Revisiting The“White Negro” Through Skateboarding

Sociology of Sport Journal 2005;22:356-372 © 2005 Human Kinetics, Inc. “Black-Lash”: Revisiting the“White Negro” Through Skateboarding Sean Brayton Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. Whereas this might be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouacʼs On the Road (1957) and Norman Mailerʼs White Negro (1957). Similar to these countercultural narratives, skateboard media represents a tension between a death of whiteness (symbolized by co-opting “blackness”) and its inevitable rebirth (through prolifi c marketing of white skaters). Unlike the Beats, however, the dialectics of white resistance appear in skateboard media through advertisements that are often underscored by parody, which produces its own set of complexities. Les sports alternatifs ont été situés au sein des idées politiques de contrecoups. Selon ces idées, les représentations marginales ou sous culturelles illustrent un mâle blanc victimisé. Quoique ceci soit vrai de quelques sports, les médias liés à la planche à roulette (ou « skate ») entretiennent une critique de la « blancheur ». Pour comprendre la représentation de la résistance blanche en skate, nous devons placer ce sport dans le contexte historique plus large de la rébellion masculine blanche retrouvée dans les écrits de Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957) et de Norman Mailer (White Negro, 1957). Similaire à ces récits contre-culture, les médias du skate représentent une tension entre la mort de la blancheur (symbolisée par la cooptation de la « noirceur ») et sa renaissance inévitable (par le marketing agressif des planchistes blancs). Contrairement aux « Beats », toutefois, la dialectique de la résistance blanche apparaît dans les médias par le biais de pubs aux parodies évidentes, ce qui produit une complexité certaine. From the time of the civil rights movements to the present, shifting gender and race relations have, in small increments, disrupted the unmentioned privileges of white males. This has resulted in a vociferous group of angry white males appropriating a marginal status in hopes of rescuing their own social advantage The author is with the School of Human Kinetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. 356 06Brayton(356) 356 8/29/05, 4:58:34 PM Revisiting the “White Negro” 357 from the ravages of such purported assaults on white people as affi rmative action, increased illegal immigration, and multiculturalism (Kimmel, 1996; Robinson, 2000). This alleged marginalized white masculinity serves “as an effective means of confi guring people of color (and, to a lesser extent, white women) as an oppres- sive group and angry white men as a group who would, and should revolt” (Ras- mussen, Klinenberg, Nexica, & Wray, 2001, p. 67). Essentially, representations of victimized white men are said to illustrate a conservative zeitgeist of backlash politics (Newitz & Wray, 1997). These insecurities of whiteness and masculinity are refl ected and articulated through popular culture (Whannel, 2002). They are also uttered through the spectacle of sport. Sport has historically been a fi eld in which masculinities and racial stereotypes have been contested, as well as erroneously corroborated (Dworkin & Messner, 1999; Messner & Sabo, 1990). The waxing momentum of athletic affi rmative action, for instance, illustrates the extent to which white male backlash politics are germinated through sport. A bevy of backlash texts, such as Entineʼs (2000) Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sport and Why Weʼre Afraid to Talk About it, have curried an increasing anxiety of white racial inferiority in athletics. Sporting narratives of white victimhood, Kusz (2001, p. 408) suggests, portray black male athletes as a “dominant, discriminating, and exclusionary force whose success unfairly constrains the life possibilities of white male youths by forcing them to abandon their dreams of being a professional athlete.” This logic has been applied to alternative sports whereby subcultural representations bolster white normativity (Kusz, 2003). An activity like skateboarding, for instance, can be read as an attempt to restore white male power in sport (Beal, 1996; Beal & Wilson, 2004; Borden, 2001). Yet there is another side to the angry white male narrative that warrants attention in skateboarding: the rebel male who attempts to refuse whiteness. Whereas a liberal antiracist white subject has been called for (Giroux, 1997), as well as rejected (Wiegman, 1999), by theorists, I draw attention to an alternative version of whiteness articulated through skateboard media. The identity that emerges here is based on an anti-white rhetoric that, though not entirely progressive, still cannot be reduced to the politics of white male backlash. And although the readings of skateboard media ultimately rest with the audience, we must account for the sources by which meaning is negotiated (Dewhirst & Sparks, 2003).1 As such, this article makes a series of claims regarding the representation of skateboarding and renegade white masculinity. First, whereas some sport portrayals are symptomatic of white backlash, skateboard media fosters a critique of whiteness, although a dearth of antiracist practices mutes the progressive potential of this critique. Second, an informed discussion of skateboarding and resistance must be placed within the context of other countercultural narratives of the past to illuminate their function in contemporary times. The white male skater, I argue, is often depicted in a way that resembles the “white Negro” narratives of 1950s Beat culture. This analysis will also reveal that a tension exists between a death of whiteness (symbolized by skate cultureʼs imagining of “blackness”) and its subsequent rebirth (through the prolifi c marketing of white skaters). Thus, this analysis suggests that skateboarding might have less to do with rescuing whiteness (through backlash politics) than celebrating its mythical demise. That is, skateboard media repudiates middle-class whiteness only to replace it with a rejuvenated heteromasculinity that is often informed by a black other. Although representations of the skaters do not overtly participate in 06Brayton(356) 357 8/29/05, 4:58:36 PM 358 Brayton white backlash politics, these images still must be unpacked with sensitivity to the complex articulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Poor White Guys, Backlash Politics, and Sport The fi rst task of this article is to briefl y outline the politics of white male backlash and explain how they are expressed through sport. To begin, several important social factors contribute to this conservative reaction. Seeing their privileges threatened by the successive waves of feminism and the incremental gains of civil rights movements, some white men came to adopt a position of self- proclaimed marginalization by the 1970s (Savran, 1998). Winant (1994) has re- ferred to this as an imagined white disadvantage for which there is little or no supportive evidence. Conservative critics argue that policies designed to implement equal opportunity in the workplace, educational settings, and other social institutions have grown outdated and now serve to discriminate against white men. Evidently, such “unjust” legislation has created a formidable character in U.S. culture—the angry white man (Kimmel, 1996; Savran, 1998). Scholars of critical whiteness studies are attuned to this and have scrutinized claims of white male victimhood and resistance (Rasmussen et al., 2001). As Giroux (1997, p. 378) argues, through backlash sensibilities whiteness becomes visible as it is “aggressively embraced in popular culture in order to rearticulate a sense of individual and collective identity for many Whites who felt under assault by minorities, radicals and multiculturalists.” Symptoms of backlash can be located in popular culture, making it possible to “map the ways in which dominant powers maintain their grip despite the proliferation of cultural difference” (Mackeye, 2002, p. 5). Popular and alternative media not only provide us with a series of cultural leitmotifs, but they also supply, in part, the tools through which we evaluate our social surroundings (Giroux, 2000; Kellner, 1995; 2003). As Whannel (2002, p. 8) suggests, “Forms of popular culture are revealing sites in which to examine the unstable attempts to deal with crisis.” Thus, a wide array of popular fi lms, music, and literature can be read alongside a reactionary politics. For example, in June of 2003, the impresarios at MTV launched the Spike network into 86 million American homes (“TNN,” 2003). Ironically, Spike dubs itself “the fi rst network for men” and showcases the retro-machismo of programs like American Gladia- tors and Stan Leeʼs smarmy cartoon Stripperella (an action heroine/exotic dancer based on the oeuvre of Pamela Anderson). By gearing its content toward (white) men, Spike represents an attempted revival of heteronormative masculinity that does more to parody identity politics than refl ect it. Amusingly, the network fea- tures what is perhaps the most revealing white backlash sport under the saturnalia of postmodernity—Slam Ball—an entertainment sport derived from basketball in which “White men can jump” through the use of courtside trampolines.

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