Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Title
Critical Rhetorics of Race
Editors
Michael Lacy and Kent Ono
Abstract
This chapter critiques the “allegorical power of sport” in relation to historical and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy. In particular, it argues that media discourse about the NBA commissioner David Stern as well as his public statements demonstrate white paternalism. From the onset of his career as commissioner, Stern normalized whiteness as a nonracialized space by repeating discourse that marked the racialized “other” as criminal. Moreover, in a popular sport in which seventy five percent of the players are black but virtually all of the corporate owners and commissioner are white, Stern's enforcement of extreme penalties and policies affecting primarily black players visibly reproduces a spectacle of the white father figure and black slave child relationship found on plantations during the antebellum South.
Pages
117-136
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Publisher
New York University Press
Publication Date
2011
Keywords
white supremacy, NBA, David Stern, white paternalism, white father figure, sport
Disciplines
Race and Ethnicity | Sociology
ISBN
9780814762226
Recommended Citation
Griffin, Rachel Alicia, and Bernadette Marie Calafell. “Control, Discipline, and Punish: Black Masculinity and (In)Visible Whiteness in the NBA.” Essay. In Critical Rhetorics of Race, edited by Michael Lacy and Kent Ono, 117–36. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011.
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