10. Silence Reverberates

ON AUGUST 26, 2020, George Hill joined a lineage that runs from the fin de siècle boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, through Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win a tennis Grand Slam tournament, to the iconic heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, the first athlete to declare himself “G.O.A.T.” (the greatest of all time), to Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommy Smith, remembered and revered now for the defiant black power salute they offered in 1968 on the podium in Mexico City. As we just discussed, this lineage reached a more modest, but no less resonant, articulation in the contemporary with Kaepernick’s taking a knee.

And now, once more, we are made to see how black athletes understand themselves compelled to act because of what is not. Once more, like 1968, ours is another “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” and this “mood”—in Heidegger’s sense, an attunement that emerges out of a specific milieu—“will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”1 In the bubble, there above their numbers, where their names used to be, one could now read “Black Lives Matter,” “Say Her Name,” “Enough,” “Vote,” and, yes, “Freedom” and “Equality.”

It remains doubtful, however, as white nationalists streamed into Portland, Oregon, to attack antipolice brutality and antifascist protesters, that the “autumn” that followed the racist police violence of the 2020 spring-summer will lead to “freedom and equality.” In what kind of a world is the work of antifascists, abbreviated, to inflect the term with an ominousness that is not native to it, to “Antifa,” a political pejorative? In America. Only in America. To oppose fascism is to render the antifascist self a criminal.

Within such an environment it is no wonder that any poetic turn, if such an inclination can be mustered, tends, rather, toward the tragically Shakespearean. Specifically, we invoke Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” About which, contra Gloucester, there can be made nothing “glorious.” About which it must be said that much of the history of black life in the United States has been nothing but one long “winter of discontent.” Or, an all-too brief spring followed by one more long winter. A long winter that is, under the worst possible circumstances, only broken up by those black athletes who can birth, once again, a tenuous interlude—or, in Antonio Gramsci’s more hopeful nomenklatura, an interregnum—that throws off the oppressive veil of winter.

In his work on forgiveness, Vladimir Jankélévitch offers an insight that is pertinent to the repetition of responsibility that falls to those who have to effect change under the most arduous conditions. Those who have the courage, the will, and those who can seize the opportunity as it—sometimes entirely unexpectedly, carpe diem—presents itself to them, to start again. As if for the first time, in Jacques Derrida’s terms.

Framing his argument in terms of “moral progress,” Jankélévitch writes: “Moral progress advances only by the deliberate effort of a decision that is intermittent and spasmodic and in the tension of an indefatigable starting-over.”2 “Intermittent” is to acknowledge that the actions taken and the burdens endured by Jack Johnson—hunted by police across state lines, for the sin of insisting on his right to marry white women—made it imperative for white America to institute a chasm between Johnson and his black successor, Joe Louis. Johnson’s blatant disregard for America’s racist norms, his flouting of white conventions, explains the political straightjacket imposed on Louis. Under no circumstances would the second black heavyweight champion of the world, known as the “Brown Bomber,” be allowed to follow in the footsteps of his Galveston, Texas, predecessor, “Papa Jack.” Aggressive, self-confident blackness, Johnson, was transformed—muted—into black quiescence, Louis. For white America, the black boxer has no political use—or personhood—outside of the ring.

It is also to recognize the “deliberate effort” expended by black women in world tennis to achieve a “merely” “spasmodic” result—that is, the sudden, brief, sporadic, presence of black women in the world’s most “lilywhite” game. In 1956 Althea Gibson became the first black woman to win a tennis major when she triumphed at the French Open. Gibson went on to win both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals (what we now know as the U.S. Open) in 1957 and 1958. Gibson’s successes notwithstanding, her career must have been a time of isolation, the loneliness and a consciousness of a world-crushing singularity for her. Every season must have felt like an “indefatigable starting-over.” How similar must this sense of isolation have been for Zina Garrison, who starred in tennis in the 1980s through the 1990s. Garrison was not as successful as Gibson, although she did reach a highest ranking of number four in the world, in addition to winning three mixed doubles Grand Slam titles, but she was made fully aware of her relationship to Gibson. Based exclusively on her race, Garrison was dubbed the “new Althea Gibson.”3

Garrison’s racially overdetermined, superimposed relationship to Gibson must have been its own onerous burden. It was also, however, a “tension-filled” “starting-over.” Garrison, unlike her white contemporaries, such as, say, Chrissy Evert and Martina Navratilova, did not only have to attend to the weight of her own professional ambitions and expectations, she was also made acutely aware of her racial singularity. Every match, every Grand Slam major, must have had made Garrison feel that every time she stepped onto the court, once more, “moral progress begins from zero. There is no other ethical continuity than this exhausting continuation of ‘relaunch’ and resumption.”4 Garrison, like Gibson before her, had to begin again—from point “zero.” As if for the first time. Singularity, the exceptional black athlete, is an unrelenting, ever-self-renewing burden, to be taken up every time the black athlete takes, in Gibson’s and Garrison’s cases, the court. “Relaunch,” once more. An “exhausting” business. Physically wearying, ontologically exhausting. How many times must the black athlete begin again because he or she is deprived of, is denied, a genealogical “continuity” that is not so overwhelmed by the lack of an easy chronological “continuity”?