by Jackson Katz
It is true that a number of high-profile black male athletes over the past ten or fifteen years have been charged with or convicted of serious crimes of domestic or sexual violence. There is no excuse for their behavior or justification for their crimes. But it is also true that countless white athletes and coaches, including a number of high-profile professional athletes and coaches, have been charged with or convicted of similar crimes. (A Google search with the words “coaches” and “sexual abuse” yields close to two hundred fifty thousand references.) Consider a few of the more prominent cases. Mark Chmura, a married, thirty-two-year-old former all-pro tight end for the Green Bay Packers, was tried in 2001 for sexually assaulting a seventeenyear-old girl who was in a group of teens he had been drinking and hot-tubbing with at a house party after their high school prom. He was acquitted. Bobby Cox, the iconic manager of the Atlanta Braves and one of the winningest coaches in baseball history, was jailed briefly in 1995 on charges of simple battery for assaulting his wife. Patrick Roy, a Canadian who is one of the all-time great professional hockey goalies, was arrested in 2000 and charged with domestic violence after a heated argument with his wife. The charges were eventually dropped. All of these white men are high-profile figures in the professional athletic world, and they have all been linked to questionable incidents involving alleged violence against women. But how often do their names roll off the tongues of people decrying the abysmal gender-violence record of today’s athletes?
It is true that mega-stars like Simpson, Tyson, and Bryant are such household names that their transgressions are bound to attract more attention. But that still does not adequately explain why media coverage seems to increase when black males are the alleged perpetrators, and why parents and others rarely use white examples when they rightly decry the negative rolemodeling of successful male athletes who mistreat women. I would suggest that in this regard—as in many others—sports are no different than the rest of society. When an athlete of color commits a rape or another assault against a woman, especially if his body is inscribed with ghetto signifiers such as gold teeth and tattoos, the average suburban white fan can dismiss him as belonging to an alien culture with questionable values. He might play for our team, but he is not really one of us. This distancing is particularly easy when a black male athlete is accused of assaulting a white woman. In reality the vast majority of white women who are raped are raped by white men, but a heavily hyped black male threat to white womanhood has deep cultural roots in white imagination in the U.S. Thus when a black athlete is charged with a sex crime—especially against a white woman—it is easy to turn him into the dark-skinned “Other,” as Time magazine attempted to do symbolically by darkening O. J. Simpson’s face on its cover after he was arrested in 1994 for the murders of his wife and her friend. When a white athlete is similarly charged, it is much more difficult because he is one of “our guys.” His transgression is felt closer to home by white fans, who then have more invested in minimizing the seriousness of the allegations, or denying them outright. One possible psychological explanation is that these tactics help shield the fans from any possible feelings of guilt by association.
A fascinating and disturbing corollary to this over the past couple of years can be found in the reactions of Los Angeles Laker fans to Kobe Bryant, an African American man, after he was charged with raping a white woman in Eagle, Colorado, in July 2003. During the course of the prosecution—before criminal charges were dropped—Bryant received numerous standing ovations at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. These could only be interpreted as explicit shows of support from the crowd, which was overwhelmingly white. But why were the Laker fans so supportive? Several people I talked with in Los Angeles during this time dismissed the idea of attaching any higher meaning to the phenomenon. It was pure Laker partisanship, they said. They believed Bryant because they wanted to believe him. He was too valuable to the team to risk losing to a long prison sentence. But there were other dynamics at play. For example, is it possible that fans who stood and cheered were unconsciously—or consciously—proclaiming that they were not racist because—unlike so many white people throughout our nation’s history—they were willing to give a black rape defendant the benefit of the doubt, even when the alleged victim was white? Is it also possible that white men who asserted Bryant’s innocence—when they had no possible way of knowing whether he was guilty or not—in a sense privileged their identification with Bryant as a fellow man rather than with the alleged white victim as a fellow white person? If so, this would be good news for the future of race relations, as it indicates a willingness on the part of significant numbers of white men to reject the racist role of “defender of white womanhood.” (What it might indicate about the willingness of men to unite in cross-racial solidarity against women is significantly less inspiring.) It is also possible that at the time he was charged, many white fans saw Kobe Bryant as a basketball superstar who had transcended any sort of threatening black identification. His most notable physical signature was a smile—not a scowl. He had no criminal record, had never been busted for guns or drugs. He had grown up not in the ’hood, but in Italy. He even spoke Italian. At the time he was charged with rape, he did not have any tattoos. Was it possible that his status as a “good black”—unlike black bad boys such as Allen Iverson or Latrell Sprewell—conferred upon him a kind of honorary white citizenship, where white fans were defensive about him in a way they would be if a white superstar for whom they had long cheered ran the risk of being labeled a sex offender?
I am well aware that some whites have little patience for nuanced discussions about race and racism in any circumstance, much less on a topic as loaded as the perpetration of gender violence. They see it as nothing more than excuse-making, as a way that white “liberals” tend to minimize the crimes of men of color in order to assuage their own guilt. Thus many people—including many anti-racist whites—are hesitant to raise the issue of race unless there is absolutely no way around it. A popular way to sidestep the issue is to claim that the conversation about violence by athletes—and our society’s toleration of it—has more to do with celebrity and money than it does with race. In the sports culture, race (along with homosexuality) is an especially sensitive subject; more than one sports commentator has referred to it as “the great unmentionable.” What this usually refers to is the hesitancy of people—whites and people of color—to talk publicly about race, especially when there has been an allegation of violence involving an African American or Latino athlete. (In private, almost everyone talks about race.) But few people even recognize—much less discuss—a racial angle when an incident involves white athletes as perpetrators.
Men’s ice hockey, for example, is a sport where the vast majority of players and fans are white. Over the past decade, a number of professional hockey players have been charged with crimes of violence against women. They include premier NHL players such as Philadelphia Flyers goalie Sean Burke and Los Angeles Kings forward Ziggy Palffy. There have been several cases of white college hockey players who were accused of gang rape. But as Dr. Richard Lapchick, a pioneer in the area of combining sport and civil rights issues, recounts in the Sports Business Journal, after an incident of domestic violence involving a football or basketball player, reporters inevitably ask him, “What makes football or basketball players more inclined to abuse women?” He asserts that he has never been asked that sweeping question about hockey or baseball players. There is also the matter of fights during games. In the NFL and NBA, sports leagues with a high percentage of African American players, fighting on the field is not a frequent occurrence, and usually results in fines and suspensions. But in hockey, where most players are white, fighting between players is not only tolerated, it is actively encouraged. Many fans expect to see “red ice,” and they call for it from the stands. Only when a player steps over the line and maims another, as the Vancouver Canucks’ Todd Bertuzzi did to the Colorado Avalanche’s Steve Moore in March 2004, when he struck him on the h
ead from behind and smashed his face into the ice, do sportswriters and fans talk self-righteously about “senseless” violence and “going too far.”
There is plenty of discussion of these issues by sportswriters and commentators, and fans in general. Parents who have sons playing youth hockey often worry about the example being set by players at the highest levels. But race is rarely part of the conversation. When was the last time you heard someone say with contempt that violence in hockey is a reflection of the lack of moral values in the white communities where the players come from? Yet when several black NBA players during a game in Detroit in November of 2004 went into the stands and assaulted fans, league officials wondered aloud about the damage done to the “image of the league.” This was widely recognized as a coded way of saying they were concerned that many whites believed the league had been taken over by a bunch of violent black thugs with poor morals, who were setting a bad example for the youth of America. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the key difference between the two phenomena is that black men are typically held more accountable for their violence than are white men.
GANGSTA RAP AND WHITE MASCULINITY
One day in 2000, I was perusing the merchandise in a hip T-shirt store on Cape Cod, with a largely but not exclusively white clientele, when I started listening to the lyrics of a song I heard booming over the sound system. I literally stopped in my tracks. “Bitches ain’t nothing but hoes and tricks.” I listened intently for a couple of minutes. I knew that a lot of contemporary rap albums that are produced and distributed by the major record labels contain songs with lyrics that are blatantly cruel and woman-hating, but for some reason when I heard this song its cruelty and callousness hit me especially hard. I was struck by an image of how I would have felt as a Jew if I were in a public place in Munich or Berlin in 1935 and heard a song whose lyrics were as vicious toward Jews as these were toward women. I knew how I would feel: I would be afraid for my life. I looked around at the women and girls in the store. Were they listening? Were they aware of the hostility to their sex—to them—that was blaring out of the stereo speakers? I knew from previous conversations with women that many of them have learned to tune these sounds out, to go into a sort of trance where they are aware of the sexism that surrounds them, but refuse to let it invade their psyche or their spirit. It is a survival strategy in a culture that is overrun with audio and visual displays of women’s sexual degradation. I looked at some of the young girls. Had they already learned to avert their ears? I thought about girls I had met who actually defended misogynistic male artists, and downplayed the sexism. Then I looked at the men. How many of them were listening to the lyrics? Were they singing along? I could not tell. I decided to approach the white clerk at the checkout counter and ask him what was playing. “It’s ‘The Chronic 2001,’ Dr. Dre,” he answered. I brusquely thanked him for the information and walked away. In retrospect, I wish I had at least asked him to put on something less offensive to women—and men. But I was in no mood for a confrontation. As I left the store, I made a promise to myself that I would find a way, together with a growing movement of people of color and anti-racist whites, to publicly challenge the white-owned record companies, television networks, movie studios, music magazines, and newspapers who profited from this sexist and racist exploitation. I would also find a way to challenge artists—regardless of their race—whose music incited men’s violence against women.
Up until that time, I had been hesitant to publicly say anything critical about misogyny in rap music. My reticence was validated each time I heard a middle-aged white person lament the sinister influences of popular culture on children, and then, practically in the same breath, say, “like that rap music the kids listen to.” Along with references to professional athletes behaving badly, negative comments about rap music often have a thinly disguised racial subtext. As an anti-racist white person, I did not want to participate in this, so I usually chose to say nothing. If put on the spot, I would acknowledge misogyny in rap, but also point out that there was a lot of misogyny in “white” rock music, and thus it was unfair to single out rap. Not to mention the fact that white men own and run most major record companies, including many that produce, distribute, and make enormous profits from rap music. But in the 1990s, as hip-hop took over the music world and entered the mainstream of entertainment culture, it became more difficult for me to evade questions about the unabashed sexism in many rap lyrics, especially in the hugely popular genre that came to be known as “gangsta rap.”
One of my younger African American male colleagues often urged me to critique in my writing and public speaking the retrograde gender and sexual politics of many black rappers. He threw my own argument back at me: since the ongoing American pandemic of men’s violence against women is fueled by cultural definitions of manhood that teach boys to deny women’s full humanity and instead seek to dominate and control them, pop cultural messages that promulgate that ideology must be challenged—by whites as well as by people of color. His view was that I should speak out regardless of the sensitivity of the racial politics. My colleague is a college-educated antirape educator from a working-class family, and a devoted member of the hip-hop generation who had become increasingly despondent about the ascendancy of glorified brutality and black-on-black violence in gangsta rap. Like many other progressives and feminists, he had long been inspired by rappers who used their lyrical and musical skills to articulate rage about police brutality, racial profiling, and the daily indignities visited on poor black and brown people. But songs about smacking bitches and pimpin’ hoes? That reeked of misplaced anger and hypermasculine posturing—not to mention the fact that black women already suffer disproportionate rates of domestic and sexual violence. It was also based on a racist caricature of black culture that was being packaged and sold by major corporations for consumption by white suburban consumers. As many black feminists have pointed out, gangsta rap not only demeans black women; it also reinforces the most malignant stereotypes of black men as brutal beasts. In addition, while there was never any doubt that he loved rap music and had an encyclopedic knowledge of its history, my colleague—along with many other blacks who have remained silent to avoid being labeled as “Toms” or “haters”—had become increasingly distressed by the anti-gay animus and vicious attitudes toward women that had made it into the rap mainstream. Prominent black feminist writers and activists, such as bell hooks, had been talking about this for years. Their work had created the space and language to hold black male rap artists accountable for the degrading treatment of women in their music, without blaming them for the pervasive misogyny in the larger culture. But not enough men—either men of color or white men—had yet joined that conversation in a meaningful public way.
My own hesitation to jump headlong into the roiling debate about gangsta rap—as it moved from the cultural margins in the early 1990s to become a mass culture art form by the end of the decade—was typical of many white men I knew. How could middle-class white men who grew up in the vanilla suburbs unselfconsciously critique a genre of music that took root in the blighted black neighborhoods of the Bronx and Compton? Especially a genre of music that had been celebrated since its birth for giving voice to marginalized and stigmatized black youth. How could educated, middle-class white guys like me call out misogynistic black male rappers without calling attention to our own privileged social position? We would be accused of “misunderstanding” the music and its context, not appreciating the complexity of the narrative or musical structures, or even of attempting to censor authentic voices from the “underclass.” We might also face accusations of hypocrisy in terms of our own musical tastes. In my case, I grew up in the pre-hip-hop generation listening to soul and R&B; but as an adolescent I was also heavily into classic white rock bands like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Aerosmith, all of whom did their share of hypermasculine posturing, and none of whom were known for treating women with great respect. There was also a practical concern. A
s an educator, how could I have any credibility with young black males—and other young men of color—about subjects like “manhood” and violence against women if they thought I was dissing their beloved music? All of this contributed to a deafening silence about rap from me and many other white men in the fields of rape and domestic violence prevention.
During the 1990s, a number of anti-racist legal theorists and sociologists, building on decades of work by civil rights activists, black and brown scholars and other progressive thinkers, began to gain traction with the idea that “whiteness” is a socially constructed category of power and privilege and not a genetic designation. This insight formed the basis of the fast-growing field of critical white studies. As the scholar Ruth Frankenberg put it in her 1993 book White Women, Race Matters, “White people have too often viewed themselves as nonracial or racially neutral, so it is crucial to look at the ‘racialness’ of white experience.” Here I discovered the seeds of a new way to think and talk about gangsta rap. In virtually every public discussion about violence against women in rap—from trainings for battered women’s advocates to graduate school seminars—someone mentions that its primary consumers are white suburban males. But few people go one step further and ask why. Why do so many young white guys get a charge out of lyrics where male narrators boast about slapping bitches around and smokin’ hoes? It is important to look at the misogyny of black male rappers and explore what their lyrics say about them, as well as about the fault lines in black culture, especially in relations between the sexes. But we should not ignore what misogynistic rap’s popularity among young white males says about white masculinity, and relations between the sexes in white culture. The misogynistic fantasies of black male rappers have clearly struck a chord in white male America. These artists and their record companies figured out years ago that there was a big white market for lyrics about men treating women like dirt. If a majority of (white) boys and men were turned off by the contemptuous attitudes toward women expressed in rap and other forms of music, market forces in music production and distribution would long ago have caused the sexism to fade. So we need to turn our attention to the demand side of the marketing equation. What is going on in contemporary white gender and sexual politics that prepares so many white suburban males to accept such crude expressions of anger and contempt for women? Many women in twenty-first-century rap narratives are derided as two-dimensional objects whose only purpose in life is to be penetrated like blow-up dolls by contemptuous men. What do these angry characterizations tell us about the white boys and men who buy the albums, download the songs, and memorize and sing along to them? It is possible that millions of young white men do not even question the misogyny in rap because they grew up with it and thus it seems normal and unremarkable to them. After all, rap had already become the status quo in music culture before many of them were even born. It is also possible that many of them do not feel any particular anger toward women, but nonetheless take on the misogynistic front in response to pressure on them to act “hard” as a means of gaining respect and establishing their “manhood.” Notably, this phenomenon long predates hip-hop culture.