(1997)

Review by Jim Nadell

 

Deep in the belly of his essay "The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness," Frantz Fanon offered up a brief yet biting analysis of the role
played by sport in the post-colonial nations of Africa. "The capitalist conception of
sport is fundamentally different from that which should exist in an underdeveloped
country," he wrote. "The African politician should not be preoccupied with
turning out sportsmen, but with turning out fully conscious men, who play games as
well." The production of mere sportsmen, Fanon concluded, would retard the growth of
the peoples of the continent, and divert them from their most important task at
hand—nation-building. Although an explicit reference to Fanon’s reflections on
sport does not appear in John Hoberman’s Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has
Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, Hoberman’s book explores
in depth what Fanon had only mentioned in passing.

Highly critical of the so-called black intelligentsia for its
failure to recognize "the ruinous consequences of making athletic achievement the
prime symbol of black creativity," Hoberman poses three questions. "Why are many
African-Americans’ feelings about athletic achievement so intense that they amount to
a fixation that almost precludes criticism of its effects? How do white-controlled
institutions profit from the perpetuation of the sports fixation? Finally, how has the
cult of the black athlete exacerbated the disastrous spread of anti-intellectual attitudes
among African-American youth facing life in a knowledge-based society?" In each case,
Hoberman’s answer is worth considering.

The symbol of the "black athlete" has become a dominant
one in American popular culture and the media. Hoberman believes that the "black
athlete" reinforces a racist mythology established over the course of the past 500
years. In its bare bones, this mythology has two simple parts. The idea of black athletic
superiority finds itself counterpoised against the idea of white athletic inferiority.
Concomitantly, the parallel idea of black intellectual inferiority finds itself
counterpoised to the idea of white intellectual superiority. The tug of war between the
naturally gifted black body and the equally natural, equally gifted white mind has been
played and replayed by numerous Western intellectuals, including the naturalist Louis
Agassiz, the anatomist Georges Cuvier, the neurosurgeon Paul Broca, and Charles Darwin.
More recently, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve), and Dinesh
D’Souza (The End of Racism) have reinforced the theory of black intellectual
inferiority and, by implication, the superiority of black physicality and athleticism.
Clearly, the legacy of scientific and cultural racism lives on.

The dominance of the superstar black athlete, such as the Chicago
Bulls’ Michael Jordan, also reinforces the myth of white superiority in the realm of
non-physical endeavor. According to Hoberman, whites have become convinced that the
playing field, rather than the intellectual or managerial fields, is where the physical
talents of black folk have led them. In turn, blacks have become fixated on their
achievements in sports, a fixation that helps to maintain "African-Americans in a
premodern condition which is promoted by the same college and professional sports
industries that many blacks regard as places of opportunity." Today, so many blacks
derive a form of group pride from the accomplishments of the superstar black athlete that
black athleticism is now "embraced as a foundation of black identity."

This same fixation, Hoberman argues, has produced an
anti-intellectual orientation in the black community—one that has severely retarded
the social progress of the race in general. In Hoberman’s view, moreover, the rise of
respect for the gangster rapper and the rejection of academic pursuits among many black
youth is an outgrowth of the athletic fixation. Critical of black commentators such as
Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, the professor of communications Michael Eric Dyson, and the
author Nelson George for their failure to "resist black America’s profound
attachment to athletic achievement," Hoberman warns that the black youth of today
have been poorly prepared to enter the complex, technologically sophisticated global
economy, and therefore have been condemned to live in a cycle of poverty and disadvantage
that their sports fixation only perpetuates.

For its part, Hoberman believes that white America lives with a
false sense of black progress and interracial harmony that, at least in part, has been
cultivated by the largely atypical gains enjoyed by a few of the exceptional black
athletes. But the social progress of blacks as a group bears little if any relationship to
the apparent integration they’ve achieved on the playing field. The rise of Michael
Jordan and other black athletes to the iconic status of Superstar has taken place against
a backdrop of insidious racism and active white opposition to the social advancement of
blacks more generally. Many white Americans have learned compartmentalization, the mental
trick by which they can embrace the accomplishments of a few black athletes, while they
remain hostile to the economic and political aspirations of blacks as a whole. The
illusory sense of racial harmony on countless playing fields across America masks the true
depth of the racial conflict that survives in one and the same society. In this sense, the
material gains of a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods impede the process of social change.
For every black Superstar, there are thousands of blacks behind bars.

Hoberman believes that black athletes serve yet another
establishment function. Namely, they are part of an escapist national entertainment
complex that distracts the American masses from delving into questions of racial and
political injustice. The success of the elite black athletes on one level of society have
helped to perpetuate the grotesque failures that exist on many others. Beyond this,
several elite black athletes serve as highly-paid marketing tools for U.S.-based
transnational corporations. Nike’s use of both Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods is the
perfect example. Nike (and scores of other transnationals just like it) manufactures its
athletic wear under neo-slave conditions in the developing countries of the Third World.
Nike’s workers toil for upwards of 70 hours a week, they enjoy no collective
bargaining rights, and they receive below-subsistence wages. But when he was questioned
about the plight of foreign workers in the factories that Nike employs to manufacture its
apparel, Michael Jordan had nothing more to say than "I do my job. Let Nike do its
job."

Perhaps the major flaw in Darwin’s Athletes lies in
what Hoberman, in his introduction, calls the "identity problems of black
Americans." Here, Hoberman’s thesis is that a majority of black Americans suffer
from a form of self-hate (their identity problem, that is) because they have internalized
the perspective of the dominant culture, which is white-supremacist through and through.
But his argument is problematic. As other researchers into the subject of
identity-development have pointed out, one’s racial self-concept is but one of the
variables that enter into the formation of one’s global self-concept. Thus, it is
quite possible for an individual to have internalized a sense of ambivalence toward his or
her own racial group, while maintaining a positive sense of self overall. Howard Ramseur
for one (Psychologically Healthy Black Adults, 1991) reports that
African-Americans are not passive receptacles, waiting to be filled with a
white-supremacist ideology. The African-American family, community, and other cultural
reference points can and do filter out the negative ideas and images that originate within
the white-supremacist setting. When exposed to a sufficient number of positive ideas and
images associated with blackness, African Americans are able to develop broadly positive
racial and global self-concepts. Hoberman’s argument that blacks invest a
disproportionate energy in the accomplishments of black athletes because they seek to
compensate for their damaged sense of self-worth is an oversimplification of the complex
phenomenon of black identity development.

Another problem with Hoberman’s analysis of the sports-fixation
is the extent to which he neglects the structural factors that have played so great a role
in damaging the everyday lives of black Americans. What about the de-industrialization of
urban America since World War II? What about the gutting of social programs, a process
accelerated by the Clinton White House? What about the resurgence of anti-minority racism?
The long-term underfunding of public school systems? The War on Drug’s
criminalization of millions of black youths? And the explosion of their rates of
incarceration? Hoberman preserves a studied silence on questions of this nature. He
attaches too much weight to the sports-fixation and the anti-intellectual trends in black
America.

"Sport should not be a pastime or a distraction for the
bourgeoisie of the towns," Fanon wrapped up his reflections on the place of sport on
the African continent. "We ought not to cultivate the exceptional or to seek for a
hero, who is another form of leader. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their
brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings."

Whatever its shortcomings, the questions that Hoberman raises about
the racist orthodoxy which surrounds black athletic accomplishment are long overdue. Given
the considerable setbacks suffered by the Left in this country over the past two decades,
they are questions waiting for an answer.

Jim Nadell is a licensed clinical psychologist in the Miami area. He
is the author of the forthcoming book, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Black Music:
Profiles in National Culture. (Winston Derek Publishers.)