What’s in a Game? Wake Working (Fantasy) Football’s Anti-Black Temporalities

Abstract

For Christina Sharpe, “wake work” involves a consciousness of how Black being still operates in the afterlives of transatlantic slavery. This article invokes wake work to highlight the palatability of anti-blackness in the game of fantasy football, calling attention to temporalities of anti-Black violence through Black autoethnography. Deploying a Black feminist relational method where telling is theory, I continue this method within rhetorical studies to focus on racialized/classed/gendered dimensions of National Football League (NFL) fantasy football. I tell my Black im/migrant story of learning dynamics of U.S. structural racism through the game in the age of #BlackLivesMatter—specifically, how it reveals violent criminalization and commodification of Black bodies through hypercapitalist representations of blackness in on- and offline discourses. Finally, I read the racial problematics of an ESPN clip—an auction scene in which Odell Beckham Jr. is sold in a live-action fantasy football draft. This analysis concludes that (fantasy) football’s rule-driven cultural codes make anti-blackness casually consumable. Building on scholarship emphasizing the racialized objectification of Black NFL players, I argue these codes render Black bodies manipulatable statistics while sidestepping their violent realities, logics/logistics reminiscent of the transatlantic slave trade’s operations.

Keywords:

• Anti-blackness
• autoethnography
• fantasy football
• statistics
• temporality

Notes

1 I tell autoethnographic stories from memory, written notes, texts, and e-mails, cognizant of how stories change across temporalities. All names except my own have been changed.

2 Likewise, college-based fantasy football works with players rostered on NCAA Division 1 teams contemporaneous to a particular league year.

3 Emphasis in original.