Does The Physicality Of Black Athletes Contribute To A Warped Perception Of Blacks?
Fans need to recognize, first and foremost, that black athletes are human beings, and that not all black males are strong and athletic.
To the untrained eye, maybe the late Eric Garner was built like an NFL offensive lineman.
A baseless assumption, of course, but one that on the surface suggests some modicum of statistical truth. Last year, Craig Booth used leaguewide NFL roster data to build a visualization of player height and weight by position — finding that the average offensive lineman checks in around 6-foot-4, and around 310 pounds. Garner was reported to be 6-foot-3 and 350 pounds; a little heavier than your average tackle, perhaps, but by no means would his measurements have looked out of place on a 53-man roster.
When I first saw the now-infamous YouTube video of Garner in the final minutes of his life, I remember thinking that he could have doubled as an NFL player. I’m well aware that this is an inherently dehumanizing thing to say; Garner was not some athlete-replica. He was a father, a friend to many, a neighborhood fixture, and a “gentle giant” to those asked to describe him. None of that is discernible from video, of course. And to assess strength, athleticism, and potential for violence by size alone is a crude measurement, at best. At worst, it’s something altogether wrong.
Still, my initial reaction — that Garner looked like he could have been a football player — is worth exploring, because that could very well be part of the reason he’s no longer here today.
There was no shortage of disturbing revelations after the decision was made not to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. What made the apparent failure of the criminal justice system even more disturbing, though — as noted by Jamelle Bouie at Slate and Lauren Williams at Vox — were the racial stereotypes and generalizations that marked Wilson’s testimony.
Wilson described Brown as aggressive during the entire incident. He assigned incredible strength to Brown, saying that grabbing him “felt like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” Wilson claimed he feared a single additional punch from Brown might have ended his life, and alleged that Brown at one point told him, “you are too much of a pussy to shoot me.” Recalling the incident that ended Brown’s life, Wilson maintained that even after he had already discharged his weapon into the suspect, Brown “looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.”
If the idea of a human being working himself into a rage in order to rush through a hail of gunfire sounds absurd to you, you’re not alone. Wilson’s testimony has been roundly criticized for assigning Brown the kind of superhuman power you would only see in an action movie. Bouie goes on to articulate just how problematic Brown’s testimony really was:
More troubling is Wilson’s physical description of Brown, which sits flush with a century of stereotypes and a bundle of recent research on implicit bias and racial perceptions of pain. In so many words, Wilson describes the “black brute,” a stock figure of white supremacist rhetoric in the lynching era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries …
… The idea that Brown could resist bullets is also familiar. In a recent paper, researchers found that whites are more likely to attribute superhuman abilities — like enhanced strength and endurance — to blacks than any other group. That, the authors assert, might explain some of the white tolerance for police brutality. “Perhaps people assume that Blacks possess extra (i.e., superhuman) strength which enables them to endure violence more easily than other humans.”
It’s the last sentence — “strength which enables them to endure violence” — that, for me, establishes a connection between Brown’s and Garner’s tragic deaths, and how sports warp larger society’s collective perception of black males. After all, studies, polls, and experience speak to the lack of interaction across racial and cultural lines in our country, regardless of the lip service we pay to the “melting pot.” Our country is still segregated in significant areas of personal life; those intimate spaces both physical and mental that allow us to develop understanding, familiarity, and empathy with others.
For many whites in this nation, our perceptions of black males — of “blackness” — are derived from sports and entertainment culture. We’re accustomed to witnessing black men who, week in and week out, display their imposing physical superiority in front of tens of millions. And it is probably skewing our understanding of black males in everyday life.
The late, great, Deacon Jones spoke often and openly about the way in which the game of football offered an outlet for his anger. “I was determined not to be what society said I was,” Jones said about his early life in the segregationist South. “Thank God I had the ability to play a violent game like football. It gave me an outlet for the anger in my heart.”
For Jones, often credited as the originator of the quarterback sack, there was no rationalizing and no apologizing for the brutality of football. Asked if he had any regrets about his career, Jones answered frankly: “I’d kill more quarterbacks.” Later, he openly lamented the ways in which modern rules changes had softened the game. For Jones the brutality of football was therapeutic, rather than evidence on some innate savagery.
It’s easy to forget how willingly the game used to wear its ferocity on its sleeve. It wasn’t all that long ago that this was the league of “Jacked Up”, “Thunder and Destruction”, and “NFL Blitz”. Even just a decade ago, not only was it the big hits; the NFL was actively promoting narratives of superhuman strength and resilience right alongside the heaping helpings of violence.
To this day, Ronnie Lott remains celebrated not only for his punishing style, but also for choosing to amputate his pinkie finger over facing recovery time. Terrell Owens, generally remembered as one of the league’s great prima donnas, was hailed for his incredible performance in Super Bowl XXXIX just weeks after suffering a broken leg and ligament damage. Anquan Boldin required 40 screws and seven plates to repair facial fractures suffered in a monstrous 2008 hit, yet inexplicably returned to the field after missing just two games and refusing painkillers during his recovery. Fans embrace these narratives at the expense of player humanity. As Lott himself reflected, “we are losing the compassionate side of sports. We’re becoming gladiators. If I ever become a coach, I hope I never lose sight of the fact that players are people. They feel. They have emotions.”
Seeing players as people is not so easy, though, particularly in light of the league’s failure to: 1) recognize (and/or ignore) head injury research; 2) establish legitimate protocols to protect injured athletes; 3) and uphold its financial responsibility to retired players in need. By refusing to shine light on the plight of its at-risk members, the NFL tacitly endorsed the myth that players are superhuman.
And it cannot be ignored that the modern-day American Superman — the athlete who doles out and absorbs extraordinary pain — often happens to be black. More likely than not, this has grave societal implications.
Regardless of how the league promotes its product, football is a fundamentally violent sport, and, for decades now, we have salivated over its savagery while caring very little about the punishing toll it exacts from the men who play it. Like the Roman gladiators of yesteryear, we celebrate the fact that these titans can deliver and absorb hits that would easily cripple ordinary people. In its most recent “NFL Report Card,” the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that African-Americans represented 67.3 percent of players who played in the NFL last season. Also, studies have shown that of the positions that deliver the biggest hits — defensive ends, safeties, linebackers — the percentage of African-American players is even higher.
When a primarily white country watches the NFL on television, they see a predominantly black league — with African-American men using their bodies as heat-seeking missiles. They see (often black) wide receivers taking bone-rattling hits and popping back up as if impervious to pain. Like it or not, these visuals have an impact reaching far beyond our living rooms on Sundays.
The dangerous, destructive, and too-often fatal stereotype of the “black brute” is rooted in a complicated and depressing mix of historical, sociological, and racist factors. The question we should at least be asking, though, is, do popular sports contribute to its endurance? And if so, what responsibility do leagues, players, and fans in addressing such a grievous misconception?
In the wake of the recent protest by the St. Louis Rams over the death of Michael Brown, and the inflammatory police union response, much has been written about athletes’ engagement in social issues. As well-stated by Tim Baffoe, Roxanne Gay, Kavitha A. Davidson, and a host of others, the Rams didn’t need to validate their engagement in the nation’s conversation about police brutality. “Because we’re human, and it’s our world, too,” is more than enough, and is essentially what the Browns’ Andrew Hawkins echoed wonderfully this week.
One wonders if those who still feel that NFL players need to justify or apologize for their social activism have considered that America’s troubling notion of a large black man as violent, superhuman, and inherently dangerous is reaffirmed in part by the action on the gridiron.
It’s also fair to ask if what happens on the field subliminally justifies hyper-vigilant police responses; after all, in the face of a superhuman brute, there’s no such thing as excessive force. A decade ago, Charles Barkley asked “Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man?” The answer appears to be many people, particularly in law enforcement, and that fear far too often turns fatal.
In a recent NPR interview, civil rights attorney Constance Rice spoke of her experiences fighting for reform in the Los Angeles Police Department, and recalled some frighteningly insightful interviews with members of the force:
They would say things like, “Ms. Rice I’m scared of black men. Black men terrify me. I’m really scared of them. Ms. Rice, you know black men who come out of prison, they’ve got great hulk strength and I’m afraid they’re going to kill me. Ms. Rice, can you teach me how not to be afraid of black men?”
At 6-foot-4, 250-plus pounds and black, Michael Brown was perceived to be a significant and overpowering threat by an officer who was more than likely carrying sublimated fear into his interaction with the public. It’s not far-fetched to imagine Darren Wilson — if his sensationalistic testimony is any indication — saw Brown through his mind’s eye rather than his actual eyes. Same with Officer Pantaleo, who wrestled the 6-foot-3, 350-pound Eric Garner to the ground and placed him in a fatal chokehold. Even with multiple officers present, it sure seems like he saw Garner through a sort of funhouse mirror that amplified the threat he represented.
The dangerous and baseless myth of the “black brute” is obviously alive in Ferguson, in Staten Island, and anywhere where police continue to base their decisions and their use of deadly force on a person’s appearance over than their actions — and, sadly, on a presumption that big and black equals a dangerous capacity for violence.
One week after their “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” introduction, the Rams spoke out once more, with several players writing “I can’t breathe” on their equipment before the game, a statement also made by Reggie Bush, Derrick Rose and dozens of others across the NBA and other sports. Predictably, these athletes have caught flak from those who wonder why sports stars are relevant to the discussion; but asking any of these men to stifle their concern and indignation is at best tone deaf, and at worst truly noxious.
Our sporting culture represents black men as warriors, and this notion is then turned on the bulk of black non-athletes outside the confines of arenas and stadiums. We should all be speaking out — not only those who play the games — but those who watch them. As with so many things, sports can serve as an escape from our world, but often can’t help but be a reflection of it, too. It’s past time to realize that the games we watch and the way we frame them have a major impact on the way everyday African-Americans are perceived in this country, for better and for worse.
None of this is to say that the culture of police brutality within this country was founded upon images and stereotypes inspired by sports. And plenty of these heinous cases of excessive or abrupt use of force — Tamir Rice and Dontre Hamilton being two obvious examples — involve black men of relatively pint-sized frames.
Still, I’m left to wonder about my initial reaction to the Eric Garner video: he looked like a football player. And as a result he was wrestled to the ground and choked to death with a move that wouldn’t have been allowed on any field in the country. How do we stop this from taking place on our city streets? America’s star athletes have every right to ask the question, and as consumers of this culture, fans have a responsibility to look inward for the answer, too.
