“Shut Up and Dribble:” Dollar Signs Don’t Excuse Systemic Racism in Sports (or anywhere else, for that matter)!
How much money is human dignity worth?
In a previous post, I said that we should all collectively ignore a certain chocolate-dipped, white racist sports commentator. Seriously. The more attention we give him, the more he gets paid. It does not matter if that attention is negative or positive. In show business, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all. Keep a name circulating, even on a meek little blog like mine, and it most surely benefits that person.
One of the strategies that sports commentators use to assuage racists is the money strategy. When sports commentators want to dodge questions or dodge controversy about the systemic racism prevalent in American sports culture, they routinely bring up the amount of money that Black American athletes supposedly make in their contracts.
It seems as if the commentator class is constantly saying, “Well, you make millions of dollars. You make more than I or other average Americans do. Just shut up and dribble.” To those people, I have a question: how much is human dignity worth?
Seriously, how much is a person’s humanity worth? How much is yours worth? How much is mine worth? Not so long ago in this country, there was a premium price placed upon the bodies of Black males. Unfortunately, one could say that the entire structure of advertisement as we know it in America came from slaveholders alerting buyers of their wares.
This picture, taken from commons.wikipedia.org, makes its rounds on the Internet. Look at the advertisement. The price of this man’s body, this man’s labor, and this man’s life was a whopping $1200 to $1250. The price for women was considerably lower, of course. In this advertisement, $800-$1000. While women could produce children (magically, because in some states it was actually illegal for Black women to name the father of their children; hence, that terrible rhyme, “Momma’s baby, Poppa’s maybe”) they were women, after all. And women’s labor has always been valued lower than men’s. In today’s money, $1250 is somewhere around $39,000. That was $39,000/slave. Now, what if a person had 100 slaves and most of them were men? That’s around $390, 000. The labor of Black slaves, male and female, represented the wealth of America and the wealth that it continues to generate.
What has slavery have to do with athletes? During slavery, wealthy white men set the price for a slave’s humanity. How much has changed? According to the behavior of the NFL owner class, not much. They, a group of wealthy white men, want to set the price for the players’ human dignity. The Plantation (when spelled with an uppercase “p,” it implies a system of psychological and physical repression, rather than a central location) still saturates thinking, mores, the economy, and yes, even sports, in America. The controversy surrounding Kapernick all but proves that. This man is being punished for daring to choose his humanity over money.
And it is an insult to descendants of those who were considered animals and worked like beasts of burden for some commentator -sitting in an air-conditioned building and wrapped in white privilege — to ask other descendants of slaves to “shut up and dribble” for a dollar amount. Unfortunately, we have been there, done that, and gotten the t-shirt in three different sizes (slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation). Along with the journalism and business classes that owners and commentators take, they should enroll in an African American history course, shut up, listen, and read. Or maybe, just maybe, we should affix a dollar amount on the likes of that one commentator who must not be named. Better still, maybe that’s the problem. He and others have already accepted a dollar amount to swallow their humanity and are angry that Kap wouldn’t???? Food for thought.
This is directly from my professor’s diary and not from class. For more information on advertising and slavery, please see www.historymatters.gmu.edu.
