Risky Dispositions: Thick Moral Description and Character-Talk in Sports Culture

Abstract

Popular beliefs in an ostensible relationship between superendowed physicality and dispositional trouble have made character the primary moral preoccupation of contemporary sport. Through the example of the NFL Draft, I employ thick moral description to argue for the importance of identifying problems of power and public morality in local, everyday discourses. Character-talk is analyzed as an idiomatic expression that signifies embodied, racialized notions of control and habit that position African American and white athletes in separate and unequal relationships to sports institutions and their presumed capacity to habituate rational, moral control. The importance of thick moral description for rhetorical and cultural criticism and the implications of character-talk for the public status of African American athletes are considered.

Acknowledgments

In addition to the editor and reviewers, the author would like to thank Brenda J. Allen, Michael Butterworth, and Jonathan Crane for their helpful comments during the preparation of this essay.

Notes

For more on general calls for vernacular criticism in rhetorical theory see Ono and Sloop (1995), Hauser (1998), and Hauser (2007).