Four thoughts on Ray Rice: 4. Are athletes the problem?

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) In the past few weeks, I have been providing four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Ray Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. For reason number one, click here; or two, click here; or three, click here. Today, I conclude with reason number four.

4. The last reason I want to share for why we should stop vilifying Ray Rice is that fact that doing so feeds into a notion that all athletes are essentially violent. Certainly, our earlier discussion of coercive entitlement and masculinity could understandably leave readers with this impression. After all, if athletes are socialized to treat their bodies as instruments of violence, and, further, are taught to wield them against opponents on the field of play in an effort to win not only games, but the financial rewards that accrue to them, doesn't it follow that they will carry that violence with them off the field? Well, yes, and no. We have covered the former answer in post number one in this series, but what of the latter?

It is easy in a discussion of structure (that is, the systems and institutions that pre-exist us and within which we live, for example, hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexual, and ability) to sweep the concept of agency (the ability of the individual person to determine her own fate) away entirely. This is not altogether fair, however. As difficult and seemingly immoveable as structural obstacles may seem (and, indeed, often are), this does not mean that they are impossible to scale. For instance, although it is more difficult for a non-white woman to become a top executive in a corporate hierarchy than a white man due to the systemic discrimination that exists along lines of gender and race, it is not impossible.

What does this mean in the context of athletes and violence? Well, as much as athletes may be conditioned to use violence in their everyday lives, and as difficult as it may be to figure out how to switch it off, many nevertheless succeed in doing so. These individuals deserve to be applauded for that fact, not simply tarred by the Ray Rice brush.

What I'm trying to say is that Ray Rice's actions cannot be read metonymically to stand for the actions of football players in general. How do I know? Because football players explicitly said so on  Twitter shortly after the extended elevator video was released. For instance, Terrance Knighton of the Denver Broncos commented,

"As players we must speak up. Stand up for what's right. I don't give a damn who u are or how much money you make. No place for this," and then, "If there's anyway to open that case up and give this guy the punishment he deserves, it NEEDS to be done," and, finally, "That man should be thrown out the the nfl and thrown into jail. Shame on those deciding his punishment. Smh."

TJ Lang of the Green Bay Packers said simply, "2 games. Disturbing." Likewise, Duke Ihenacho of the Washington professional football team said,

"No I don't care how you slice it, it's wrong. They gotta open the case back up and come down hard on this one..." and then, "& being a fan of someone that's a good player is one thing, but this is way bigger than football. Don't be blind to what's really important."

Chris Harris of the Denver Broncos added, "The NFL should have zero tolerance for domestic violence. There is never a reason for any man to be violent towards any woman." The list goes on.

The point is that players had the courage to speak publicly about the issue and confront their own peers even before the NFL reversed course and extended Rice's suspension to the whole season.

This stands in contrast to the actions of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's various owners, who continue to implausibly deny that they had viewed footage of what Rice did when they handed down his original two game suspension. It is easy (and just) for people to decry the violence of football, especially when it leaks off the field. What we seem to be less inclined to condemn, however, are the economic forces that propel the violence in the game, and our complicity in them as fans and consumers of the NFL. There is relatively little criticism of the fact that the NFL is an industry that is worth billions of dollars (the most valuable team, the Dallas Cowboys, is worth over $3 billion alone) and that players are taught to hit hard precisely because fans love to see them do so. If fans want to watch, then owners get paid. If they didn't then the NFL wouldn't exist. It's a simple equation, really.

It is very likely that Ray Rice was initially handed only a two game suspension because the NFL wanted to see him, one of its stars, on the field generating revenue for the league more than it cared about the implications of gender-based violence. Although players are often accused of greed (an argument that is particularly hard to defend in the NFL, in which contracts are not guaranteed) it is, in fact, ownership that is inherently motivated by a thirst for capital. After all, how many owners spoke out to denounce the two game suspension for Rice? Not one, of course.

There are a couple of lessons here. First, it is a mistake to assume that all athletes are conditioned in them same ways to the same degrees by the prevailing ideologies of sport. While those ideologies are seductive, and thus difficult to resist, there are individuals who are able to do so, and they are worthy of our admiration. Second, although they are not the ones performing violence on the field or, typically, off, owners bear far more responsibility for the culture of coercive entitlement than we are usually willing to admit. The inherent violence of the NFL has been fostered and marketed in large part because it is a remarkably lucrative source of revenue for them.

The implication of this second point is crucial. If we are really serious about challenging the culture of coercive entitlement in sport, we cannot just look to players to change their behaviour. We need to start asking more fundamental questions about violent sports like football, such as whether the pleasure that fans receive and the money that owners (and players to a much lesser extent) generate from these games are worth the frequently devastating consequences to players on the field and the people around them off of it. For, gender-based violence is not simply the purview of deviant individuals; it is an all-too-frequent consequence of activities that teach men to use violence as a necessary tool for getting what they want and need.

Activities like football.

Four thoughts on Ray Rice: 3. Race and violence

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) In the next few days, I will provide four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Ray Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. For reason number one, click here or two, click here. Today, reason number three.

3. Chuck Knoblauch. Josh Lueke. Brett Myers. Patrick Roy. Semyon Varlamov. Ray Rice.

The people on this list have two things in common: they are all athletes and they are all alleged perpetrators of gender-based violence. However, only one member of this group has become the centre of a popular culture and media fire-storm. Can you guess who that is?

Oh, yeah, and there is also this: only one is black.

That one, of course, is the now infamous Ray Rice. In this post I will attempt to explain why the vilification of Rice as an individual has deflected attention away from the persistent racialization of black masculinity as inherently violent and criminal.

The starting point for this discussion is the simple fact that we all know who Ray Rice is and what he did. This is noteworthy because what he did is so disturbingly common, including amongst  athletes in all the major sports. I contend that one of the primary reasons why we have all been so quick to indict Rice is because of his identity as an African-American. Again, as I have said before, I do not in any way condone what Rice did -- I consider it fundamentally abhorrent. However, what I want to remain attentive to is why it is Rice we are up in arms about and not the other names on the above list.

In order to answer this question, I believe we must make a brief examination of the role of race as a socially-constructed form of identity in American history. By stating that race is socially-constructed, I mean that there is nothing biological that separates human beings into discrete racial categories. Rather, race is an inconsistent and unsound idea developed by humans to explain superficial physical differences. Yet, the fundamental insufficiency of race as an explanatory concept has done little to inhibit the radical impact it has had on modern history. This is another way of saying that although race itself is not real, the idea of race is, and that idea has come to shape the social organization of the world we live in in profound ways.

The history of the United States bears this out. Prior to the mid-19th century, the defining feature of American society was the institution of slavery, an institution ideologically-predicated on the idea of race. African-Americans were understood to be less human than whites by the dominant white society and were sold as slaves who were compelled to labour for the material gain of their owners. Part of this dehumanization was the notion that black people were naturally better-suited for physical labour, that they were, in a sense, more animal than whites.

The U.S. Civil War abolished slavery, but it did not abolish the idea of race, nor of racial hierarchy. What it did was create insecurity among whites who had previously felt comfortable in their status as the dominant group in society (note: this is an obvious generalization, as significant class differences existed among whites). The end of slavery ushered in the spectre of class mobility and the possibility of competition. So, in order to enforce a new racial order -- the order of Jim Crow segregation -- the practice of lynching was developed. Lynching involved the false accusation that a black man had raped a white woman. The consequence of this accusation was the murder of the black man by a white lynch mob, a form of terrorism designed to enforce a racial order. The consequence of this practice for the idea of race was to instil in the popular imagination the notion that blackness was associated with dangerous, aggressive, violent sexuality (the myth of the black rapist).

What emerges out of this history is a popular notion of black masculinity closely associated with animal violence and sexuality. This is an idea that is reproduced today through the notion of the black criminal who must be policed through racial profiling and deadly violence (think Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, etc.), a paradigm that Ray Rice fits neatly into. It is easy for America to accept that Ray Rice is a deviant criminal because that is the pathology of the black man. The public excoriation of Rice is a convenient way for a society that continues to be governed by hegemonic whiteness to wipe its hands of responsibility for gender-based violence. After all, it is simply a black problem. Meanwhile, Knoblauch, Lueke, Myers, Roy, and an entire society marked by coercive entitlement and rape culture deftly evade accountability.

There is another side to the issue of race, Ray Rice, and gender-based violence, as well, and that is the question of why the NFL's original suspension (two games) was so short. The unfortunate reality is that the length of the suspension may have had some correlation with the race of the survivor of the assault, Rice's partner. The reality is that we live in a society in which non-white women are subjected to much higher rates of violence than their white counterparts. In the United States, 29% of black women report having experienced intimate partner violence, and, although they comprise only 8% of the U.S. population, black women make up 22% person of intimate partner homicide victims. In Canada, indigenous women are three times more likely than non-indigenous women to experience violent crime.

In this context, the mere fact of violence against a black woman was apparently not enough to warrant more than a token punishment for Rice. Sadly, this is all too representative of the fact that violence against non-white women does little to raise eyebrows in our society. Indeed, even in the rare situation in which a story of the murder of a black woman is sensationalized -- the murder of Renisha McBride, for example, who was killed for seeking assistance at the home of a white man in the Detroit area after an auto-mobile accident -- media coverage sought to blame McBride for the violence (the Associated Press, for instance, tweeted: "Suburban Detroit homeowner convicted of second-degree murder for killing woman who showed up drunk on porch."

For all these reasons, then, it is impossible to divorce the Ray Rice saga from the broader context of structural racism. Rice fits all too neatly into the mould of the criminal, animal, violent black man, just as his wife can be carelessly discarded as just another non-white woman subject to violence. Black men are always already criminal, while black women are never truly victims of crime. The Ray Rice story manages to reproduce both of these narratives. This is why it is essential that we make the connection between race and Rice; the failure to do so too often results in a form or representational racial violence.

Four thoughts on Ray Rice and gender-based violence: 2. Respect, privacy, and the myth of "provocation"

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) Over the next few weeks, I will provide four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. For reason number one, click here. Reason number two is detailed below.

2. When we talk about what is wrong with Ray Rice, the conversation tends to inevitably turn to the person he assaulted, his then fiancée, now wife. I have deliberately chosen not to refer to her by name because at no time has she asked to have her private business broadcast around the world.

Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened to her when the Ray Rice story emerged at the top of the news cycle. The lynch-pin of the story is the video released by TMZ that chronicles exactly what happened to her in the Atlantic City elevator. This is a video that no one in the public sphere has any right to see, for it documents what was assuredly a deeply personal and private moment in her life. It should only be viewed with her explicit consent. This is what she had to say on that subject (from a post by Dave Zirin that makes a similar argument):

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I'm mourning the death of my closest friend. But you have to accept the fact that reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media and unwanted [opinions] from the public has cause my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing...

That is not what consent sounds like. That is the voice of a person who finds it painful to have her experience and identity dragged through the news. Yet, despite this unequivocal statement, in an incredible and egregious violation of her basic right to privacy, the video was repeatedly aired by every major U.S. news and sports television network. It has also been watched by countless others over the internet, not to mention shared, analyzed, judged, and commented upon. We need to move the conversation to a broader discussion of structural gender-based violence because we need to move the conversation away from the person that Ray Rice hurt. As Zirin puts it in the title of his piece, otherwise we are just "revictimizing" her.

The ethical imperative not to violate her privacy is not the only reason to stop discussing the specifics of this story, however. We also need to stop parsing the details of the case because in doing so we create the false impression that those details matter. They don't. Yet, many people think that they do and they have shared that perspective from very prominent media platforms. For instance, on the ESPN television program First Take shortly after the original two-game suspension was handed down to Rice, Stephen A. Smith  said:

"But, as a man who was raised by women, see, I know what I'm gonna do if somebody touches a female member of my family. I know what I'm gonna do, I know what my boys are gonna do, I know what, I'm gonna have to remind myself that I work for the worldwide leader, I'm gonna have to get law-enforcement officials involved because of what I'm gonna be tempted to do. But, what I've tried to implore the female members of my family, some of whom you have all met and talked to and what have you, is that, again, and this is what, I've done this all my life, let's make sure we don't do anything to provoke wrong actions. Because, if I come, or if somebody else come, whether it's law enforcement officials, your brother, or the fellas that you know, if we come after somebody has put there hands on you, it doesn't negate that the fact that they already put their hands on you. So, let's try to make sure that we can do our part in making sure that that doesn't happen...And, I think that just talking about what guys shouldn't do, we gotta also make sure that you can do your part to do whatever you can do to make, to try to make sure it doesn't happen. We know they're wrong, we know they're criminal, we know they probably deserve to be in jail. And, Ray Rice's case, he probably deserves more than the two game suspension, which we both acknowledged. But, at the same time, we also have to make sure that we learn as much as we can about elements of provocation -- not that there's real provocation -- but, the elements of provocation, you've gotta make sure that you address them because what we've gotta do is do what we can to try to prevent the situation from happening in anyway and I don't think that's broached enough, is all I'm saying."

The focus on individual cases of gender-based violence ultimately becomes a focus on contingency, on the specific details of what happened in any given case. It becomes a question of who did what and why and whether it was justified. These are questions that have zero value, for they obfuscate the most important and most basic fact: gender-based violence is never legitimate. Never. No matter what.

They also make it more difficult to see the second most important and most basic fact: that gender-based violence is a structural issue. That is, it is a social issue, a cultural issue, a masculinity issue. When we are able to understand this premise, the question of "elements of provocation" is rendered unintelligible. Or, it is rendered intelligible in all its absurdity. For, the only context in which making someone angry can be understood to be legitimate provocation for the use of violence is one in which a person is socialized to believe that violence can provide appropriate resolution to anger. In other words, a society in which coercive entitlement is a prevailing ideology. If we do not accept the premise that coercive entitlement is legitimate, then it becomes impossible for any form of provocation to exist that might legitimize gender-based violence.

If we look at the Ray Rice story from these two angles, it becomes easy to see why we need to stop focusing on the details of the case. It's pretty simple: we need to honour the request for privacy made by the survivor of the assault. And, we need to understand that gender-based violence is caused by structural factors, principally a philosophy of manhood based on the notion that violence is an appropriate tool for getting men what they want. This means that gender-based violence is not caused by the "provocation" of women. Ever.

Four thoughts on Ray Rice and gender-based violence: 1. Coercive entitlement, masculinity, and violence

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) In the next few days, I will provide four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Ray Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. Today, I begin with reason number one.

1. In a recent story by the CBC, I was asked what I thought about the Ray Rice situation. They quoted and paraphrased me as follows:

"It’s a mistake to say this is a Ray Rice problem," says Nathan Kalman-Lamb, co-author of Out of Left Field: Social Inequality and Sport. "This is a social problem. This is a problem with toxic masculinity and rape culture."

Kalman-Lamb says men are socialized to use violence as a tool to resolve all kinds of situations particularly in sports.  

"In sport men are taught that through violence on the playing field they are going to receive rewards, monetary accolades, and celebrity. Violence is consistently validated," says Kalman-Lamb.  

The development of these instincts towards violence on the field is what creates a problem off the field, where athletes eventually come to see aggression as normal because they are asked to rehearse these kinds of behaviours over and over again says Kalman-Lamb.

I repeat these points here because they cannot be emphasized strongly enough in a discussion about Ray Rice and gender-based violence. It is a fundamental mistake to think that domestic violence is simply a personal failing of an individual, or even to think that it is a collective failing of professional football players as a sub-group.

We live in a society that prizes hegemonic masculinity above few other things. That is, we exist in a culture that values characteristics such as toughness, courage, violence, aggression, stoicism, competitiveness, and material success. Men (but also many women) are taught to hone these characteristics in order to achieve social validation and economic rewards. In fact, they are taught that they are entitled to have whatever they are able to take by force or coercion. (Varda Burstyn has developed this idea and referred to it as "coercive entitlement".)

We also live in a society that objectifies women's bodies constantly and ubiquitously. Images abound that inform men that we have the right to extract visual enjoyment from women's bodies, indeed, that those bodies exist precisely for our gratification.

Taken together, coercive entitlement and objectification create a toxic ideological cocktail that convinces many men that they have the right to act violently towards women in both a physical and sexual sense if doing so enables them to get what they want.

It may sound like I am defending Ray Rice; I am not. We all have the agency to make decisions for ourselves and to determine right from wrong. However, to place the focus on Rice as an individual and to suggest that his behaviour is somehow exceptional or deviant is to grossly distort the nature of the society we are living in. Ray Rice is simply the embodiment of hegemonic (dominant, 'normal') masculinity taken to its logical conclusion. If that sounds ugly or hard to accept, good. It should, because it's time we stopped accepting it, even if that acceptance is merely tacit.

One more comment should be made about football here. It is not a coincidence that Rice and many other football players (and athletes in other sports) engage in gender-based violence. Sport is a social site that conditions its members to engage completely in coercive entitlement. Players are taught to use their bodies to forcefully take what they want from their opponents. When they succeed in doing so, they are awarded with victory, prestige, and economic rewards. In order to truly excel in these pursuits, athletes must fully internalize these notions; any hesitation or reluctance produces weakness and vulnerability that can be exploited. The problem with this -- one of the many, that is -- is that it becomes extremely difficult to turn such instincts off once the athlete leaves the field. He becomes accustomed to getting what he wants simply by taking it through force, whether what he wants is to score a touch down, win an argument, intimidate, demonstrate physical superiority or "strength", or satisfy a sexual desire.

So, what does all this mean? It means that if we are truly indignant about what Ray Rice did, we need to stop standing on soapboxes to decry his villainy and start turning that indignation back on ourselves and the culture in which we live. For, the frightening truth may be that Ray Rice acted exactly as our society told him he should. That is something we all share some responsibility in.

Breaking Bad, Walter White, and "male power fantasy"

By Nathan Kalman-Lamb

In 2013, AMC's Breaking Bad concluded its fifth and final season to impressive ratings. The show chronicled the transformation of high school chemistry teacher Walter White into a minor drug kingpin after he was diagnosed with cancer (ostensibly so that he could ensure that his family was provided for after his passing). The question I want to ask is, what can we learn from the popularity of Breaking Bad? And, further, what does it tell us about contemporary North American culture? These questions are perhaps more difficult to answer than it might first appear, for they confront us with the challenge of extricating the intentions of the show's creator from the way in which it came to be perceived by audiences. In other words, it is not uncommon for a work of art to be understood by viewers in a very different way than its author intended. A famous example of this phenomenon was Dave Chappelle's decision to take a break from his show after a sketch intended to satirize racial stereotypes was perceived to be funny by audience members precisely because it reinforced the very essentialisms it was intending to disrupt.

In the context of Breaking Bad, the issue I want to explore is masculinity. In many ways, the show offers an extended meditation on the theme of what it means to be a man. Walter White charts an arc that takes him from putative loser (a high school teacher who struggles to achieve the respect of his current teenage students and former academic colleagues) to successful and feared producer and trafficker of meth. Along the way, Walt in effect loses the love and admiration of his family and gains the esteem of members of the criminal underworld. Is Walt's journey a triumphant ascent to manhood facilitated by impending mortality, or is it a harrowing examination of the costs of hegemonic masculinity? Laura Hudson writes:

Many have argued that Breaking Bad is an indictment of Walt, a critique of the male power fantasy rather than a celebration. How we respond to the ending and whether we’re still rooting for Walt in those final moments is indeed a measure of our own complicity – or Matt Zoller Seitz puts it at Vulture, “it’s an ending that leaves us alone with a mirror.”

While we may want to cheer for the character we’ve been identifying with for so long, what are we really cheering? What standards of success are we tacitly endorsing when we feel just a little bit pleased that Walt got to live — and die — “like a man”? The masculinity described in Breaking Bad is something deeply pernicious, a cultural dogma that damages, warps and limits men, isolating them from their emotions and from others. It promotes violence, retribution, and a hierarchy built upon the backs victims both male and female. Sometimes, it kills them. As Silpa Kovvari at The Atlantic observed, the masculinity of Breaking Bad represents “standards to die by, not to live by.”

As Hudson indicates, ultimately, the issue is not whether creator Vince Gilligan understands Walter White to be a hero or anti-hero. Rather, what matters (as Dave Chappelle understood) is how devoted fans watch the show. Why is it so popular and what are people getting out of it?

The frightening reality seems to be that for many passionate followers of Breaking Bad, Walter White does indeed represent a "male power fantasy." This fact is laid disturbingly bare by actor Anna Gunn who played Walt's wife Skyler on the show. Gunn writes,

 Because Walter is the show’s protagonist, there is a natural tendency to empathize with and root for him, despite his moral failings. (That viewers can identify with this antihero is also a testament to how deftly his character is written and acted.) As the one character who consistently opposes Walter and calls him on his lies, Skyler is, in a sense, his antagonist. So from the beginning, I was aware that she might not be the show’s most popular character. 

But I was unprepared for the vitriolic response she inspired. Thousands of people have “liked” the Facebook page “I Hate Skyler White.” Tens of thousands have “liked” a similar Facebook page with a name that cannot be printed here. When people started telling me about the “hate boards” for Skyler on the Web site for AMC, the network that broadcasts the show, I knew it was probably best not to look, but I wanted to understand what was happening. 

A typical online post complained that Skyler was a “shrieking, hypocritical harpy” and didn’t “deserve the great life she has.” 

“I have never hated a TV-show character as much as I hate her,” one poster wrote. The consensus among the haters was clear: Skyler was a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an “annoying bitch wife.”... 

At some point on the message boards, the character of Skyler seemed to drop out of the conversation, and people transferred their negative feelings directly to me. The already harsh online comments became outright personal attacks. One such post read: “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?” Besides being frightened (and taking steps to ensure my safety), I was also astonished: how had disliking a character spiraled into homicidal rage at the actress playing her? 

But I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.        

Gunn really hits the nail on the head here. Skyler White drew the ire of the show's fans because she posed a challenge to Walt's patriarchal ascent. The responses to Walt and Skyler are two sides of the same coin. All too many male viewers identify with Walt and are thus deeply resentful of the ways in which Skyler is perceived to thwart the realization of his (terrifyingly sociopathic) ambitions. Whether or not Vince Gilligan endorses the character he created as a model of manhood, there is little question that that is how he has come to be taken up by legions of the shows fans. They admire his stoicism, his ruthlessness, his vengefulness, and, perhaps most of all, his success. Varda Burstyn has coined the term "coercive entitlement" to describe a dominant thread in contemporary masculinity. What she means is that men are taught that they deserve those things they are able to take through violence. This is a common theme in contemporary sport and it is the lesson of Breaking Bad for many if not most of its fans. Whether Gilligan himself believes in the justice of coercive entitlement, he has created a character who embodies it. Unfortunately, unlike Dave Chappelle, Gilligan does not appear to have acquired the requisite social conscience required to stand up to the monster he created. Instead, as Hudson tells, he has this to say of his show's ending:

“As bad a guy as he has been, and as dark a series of misdeeds as he has committed, it felt right and satisfying and proper for us that he went out on his own terms. He went out like a man.”

If one of the most appealing definitions of manhood to be found in popular culture today is death via a hail of gunfire in a war over drug turf, then we have a problem.