THE VAPIDITY OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

Scientific American recently published an editorial by a Duke anthropologist who is only the most recent academic to suggest there's a racialized gladiator economy in football.  That essay has come in for the mockery it deserves, including from former professional football coach Tony Dungy, who, alone amongst NBC's panel of football pundits, correctly picked the Detroit Lions to win in Green Bay and keep the Packers out of the playoffs.  "As a black man and former NFL player I can say this article is absolutely ridiculous."

It's against my better judgement, but let me take the essay seriously, starting with the author's credentials.  "Tracie Canada is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her research uses sport to theorize race, kinship, care, gender and the performing body, and she is currently working on a book project about the experiences of Black college football players. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia."  That's a misuse of the term "theorize".  It's possible to have theories about the evolution of race, or kinship ties, or sex roles, or performance, and to look for confirming evidence in sports, using rules of inference that are part of your discipline's discourse practice.  Theory first, then evidence.

Let's turn, dear reader, to the professor's argument.

The ordinariness of men running into each other at full speed represents a normalized—even rationalized—violence that is routine to this American game.

This ordinary violence has always riddled the sport and it affects all players. But Black players are disproportionately affected. While Black men are severely underrepresented in positions of power across football organizations, such as coaching and management, they are overrepresented on the gridiron. Non-white players account for 70 percent of the NFL; nearly half of all Division I college football players are Black. Further, through a process called racial stacking, coaches racially segregate athletes by playing position. These demographic discrepancies place Black athletes at a higher risk during play.

There are several phenomena at work in that paragraph, none of them particularly intellectually novel.  For years, observers of sport have fretted about those "demographic discrepancies," particularly in what football calls the "skill position."  Stanford's Jim Plunkett got attention years ago precisely because his team did not involve a white quarterback handing off to black runners during the Pacific Ten run to the Rose Bowl.  For years, economists have understood that people who might have more to lose from suffering injury might be less willing to go out for football: just go to the youth football games in upscale neighborhoods, or see high schools that used to be football powerhouses going to eight or seven players on a side as fewer kids are trying out for the varsity; and reflect on that college admission scam of a few years ago involving upscale parents pretended their kids were sailors or tennis players, while the black kids were developing their skills as football players, including quarterbacks, linebackers, kickers, and left tackles.  "I wish I had known of that quote when I was posting about the gladiator economy. Put in something about how so-called social justice pedagogy embraces illiteracy, innumeracy, and insolence in the name of diversity and we've got a positive program for improving life in the 'hood."

That is, it is the very efforts of the education establishment to be inclusive that prunes the management tree and the development of kickers.  "I can't help but wonder if the weak academic performance of athletic powerhouse high schools contributes to the difficulty College Sports, Inc. has in diversifying the coaching and administrative ranks."  I was writing of the high-school-to-university career path, but the high-school-to-Sunday path starts with College Sports, Inc.

That, in a nutshell, is the gladiator economy. Recruit students from academically weak high schools, keep them eligible, get enough graduated to keep the academic progress rate above the sanctioning line, wish them well, but have those young women and men acquired the human capital to handle the logistics or the fund-raising or advocating before faculty or legislators?

Let alone placating middle-aged men who have had everything arranged for them and want to keep playing for a few more years?

The professor and I are in agreement that football is a rough game, and we even use the same metaphor, "gladiators."

Consumers of the sport assume players will withstand any bodily affront, so they are shocked when a player’s physical limits are exceeded, often on very public stages. People with a vested interest in professional football rationalize excessive violence in this structured space, as well as the ones that encompass college, high school and peewee play, all because they assume that rules, equipment, and regulations exist to prevent death. But this is false protection. While this form of entertainment has been normalized, Hamlin’s injury demonstrates that ordinary violence has potentially deadly consequences, and highlights how Black men’s athletic labor sustains this brutal system.

Here might be an opportunity to look at the participation of youngsters in football, stratified by age, income, neighborhood, and ethnicity.  If I were still supervising senior papers or doctoral theses, I might turn a student loose on such a project.  That's apparently beneath the dignity of a cultural anthropologist.  "While I am not aware of research that compares the rate of injury between Black and white football players, heatstrokes, ACL and labrum tears, ankle sprains, bone breaks, and concussions are just a few of the consequences of how these bodies are used."

I am not aware of how Duke's anthropology department will evaluate her essay for merit money or tenure considerations, but that passage makes me scornful of what follows.

League officials admitted to using race norming—the assumption that Black players have lower baseline cognitive function than white players and suffer less from concussion—in settlements for concussion-related injuries. A former head coach, Brian Flores, has sued the league for racial discrimination in hiring. The NFL’s success and popularity should never be disentangled from its persistent anti-Black practices.

That's a bundle of points. I would think that neurologists, kinesiologists, and physiologists might have something to say about that race norming, but that linked article, also involving the professor, provides no links to such work.  Under the current reward structures in higher education, clinical or other medical evidence that baseline function norms have biases conscious or unconscious would likely receive rapid publication and widespread notice outside the world of journals.

She then turns to the youth football to college stretch of the road to Sunday.

The college system thrives on unpaid athletes’ labor through a power dynamic that sociologist Erin Hatton terms “status coercion,” as coaches manipulate and exploit players’ work to extract value that ultimately leads to revenue for almost every entity involved, except for players themselves. College players suffer the same injuries as professionals, some of which end careers before they even begin. Yet, there is often little support to help players imagine themselves outside of their athletic identities and to cultivate alternative careers.

So it goes when your athletic business model is recruiting students from academically weak high schools and keeping them eligible, with little regard for what happens to the players who will not get that April 'phone call, let alone finish four years in good health.  But that's a risk the athletic recruit faces, irrespective of his ancestry, and the remedy is to ensure that those students, beginning in youth football or high school, acquire the agency to weigh those risks, and act accordingly, or go out for the chess team instead.