others. Some words work harder, get more done, and demand more respect (Hart et al., 2005; Williams, 1985). Words discipline us: they expose our psychological make-up, our cultural history, our fears, anxieties, and sources of excitement. In Kenneth Burke's language, words reveal the dancing of our attitudes (1962). When sports journalists, coaches, scouts, and fans describe athletes using words like “raw” or “smooth,” or phrases like “game managers,” and “dual-threats,” or descriptors like “high motor” or “freakishly athletic,” they are committing to a set of values and strategies that speak to our past and inform our future. The discursive foundations of those words connect in revealing ways to the larger ideological dimensions of our most intractable social issue.

The relationship between race, the NFL, and the quarterback position offers a fecund opportunity to critically examine this relationship between discourse and ideology. In the United States, the NFL is king. Although baseball is the national pastime, basketball is expanding globally, golf is a mainstream leisure sport, and poker on television is a popular new phenomenon, the NFL is the most attended, most watched, and most profitable sports league. More broadly, it has become arguably the most popular form of entertainment in the United States. Accordingly, it is an arena where racial issues are deeply embedded in the fabric of power relations. Black Americans account for 12.3 percent of the United States population. They account for 67 percent of the NFL population. As I argued in the introduction, the exception to the overrepresentation of black men in the NFL halts abruptly at the quarterback position. In a league where skill-position players (quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs) are 90 percent black, only about a fifth of the quarterbacks are (Lapchick, 2011).

Whenever the dispossessed and marginalized attempt to break through previously excluded positions of power–the front of the bus, the Woolworth's counter, the White House–they first have to confront a set of deeply embedded and widely accepted lies about who they are and their place in society. This is clear when grade school children are accused of acting white when they perform well in school, when Barack Obama is described as surprisingly clean and articulate during his initial presidential campaign, or when aspiring black businessmen are accused of being Uncle Toms when they move up the corporate ladder. These are each discursively constructed ideological responses that bubble up when previously closed off avenues of power are challenged. A young black boy choosing to play quarterback is a politically loaded decision: a decision that forces him, his parents, and his coaches to directly or indirectly confront a legacy of widely circulated lies about his intelligence, leadership, and work ethic. It would be easier to play running back or safety. It would be less risky. It would be less uppity. However, more black men are playing quarterback than ever before. College and professional football now looks quite different than in previous decades, as several quarterbacks are currently on NFL rosters and dozens more lead prominent college programs. Continued progress in this area would be a sign of improved race relations (Billings, 2004). We keep a close eye on the way race influences capital punishment in Tuscaloosa, college admissions in Austin, and political conventions in Tampa; we ought to also pay attention to the amount of black men playing quarterback in the NFL.

Because we live in an age where blatant bigotry and direct racism is out of fashion in most places, racial struggles often occur in out of the way places below the public's critical radar (Brummett, 2004; Hardin & Banaji, 2013). A richer understanding of these struggles, therefore, often occurs by sneaking up on the subject slowly and patiently. In the following section, I shift from directly addressing race and sport to the field of social psychology. I explore how social psychologists have identified ways individual response patterns to failure can accurately predict underlying personality variables. I then identify how that relationship connects to particular identity markers, like gender and race, which can ultimately lend insight into what is required to succeed as an NFL quarterback.

Social psychology and responses to failure

Since its emergence as a distinct discipline, one primary focus of social psychologists has been to explore the relationship between underlying personality variables and individual cognition, affect, and behavior (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Kunz & Pfaff, 2002). One of the most useful methods of exploring that relationship is by analyzing post-behavioral inferences after individuals are confronted with challenges, set-backs, and failures, in part, because these inferences influence both self-perceptions and attributions towards others. In a typical experiment, a psychologist will ask children to solve an increasingly difficult series of mental puzzles. When the children ultimately fail, the psychologist will try to find out why they think they failed, whether they would be willing to try t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Agendas in Communication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Communication and Sport Identity Scholarship, and the Identity of Communication and Sport Scholars
• Part I Sport and Race
• Part II Sport and Gender
• Part III Sport and Image Management
• Part IV Sport Mediation and Simulation
• A Bibliography of Recent Works Relevant to Sport, Identity, and Communication
• Index