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Abstract
This essay examines how tensions between race and gender are negotiated when these two identifications intersect in news stories about black male athletes accused of domestic violence. Specifically, by analyzing news coverage of abusive black athletes from 1990 to 2005, I demonstrate how these accounts employ narratives that pathologize black men as naturally aggressive due to their sporting background and black rage. These rhetorical strategies, I argue, reflect broader social efforts to negotiate a tension between performing sensitivity to both the harms of domestic violence and of perpetuating racism against African Americans. Ultimately, I conclude, by using sport as the venue for talking about domestic violence and black male bodies as the site of criminal rage, gendered violence is allowed to flourish and hegemonic (white) masculinity is both exonerated and (re)secured.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 meeting of the National Communication Association.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 meeting of the National Communication Association.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Phaedra Pezzullo, Darrel Enck-Wanzer, Jeff Bennett, Joan Hawkins, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, Shane Miller, and Angela Aguayo, as well as John Sloop and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, engagement, and feedback on this project.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 meeting of the National Communication Association.
1. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1989), 243.
2. George Lipsitz, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: Marketing and the O. J. Simpson Trial,” in Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 16.
3. In their analysis of Simpson's enhanced blackness on Time's infamous cover of 27 June 1994, Dickinson and Anderson offer a compelling read of his “honorary whiteness” by arguing that Simpson was able to parlay his stardom into a position of “All American” and thus hide from his racial markings rather than “transcending” or negating racial categorization. Greg Dickinson and Karrin Vasby Anderson, “Fallen: O. J. Simpson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Re-centering of White Patriarchy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2004): 278.
4. Based on a search of the Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature.
5. Rachelle Brooks, “Feminists Negotiate the Legislative Branch: The Violence Against Women Act,” in Feminists Negotiate the State: The Politics of Domestic Violence, ed. Cynthia R. Daniels (New York: University Press of America, 1997), 78.
6. Rachel Hall, “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management,” Hypatia 19 (2004): 13.
7. Marian Meyers, “News of Battering,” Journal of Communication 44 (1994): 45.
8. Sut Jhally, “The Spectacle of Accumulation: Material and Cultural Factors in the Evolution of the Sports/Media Complex,” The Insurgent Sociologist 12 (1984): 41–57. See also George Harvey Sage, Power and Ideology in American Sport: A Critical Perspective (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1998); Nick Trujillo, “Machines, Missiles, and Men: Images of the Male Body on ABC's Monday Night Football,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 403–23; and David Q. Voight, “American Sporting Rituals,” in Rituals and Ceremonies in Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980), 125–40.
9. Dickinson and Anderson, 272.
10. Ronald L. Jackson, II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 7, 12.
11. Kathleen B. Jones, Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 174.
12. Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4. The first article to appear in a nationally circulated periodical was: “Battered Wives: Chiswick Woman's Aid,” Newsweek, 9 July 1973, 39.
13. See, for example, Kimberly A. Maxwell, John Huxford, Catherine Borum, and Robert Hornik, “Covering Domestic Violence: How the O. J. Case Shaped Reporting of Domestic Violence in the News Media,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (2000): 270; Meyers, 1994, 48.
14. Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2005), 86.
15. Greg Barak, Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology (New York: Garland, 1994), 3.
16. Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 39.
17. Kieran McEvoy, “Newspapers and Crime: Narrative and the Construction of Identity,” in Tall Stories? Reading Law and Literature, ed. John Morison and Christine Bell (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996), 181.
18. See John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); William A. Gamson, “On a Sociology of the Media,” Political Communication 21 (2004): 305–7; Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage, 1979); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Stuart Hall, “Culture, Media, and the Ideological Effect,” in Mass Communications and Society, ed. J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977), 315–48; Stuart Hall, ed., “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 13–74; John Hartley, Understanding News (London: Methuen, 1982); Peter Lunt, “Liveness in Reality Television and Factual Broadcasting,” Communication Review 7 (2004): 329–35; Radhika E. Parameswaran, “Spectacles of Gender and Globalization: Mapping Miss World's Media Event Space in the News,” Communication Review 7 (2004): 371–406; Sarah R. Stein, “Legitimating TV Journalism in 60 Minutes: The Ramifications of Subordinating the Visual to the Primacy of the Word,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 249–69.
19. Maurice Charland argues rhetoric constitutes or generates the conditions of possibility that can structure the identity of those to whom it is addressed. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50.
20. Wendy Kozol, “Fracturing Domesticity: Media, Nationalism, and the Question of Feminist Influence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20 (1995): 649.
21. Lisa McLaughlin, “Gender, Privacy and Publicity in ‘Media Event Space,’” in News, Gender and Power, ed. Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston, and Allan Stuart (London: Routledge, 1998), 77.
22. Jeff Benedict reveals that between 1986 and 1996, over 425 professional and college athletes were documented publicly for committing violent crimes against women. Jeff Benedict, Public Heroes: Private Felons (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
23. W. O. Johnson, “A National Scourge,” Time, 27 June 1994, 92.
24. John Leo, “Unfair to Thugs,” US News and World Report, 22 December 1997, 22.
25. Messner, 1988, 197.
26. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1999), 158.
27. Michael A. Messner, Michele Dunbar, and Darnell Hunt, “The Televised Sports Manhood Formula,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 24 (2000): 387.
28. William Nack and Lester Munson, “Sports’ Dirty Little Secret,” Sports Illustrated, 31 July 1995, 74.
29. Nack and Munson, 64.
30. Nack and Munson, 64.
31. Lyndsey Meân, “Identity and Discourse Practice: Doing Gender on the Football Pitch,” Discourse & Society 12 (2001): 790. See alsoLois Bryson, “Sport and the Maintenance of Masculine Hegemony,” Women's Studies International Forum 10 (1987): 349–60; Pamela J. Creedon, “Women, Sport, and Media Institutions: Issues in Sports Journalism and Marketing,” in Mediasport, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (London: Routledge, 1998), 88–99; Michael A. Messner, “Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athletes as Contested Ideological Terrain,” Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988): 197–211; Toby Miller, Sportsex (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
32. Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O. J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 104. See also, Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
33. Italics added. “Glenn Robinson Arrested, Released on Domestic Battery and Weapons Charges,” Jet, 12 August 2000, 48.
34. Nack and Munson, 64–65.
35. Patrick Rogers, “Personal Foul,” People Weekly, 7 August 1995, 60.
36. Nack and Munson, 65.
37. Gary Mihoces, “Sports Stars Juggle Strategies to Sidestep Off-the-field Pitfalls,” USA Today, 9 October 2003, 01c.
38. Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 12.
39. Rick Telander, Heaven is a Playground (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), 12.
40. Marie Hardin, Julie E. Dodd, Jean Chance, and Kristie Walsdorf, “Sporting Images in Black and White: Race in Newspaper Coverage of the 2000 Olympic Games,” Howard Journal of Communications 15 (2004): 211–28.
41. See, for example, Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); John Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Boson, NY: Mariner Books, 1997); bell hooks, “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” in Black Male Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 127–40.
42. Sujata Moorti, Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television's Public Spheres (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 192. See also, Neil A. Wynn, “Deconstructing Tyson: The Black Boxer as American Icon,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 20 (2003): 99–114.
43. Nack and Munson, 66.
44. In arguing against this stereotype of black men enraged, I do not mean to suggest that there is not great reason for black men and women both to experience rage at a US system that continues to oppress their existence. bell hooks makes the point that black rage, does in fact exist; however, this collective rage is against a sustained, systemic racism affecting black folks in the US context. She argues, “Mass media's trivialization of black rage reinforces white denial that white supremacy exists, that it is institutionalized, perpetuated by a system that condones the dehumanization of black people, by encouraging everyone to dismiss rage against racism as in no way a response to concrete reality since the black folks they see complaining are affluent.” bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 29.
45. John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in US Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). See also, Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Hoop Dreams: Professional Basketball and the Politics of Race and Gender,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 23 (1999): 403–20; Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
46. Michael A. Messner, “White Men Misbehaving: Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the Promise of a Critical Standpoint,” in Sex, Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity, ed. Michaeal A. Messner and Donald F. Sabo (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1994), 138.
47. Phil Richards, “NFL, Colts Try to Address Off-Field Abuse,” The Indianapolis Star, 9 January 2000, A1.
48. Steven D. Levitt, “Facing the Rage,” People Weekly, 20 February 1995, 56–60+.
49. Levitt, 57.
50. Alex Tresniowski, “Outrage-ous,” People Weekly, 16 September 1996, 203–4.
51. It is worthwhile to remember that Time magazine literally enhanced O. J.'s blackness through photo editing in their cover story after his initial arrest. See Dickinson and Anderson for further analysis of this darkening.
52. Levitt, 56.
53. “O. J. Simpson's Trial Reveals Role of Sex, Race and Rage in Nation's Hottest Courtroom Drama,” Jet, 13 February 1995, 54.
54. Don Yaeger, “Prisoner of Conscience,” Sports Illustrated, 15 April 2002, 54.
55. Moorti, 73.
56. Fiske, 1996, 80.
57. Banet-Weiser, 409.
58. Marian Meyers, News Coverage of Violence Against Women: Engendering Blame (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 98. See also, Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); Jane Caputi, “The Sexual Politics of Murder,” in Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints, ed. Pauline B. Bart and Eileen Geil Moran (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 5–25; William E. Cote and Roger Simpson, Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims and Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Kozol, 1995.
59. Meyers, 1997, 10.
60. Mia Consalvo, “‘3 Shot Dead in Courthouse’: Examining News Coverage of Domestic Violence and Mail-order Brides,” Women's Studies in Communication 21 (1998): 190.
61. Kozol, 659.
62. D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 134.
63. George P. Cunningham, “Body Politics: Race, Gender, and the Captive Body,” in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellis Blount and George P. Cunningham (New York: Routledge, 1996), 142.
64. Jackson, 12.
65. Moorti, 195.
66. Callie Marie Rennison, Intimate Partner Violence and Age of Victim, 1993–1999, (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 2001).
67. Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in US Culture. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 143. See also, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Audre Lorde, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” in Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 323–63; Marian Meyers, “African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race, and Class in the News,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 95–118.
68. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 175.