Historian Darlene Clark-Hine writes that “the experience
of black men and women in American sports are a microcosm of their
lives in American society. The privileges whites enjoyed in
sports paralleled the disadvantages and exclusions that were a constant
part of black life.”
Certainly the ordeal experienced this year by 2006
Olympic Gold Medalist Shani Davis is yet another example of how
the privileges white athletes enjoy continue to parallel the disadvantages
that are continuing to be a part of black life. Shani Davis
is the first African-American male to win an Olympic Gold medal
in an individual competition of the Winter Olympics, however he
is not able to enjoy the privileges afforded to white Olympic Gold
medalists due to the disadvantages he has experienced. These
publicized disadvantages support the notion that institutionalized
racism in America is certainly still alive.
Norman Kelley recently wrote that the greatest unrecognized
achievement of the civil rights movement is the unintended consequences
of convincing white Americans that racism is no longer a serious
social and structural problem in the United States. By studying
the stark similarities in the experiences of pioneering black athletes
such as Althea Gibson and that of Shani Davis, it is clear that
racism in the greater corporate society is still a serious
social and structural problem in the United States. However
I advocate a study from an alternative perspective from the one
Davis himself has revealed in his recent quotes in Ebony and
Jet articles. In the March 27, 2006 issue of Jet,
Davis states: “When I skate and people try to get me down, I’m
thinking, Malcolm X had to do this, Martin Luther King had to do
this or Jack Johnson went through this and it's nothing compared
to what they had to go through. So I just draw strength from
those guys who paved the road that made it possible for Black people
period.”
As important as this is, it is even more imperative
for Davis to draw even more strength by studying and mentioning
the black female athletes who also have important lessons to teach.
While I am not implying that Davis has not sufficiently considered
the experience of black female athletes, I am simply stating that
Davis must be sure to include their perspectives in his public statements.
Especially since Shani Davis’s most vocal and articulate defenders
have been black women such as his mother Cherie Davis, Deborah Mathis,
Julianne Malveaux, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. These perspectives
undoubtedly can help Shani Davis to overcome the hurdles of the
entrenched American racism. However, to overcome such hurdles
requires understanding the nature of the problem. To understand
oppression in professional sports in its most complete form requires
the perspective of a black woman. Darlene Clark-Hine writes
in Speak Truth To Power that:
“It is senseless to discuss
the impact of racism on the formation of black identities without
concomitant explorations into the ways race, a social construct
of tremendous importance, nevertheless intersects with constructs
of gender and class. Arguably, the history of black women
in the United States provides the best available lens through which
to illustrate the intersections of race, gender, and class across
time.”
Therefore, to discuss the impact of racism on Shani
Davis, I hope to compare his experience with that of a black female
athlete who also broke color barriers in what was then an elite
sport, professionally played by only whites: tennis champion
Althea Gibson, who later became the first African-American to win
Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958.
Certainly Althea Gibson’s experience in the early
to mid-twentieth century provides illuminating sources of strength
that could encourage Mr. Davis and should be recognized. Like
Davis, Althea Gibson became a pioneer in a sport dominated exclusively
by whites, an elite sport that arguably demands more finances than
others. To date, an important primary source about the experience
of Althea Gibson is her authorized biography Born To Win, written
by Frances Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb. Gibson’s experience
with the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) and the greater American
society in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties mirror Davis’s experience
with the U.S. Speedskating Association and the unchanged American
society that operates with a more covert yet latent racism.
There are events in Gibson’s life as told in Born
To Win that draw disturbing similarities to the experience of
Shani Davis as stated in current media reports. For example,
Born To Win states that in 1949, when Gibson became the first
black woman to play tennis in the exclusively white Forest Hills
court, the United States Lawn Tennis Association nonetheless “maintained
a cold shoulder given the widespread segregation in society at the
time.” Reasons like these are why the American Tennis Association
(ATA) was founded in 1916, to increase the field of black athletes.
While
many ATA players were thrilled for Gibson’s 1949 breakthrough, many
said the USLTA needed to strengthen its opposition to exclusions
based on race or religion at USLTA events. They also felt
that the USLTA had an “implied quota” and too many barriers. “No
Negro player, man, or women, has ever set foot on one of these courts,”
wrote the journalist Lester Rodney of the West Side Tennis Club
at Forest Hills. Rodney says, “In many ways, it’s even a tougher
personal Jim Crow-busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s
when he first stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.”
Deborah Mathis writes that Cherie Davis, mother and
personal manager of Shani Davis, describes the relationship between
Davis and the U.S. Speedskating Associations as “poor,” evidenced
by the fact that they have not, to this day, posted his biography
and record on its website.
However the biographies and records of all other athletes who are
over 90% white have been posted. Of course, the U.S. Speed
Skating Association in their willful ignorance would probably not
attribute this to their racism, but to their heavily publicized
disagreement with Davis over the corporate sponsorship logos on
his skinsuit.
Tracey Robinson-English in the May 2006 issue of Ebony
writes that under the association’s national team agreement,
athletes are supposed to wear skinsuits with logos provided by U.S.
Speedskating. However, Davis opted for a corporate sponsor
outside of America, Deutsche Bank (DSB Bank of Holland) which clearly
angered the U.S. Speedskating Association and is probably responsible
for his long-standing fallout with the organization that exists
to this day. In my personal interview with Ms. Robinson-English,
she revealed that in helping her son avoid American corporations
for sponsorship, Cherie Davis was protecting her son.
Cherie said that she refused a Wheaties endorsement
offer because they did not really plan to unequivocally support
her son. She said their full endorsement was very conditional;
they only guaranteed commercial spots if he medaled, without the
type of provisions that were arguably less friendly than those offered
to white winter Olympic athletes.
This kind of endorsement was weaker than the one DSB
Bank of Holland provided. Second, she also noted that Nike
in particular wanted him to make a lot of personal appearances
that conflicted with his own personal training schedule; ultimately,
Nike simply did not have Davis’s best interest at heart,
according to Cherie Davis and thus did not deserve her son’s endorsement.
This kind of endorsement was also arguably weaker than the one DSB
Bank of Holland provided. Why couldn’t American corporations
offer Davis their full support without it being riddled with conditions?
Why couldn’t these giant corporations find ways to work around Shani
Davis’s schedule to support him so that he would not feel forced
to look outside America? In a March 10, 2006 interview with
Shani Davis, Tavis Smiley said:
Tavis: “I like your
spirit and attitude but it does not make me happy to hear that you
ain’t been able to get no phone calls from nobody about endorsement
opportunities as a result of doing what you’ve done historically?
As an African-American? And your phone ain’t blowing up?”
Davis: “No. I guess
that’s just the way it is. I think maybe, maybe…there might
be something but I don’t know.”
I urge to inform my brother, Shani Davis, that there
is something. Its called American institutionalized
racism and in order to continue surviving it, it is important to
study methods of surviving such oppression by studying the experiences
of one Althea Gibson. Born To Win reveals that Althea
Gibson “had more freedom moving about Europe and other parts of
the world than she did in her own country.”
The relationship between corporate America and Shani
Davis demonstrates in very significant ways the ultimate value that
the center of corporate marketing, or Madison Avenue places on black
life. This kind of disrespect that Cherie Davis rightfully
discerned and rejected is discussed at length by another scholar,
Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown Law Professor who happens to be a woman
of color and writes in her latest book The Failures of Integration
when she describes the pattern of white flight, that includes not
only residents but also major businesses and markets, away from
black communities:
“Even when minority-owned, minority-formatted radio
stations were number one in terms of ratings, mainstream advertisers
would send their advertising dollars elsewhere. The practice
of making racist or ignorant assumptions about the buying habits
of people of color in order to justify not spending advertising
dollars with stations that were reaching more people than any
other in their markets was widespread. In short, black communities
and the assets they bring are frequently devalued by nonblack
institutions and people”
Many American corporations probably devalued Shani
Davis’s endorsement of their product because of their racist or
ignorant assumptions about what he should be giving up to them for
their money. Cherie Davis clearly proved to them and to the
American public that money will not be their god. The
American dollar bill will not dictate the direction of her son’s
professional advancement. The relationship between these American
corporations and Cherie Davis is a crucial, essential, instructive
example as to how to maintain your dignity and morals in the face
of million dollar offers.
What was apparently more important than millions of
dollars was the integrity of her son’s career work and ultimately
of course, her son. This kind of decision certainly is not
popular, but was certainly more moral. Popular approval would
advocate a “profit-at-all-costs” relationship with American corporations
that Cherie Davis clearly avoids.
This kind of relationship is seriously challenged
in an upcoming book by New York Times sportswriter William
Rhoden entitled Forty Million Dollar Slaves, suggesting that
the relationship between professional athletes and team owners are
like slaves to plantation owners. It was this kind of slave
relationship that Cherie Davis was trying to prevent her son from
entering. Like Margaret Garner, Cherie Davis was doing all
that she could to make sure her child avoids living in a certain
kind of slavery, a kind that is undoubtedly more inhumane and brutal
than that during Garner’s time, but one that is nonetheless comparable.
Rhoden’s book explains the dangerous relationship between the black
male athlete or “new slave” and the American corporate world.
It includes provocative chapter titles such as Integration: The
Dilemma of Inclusion Without Power. Certainly Cherie Davis
by asserting her son’s ability to earn a Gold medal and her insistence
on a stronger contract from corporations was trying to assert power
that American corporations were clearly unwilling to yield.
Therefore she had to move the way so many African-Americans are
forced to move when backed into a corner: outside the country.
Commentator Julianne Malveaux succinctly and articulately
described this incident when she said on a February 23, 2006 News
& Notes program that:
“…white folks are sending
e-mails to him under friend’s page using the n-word. It is
utterly absurd…our country missed an opportunity to celebrate an
excellent athlete because we are so seeped in our racism, and in
the pathology of so-called patriotism that we forget the U.S. Speed
Skating Association does not support this young man. He trains
in Canada. His momma is running around wearing orange, the
Danish colors, as opposed to our colors, because of how rude they
have been to him and this is a single mom who has sacrificed all
kind of stuff to get this young brother going and that’s the story
that needs to be told here.”
Speaking of American corporations, BET also missed
a phenomenal opportunity to celebrate an excellent athlete when
they did not even nominate Shani Davis for their 2006 Best Athlete
of the Year Award. They gave it to yet another basketball
player.
That was utterly disrespectful. The rudeness
of other American individuals such as speedskating teammate Chad
Hedrick reveals other reasons why a corporate endorsement from the
U.S. would be unlikely. Mathis wrote that Hedrick wanted to
bring home five Gold medals, including one for a race involving
the U.S. team. Hedrick was angry that Davis would not participate
in the team event, saying that he “felt betrayed in a way.
Not only did he not participate, he wouldn’t even discuss it with
me as a leader of the team.”
In fact, Melody Hoffman in Jet writes that
“Shani was never among the five skaters U.S. Speedskating
officials entered in the [team] event. Since January, Shani
and his coach made it clear that he would not be skating in the
pursuit and preferred to concentrate on his later individual races…Shani
could never have pulled out of the inaugural event because he never
entered.” However the American media has insisted on unfairly
characterizing Davis as “unpatriotic” and “selfish” because he did
not participate in the team event with Hedrick.
NBC commentator Bob Costas has gone to great lengths
to castigate Davis as not being a team player. When Davis
won the 1,000 meter race, Hedrick would not congratulate him, according
to Davis who said “it would have been nice after I won the 1000
if he would have been a good teammate and shook my hand, just like
I shook his hand – or hugged him – after he won the 5,000.”
Being the fierce competitors that Hedrick and Davis
are, why exactly would Hedrick think that Davis should immediately
perform the team event when he was struggling with endorsements
from American corporations? And based on the type of coverage,
it was clear that corporate-network coverage of Shani Davis was
clearly biased against him. Davis was labeled ‘rude’ for his
terse interview on NBC, where Davis said about an NBC reporter that
“I didn’t have anything to say to her because I saw the way she
was with Chad and I didn’t have any respect for her. I had
no intentions on talking to NBC at all but they (the U.S. Olympic
Committee) forced me to.”
Melissa Harris Lacewell poignantly traces Davis’s
treatment to Jim Crow:
“He made a decision to put his personal goals for
success above those of another athlete. He chose not to
grin for the camera and announce that he’s not going to Disney
World. These hardly seem like headline provoking choices,
but when these choices are made by a black man, the first black
man of Winter Olympic Glory, they provide America’s racial angst.
Black men in America face very strict constraints on their public
behavior. Powerful images of black men as aggressors, sexual
predators, emerge at the same time that the black men first assumed
the role of citizen following Reconstruction. Under lynch
mob rule, black men could be murdered for the slightest infraction
of the social code. When Shani Davis failed to act sufficiently
gleeful after his win, he was asked ‘are you angry?’ Our
nation continues to read black male autonomy as frightening, angry,
and aggressive. The subtext here is racial. How dare
you keep a white skater from reaching his goal just so that you
can pursue your own? How dare you not smile broadly enough
for the cameras in order to reassure the nation that you are a
safe black man? Black men have the right to claim
their victories and their humanity, unconstrained by nation’s
racial rules.”
The racial rules that Lacewell mentions are unspoken,
however Davis has stated that he feels like the Jack Johnson of
speed skating. In Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and
Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey Ward writes that U.S. authorities
were seeking the arrest of Johnson under the 1912 Mann Act, which
made it a crime to transport white women across state boundaries
for “immoral purposes,” and Johnson then had a white wife.
It was said about Johnson that he “has insulted every white woman
in the United States.”
No doubt similar repercussions were felt by Davis
when he refused to engage the white female NBC reporter who refused
to engage him before he won the gold medal. Davis felt the
retaliation of this insult against white women when he was attacked
by the American media for being “selfish” and “rude.” Johnson
fled to Canada, while Davis trains in Canada. Davis also discloses
to Tavis that to this day, money is still hard to come by, despite
his Gold medals. Althea Gibson said less than two years after
her Wimbledon win that “I may be queen of tennis right now, but
right now I reign over an empty bank account.” She later says:
“The taste of disappointment was distinctly bitter
to me. When I looked around me, I saw that white tennis
players, some of whom I had thrashed on the court, were picking
up offers and invitations. Suddenly it dawned on me that
my triumphs had not destroyed the racial barrier once and for
all, as I had – perhaps naively – hoped…But once a Negro has established
himself and the snubs still come, does he really have any alternative
but to believe he is being discriminated against by virtue – or
should I say by vice – of his skin color, I boil over with indigination”
William Rhoden writes in Ebony that Althea
Gibson was “the most significant black athlete in America.”
However Born to Win reveals that for a long time she was
“dead broke.” Gibson came along too early to have the monetary
awards to go along with her talent. There was no prize money
when Althea won Wimbledon. Venus Williams, on the other hand,
earned $650,000 for winning Wimbledon. The most Althea ever
made in playing tennis was $100,000 during the year that she turned
pro – and that was before expenses.
David Dinkins is quoted as saying, “it’s one of the
many injustices in life that Althea never really made any money
at this sport as she should have. But those were tough times.
One appreciates the fact that she was not only black, but a black
woman – and those were pre-civil rights days when she was accomplishing
all this greatness.”
In her 1968 memoir, Gibson noted the lack of endorsements,
the lack of offers to teach or tour, the lack of pros, to play,
the lack of money from seemingly good business ventures gone bad.
Most of all she noted that any barriers she had destroyed had been
erected behind her again. Arthur Ashe pointed out that it
took him years to understand “the emotional toll of repressing anger
and natural frustration.” And he, far more than Althea, was
acknowledged to have been proactive and outspoken in venting his
feelings on racism. So much so that he published three volumes
of the African-American athlete’s experience entitled A Hard
Road To Glory, where he describes the presence of Jim Crow in
every conceivable American sport.
Certainly Shani Davis’s experience proves that the
barriers that Gibson broke down are still present and produce yet
another hard road to Glory. These barriers need to be assessed
by the U.S. Speed Skating Association and other professional sports
association with currently low numbers of people of color so that
this country is not shamed by their own citizens being sponsored
by corporations in other countries. That is, assuming that
America is comfortable with its athletes of color being endorsed
by companies outside the U.S. This assumption has yet to be
challenged on a systemic, nationwide level at the moment.
Althea Gibson was no doubt profoundly affected by
the impact of institutionalized racism on her life. She dealt
with racial injustice in her own way, one of them was her medically
diagnosed depression. Her niece said that “she didn’t like
talking about her sickness.” Her doctor said that “she had
a lot of pride. That’s part of the depression, and becoming
more or less reclusive.”
However, Gibson’s experience of her depression is
an instructive lesson for Shani Davis. It teaches Davis to
not underestimate the impact of psychosocial forces and to identify
them before they in fact try to obliterate his accomplishments.
Rhoden writes that Althea Gibson had a profound impact on the “psychosocial
impact of black America.” However as much psychosocial influence
she gave, she was also on the receiving end of such influence by
a very real and racist society that denied opportunities to pioneering
people of color in sports. Darlene Clark-Hine writes that:
“…an enlightened future is
possible only if we are finally able to comprehend and confront
the damage that historic sexual [and gender] exploitation has done
to black girls and women. Further, we must fully understand
the close friendship and family ties between black women.
Only within the realm of these critical relationships can they receive
the psychosocial support that has helped them escape the paralysis
of being the country’s greatest and most total victim.”
Clearly family relationships are essential to athletes
coping with the lack of endorsements due to a racist society that
suppresses accomplishments, evidenced by the U.S. Speedskating website’s
omission of Davis’s information. The first American woman
to win three Olympic Gold medals, Wilma Rudolph, states in her memoir,
“…the fact of the matter is that black women athletes
are on the bottom rung of the ladder in American sports.
They wind up drifting back to where they began, and nobody ever
hears from them again. Sure the situation should be changed,
but who is going to tell the company presidents and advertising
agencies to start making room for black women athletes?”
More specifically, Rudolph’s question can be rephrased
in the context of Davis’s experience to ask: who is going
to tell the American corporation presidents and advertising agencies
to start making room for black speedskaters? Especially when,
as Davis admitted to Tavis Smiley, speedskaters of color are pushed
away from the field.
Davis describes a speedskater of color to Tavis and
says that “he was one of the first that was considered a true threat
to a lot of skaters, but they found a way to get him out of skating
because he wasn’t an American citizen; he was of Nigerian descent.”
Still, Rudolph poses a crucial question and an even more important
answer to the question of coping with such constraining environments.
Rudolph said “whatever the future holds, I’ll be ready
for it, for I’ve learned a family’s a powerful thing.” This
is also exactly what Darlene Clark-Hine states as being the most
important coping mechanism with institutionalized racism: the family
relationships. The support Shani receives from his mother
proves that he will be ready for any obstacle in his way.
Rhone Fraser is a graduate assistant in the Department
of Africana Studies at the University of South Florida. Contact:
[email protected]. |