There has never been a better time to be a black athlete. Moneywise, it is now a sum-of-zeros game. (If only my parents had seen the long-term value of studying Rod Carew's books on hitting instead of math and chemistry.) African-Americans have turned white football and basketball players into tokens. And while our representation in baseball continues its decline, the percentage of blacks who dominate the game continues to surge. The reign of Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters could lead to a time when country club athletic equipment will be on back order in Harlem's sporting goods stores.
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Advertisers now line up to have black sports figures push their products, especially to the audience they covet, with near-liturgical zeal, 18- to-25-year-old white suburban males, many of whom are mesmerized by the idiomatic hip-hop jargon, the cock-of-the-walk swagger, the smooth-as-the-law-allows attire of their black heroes.
But there is a downside to all this. The unsayable but unassailable truth is that the clowning, dancing, preening smack-talker is becoming the Rorschach image of the African-American male athlete. It casts a huge shadow over all other images. This persona has the power to sell what no one should buy: the notion that black folks are still cuttin' up for the white man.
| Continue Thad Mumford's New York Times essay "The New Minstrel Show: Black Vaudeville With Statistics"
posted in articles on May 22, 2004 11:44 PM | t (0)
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