“It’s about respect!” college-athlete activism and left neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a critique of left neoliberalism with reference to certain tendencies in cultural studies, antiracist politics, disparity discourse, and college sports. Where the dominant tendency in cultural studies has been to produce complex analyses of identity-based oppression, this article insists on a conception of class politics that, on the one hand, calls for more attention to exploitation and, on the other, de-emphasizes the “working-class identity” model. By examining two recent episodes of athlete activism in college sports—namely, the much-admired “strike against racism” at the University of Missouri in 2015 and the widely condemned (and ultimately unsuccessful) effort by Northwestern University football players to form a union in 2014—the article contends that the commitment to eliminating racism and indifference to ending exploitation in these contexts reflects the broader commitments of a “left-wing” neoliberalism that devotes itself to ending inequality without redistributing wealth.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• neoliberalism
• race
• labor
• exploitation
• sport

Acknowledgements

Joe Tompkins is an assistant professor of Communication Arts at Allegheny College, where he teaches critical theory and media studies. He wishes to thank the editor of CCCS and the two anonymous reviewers for their help with this article. In addition, he is grateful for the valuable feedback of Julie Wilson, Doyle Greene, and the audience at the 2016 Cultural Studies Association conference.

Notes

1. Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22, no. 1 (2013): 49–57; Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014); Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent 64, no. 2 (2017): 130–34; Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–95.

3. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 24.

4. Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

5. Adolph L. Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents,” Socialist Register 48 (2012): 149–75.

6. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 134.

7. Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 87.

8. Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with the Debate?” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 72–81; Jennifer Daryl Slack, “Duel to the Death?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 336–342.

9. Hence, the two anonymous readers of this essay were in sync when they proposed “intersectionality” as a way to add “nuance” to the argument. While I am grateful for their suggestions, I remain unconvinced that intersectionality is the best way to understand class and other forms of inequality, not least because it forestalls frameworks that approach inequality from the standpoint of redistribution. Moreover, it obscures the possibility that remedies for redistribution follow different logics than remedies pertaining to discrimination.

10. Dieter Plehwe, “Introduction,” in The Road from Mount Pelerin, eds. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 34.

11. Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 15.

12. Ibid.

13. The term “disparate exploitation” comes from sociologist Harry Edwards; quoted in Earl Smith, “The African American Student-Athlete,” in Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality on and Off the Field, ed. Charles K. Ross (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2004), 139.

14. Exploitation here refers to the process where labor generates value for capital, not the informal sense of harsh labor conditions. As one anonymous reviewer put it, by this (Marxist) definition, “both wealthy professional athletes and fast food workers are exploited, even if that exploitation differs in degree and lived experience.”

15. As Doug Henwood puts it in another context, “capitalism need not be racist or sexist … What capitalism can’t live with is an end to class exploitation.” Bhaskar Sunkara, “An Interview with Doug Henwood,” Jacobin, 16 May 2013. Of course, racism and sexism have historically acted to justify exploitation. But insofar as their origins (particularly racism in the United States) is inextricable from capitalism, and insofar as racism and sexism are problems of distribution within capitalism, they do not exactly produce the conditions of poverty, although they do account for unequal access to capitalist markets (employment, housing, etc.). But if one is concerned to address the social system that produces economic inequality in the first place (rather than its disparate effects), this is an important distinction to make.

16. Walter Benn Michaels, “What Is the Left Without Identity Politics?” The Nation, December 16, 2016.

17. Walter Benn Michaels, “Picturing the Whole: Form, Reform, Revolution,” Socialist Register 53 (2017): 330.

18. Michaels, “What Is the Left?”

19. Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 75.

20. “Interview: Walter Benn Michaels,” Edges, February 17, 2014, http://edges.gmu.edu/interview-walter-benn-michaels/.

21. See Brooke Sopelsa, “Major Corporations Join Fight Against North Carolina’s ‘Bathroom Bill,’” NBCnews.com, July 8, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/major-corporations-join-fight-against-north-carolina-s-bathroom-bill-n605976; Chris Isidore, “These 127 Companies Are Fighting Donald Trump’s Travel Ban,” CNN.com, February 6, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/06/technology/companies-opposed-trump-travel-ban/.

22. Fraser, “From Redistribution,” 74.

23. Erik Olin Wright, “The Class Analysis of Poverty,” in Interrogating Inequality (London: Verso, 1994), 37–8.

24. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 180.

25. See Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 106.

26. Rita Felski, “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 42.

27. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13.

28. See, for example, John Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film (John Hopkins University Press, 2008); Julie Bettie, “Class Dismissed: Roseanne and the Changing Face of Working-Class Iconography,” Social Text 45 (1995): 125–149.

29. See, for example, Beverly Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (Routledge, 2003); Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

30. See, for example, Lisa Henderson, Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

31. See, for example, Laura Grindstaff, The Money Shot: Trash Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

32. See, for example, Tasha R. Rennels, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: A Cautionary Tale Starring White Working-Class People,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2015): 271–88.

33. Sally R. Munt, ed., Cultural Studies and the Working Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), back cover.

34. Cf. Vivek Chibber, “Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn,” Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 1, no. 1 (2017): 37–56.

35. Sut Jhally, “Stuart Hall: The Last Interview,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 2 (2015): 337.

36. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris, France: UNESCO, 1980).

37. In an echo of Hall’s point, Karen and Barbara Fields argue that beliefs about race (what they call “racecraft”) have made “straightforward talk about class inequality all but impossible.” One example is the white identity politics of the 2016 Trump election, where class issues (a lack of jobs, a “rigged” political system) were displaced onto racial scapegoats (immigrants, criminals), resulting in a bad diagnosis of economic inequality and some poor white people imagining their social victimization in racial rather than class terms. As the Fieldses write: “once racecraft takes over the imagination, it shrinks well-founded criticism of inequality to fit crabbed moral limits, leaving the social grievances of white Americans without a language in which to frame them.” Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 12, 286.

38. Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 206.

39. Quoted on MSNBC.com, “Why ‘Black Lives Matter’ Activists Upstaged Bernie Sanders,” August 11, 2015 (my emphasis).

40. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?” The Atlantic, January 19, 2016.

41. Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter, 194–203.

42. Matt Taibbi, “The Line That May Have Won Hillary Clinton the Nomination,” Rolling Stone, April 28, 2016.

43. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness,” The Atlantic, February 8, 2016.

44. Ibid.

45. Touré F.Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin, August 22, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement.

46. Cedric Johnson, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 1, no. 1 (2017): 60: “This line of thinking always assumes that there is something underneath it all that binds black people together politically, but that reasoning must always rely on some notion of racial essentialism and a suspension of any honest analysis of black political life as it exists” (78).

47. Coates, “The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness.”

48. See William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013).

49. Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter, 49.

50. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 18, 12.

51. Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter, 210.

52. Ibid., 49, 214.

53. Coates, “The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness.”

54. Chuck Collins, “Billionaire Bonanza,” Institute for Policy Studies, December 1, 2015, https://www.ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza/.

55. Anna Ratcliff, “Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World,” Oxfam.org, January 16, 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world.

56. Collins, “Billionaire Bonanza.”

57. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 147. Consider the “alt-right” neoliberals who seek to “awaken a white identity politics,” give priority to “national heritage,” and view politics as “downstream” of culture. It seems they too, like neoliberals on the left, prefer to think about inequality in terms of racial/cultural wars rather than class wars. See Richard Spencer “‘We’re Not Going Away:’ Alt-Right Leader On Voice In Trump Administration,” NPR.com, November 17, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/11/17/502476139/were-not-going-away-alt-right-leader-on-voice-in-trump-administration.

58. Quoted in Adolph Reed, Jr., “Mazzocchi and the Moment,” nonsite.org, November 21, 2016, http://nonsite.org/editorial/mazzocchi-and-the-moment.

59. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 147, my emphasis.

60. Walter Benn Michaels, “Believing in Unicorns,” London Review of Books 35, no. 3 (February 7, 2013).

61. Ibid.

62. William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006).

63. Billy Hawkins, The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and the Predominantly White NCAA Institutions (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

64. This is the logic behind the so-called “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for coaching and administrative positions. Here the problem of inequality is imagined as a “pipeline” problem of discriminatory practices.

65. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 117.

66. Harry Edwards, quoted in Smith, “The African American Student-Athlete,” 139–40.

67. Hawkins, The New Plantation, 182.

68. Ibid.

69. For a complete list of student demands, see http://www.thedemands.org/.

70. Ibid.

71. Quoted in David Morrison, “Spike Lee’s ‘2 Fists Up’ Captures a Semester of Unrest at MU,” Columbia Daily Tribune, April 7, 2016.

72. For details, see Marc Tracy and Ashley Southall, “Black Football Players Lend Heft to Protests at Missouri,” The New York Times, November 8, 2015.

73. Maya Chung and Amber Payne, “Inspired by Mizzou Protests, Students Across Country Focus on Being #BlackonCampus,” NBCnews.com, November 11, 2015.

74. Dave Zirin, “3 Lessons from University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe’s Resignation,” The Nation, November 9, 2015.

75. Michael Miller, “With $1 Million at Stake, U. of Missouri’s President Now Taking Protests Seriously,” Washington Post, November 9, 2015.

76. Philip Bump, “How the Missouri Football Team Just Took Down Its University President,” The Washington Post, November 9, 2015.

77. Miller, “With $1 Million at Stake.”

78. Dave Zirin, “Black Mizzou Football Players Are Going on Strike Over Campus Racism,” The Nation, November 8, 2015.

79. William C. Rhoden, “University of Missouri Football Players Exercise Power in Racism Protest,” The New York Times, November 8, 2015.

80. Michael Connelly, “The Missouri Football Strike Was about a Lot of Things, but Mostly about Respect,” SBNation, November 9, 2015.

81. Ben Strauss, “At Northwestern, a Blitz to Defeat an Effort to Unionize,” The New York Times, April 23, 2014.

82. Quoted in Strauss, “At Northwestern.”

83. Ibid.

84. Quoted in Dave Zirin, “‘Right Now the NCAA is Like a Dictatorship’: Why the Northwestern Football Team Formed a Union,” The Nation, January 29, 2014.

85. Sally Jenkins, “College Athletics Have Many Problems, but a Union Is the Wrong Way to Try and Fix Them,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2014.

86. Jere Longman, “Amid Cheers, Union Bid Stirs Concern for Women,” The New York Times, April 3, 2014; Alejandra Cancino, “Northwestern, Football Players Cap Off Arguments in Union Effort,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2014.

87. Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Limits of Anti-Racism,” Left Business Observer 121 (2009), http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html.