Prologue

ONLY A BLACK ATHLETE CAN SAVE US NOW is an essay that should come with a warning label. One that reads “Misleading Title.” Or, maybe, if one were generous, “Slightly Misleading Title.” The dissembling assumes an even-more serious aspect because, as will be seen momentarily, this essay is addressed to my son, Ezra, himself an aspiring—soon-to-be teen—black athlete.

However, the ambivalence about the title derives from an obtrusive recognition. That is, this essay is as much an acknowledgement of the important role played by athletes, and black athletes in particular, during the Covid-19 pandemic and the racist violence that marked—and marred—2020, as it is an articulation of the limits of what these athletes can do. Indeed, in some of its more reflective moments, this essay offers a pointed critique of what it is that these athletes do. And, by extension, what it is that they fail to do—what they cannot do.

However, much as this essay is in a dialectical struggle with itself about the role of the black athlete in a moment of historic crisis, Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now undertakes this work toward a very specific end. On the one hand, this essay recognizes the importance of the athletes’ reformist tendencies and objectives. Some of the athletes’ undertaking are more urgent than others. In truth, some are even radical. Most prominent among these is the campaign to end police violence (a stand that constitutes arguably the key moment in this essay), a movement fundamental to simply keeping black Americans alive. The events of George Floyd (killed by a police officer’s knee, Minneapolis, 2020), Lt. Caron Lazario (a uniformed U.S. Army officer pepper sprayed by a police officer, Virginia, 2021), Daunte Wright (Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, 2021, shot by a police officer, Kim Potter)1 and Andrew Brown (Elizabeth City, North Carolina, April, 2021)2 are but some of the most high profile instances that have led to the widespread call to defund the police.3 A movement that achieved its first statutory success in April 2021, when the Maryland legislature voted to overturn the state’s police Bill of Rights; the officers Bill of Rights protects the police from investigation and prosecution for acts committed in the execution of their duties, rights not afforded ordinary citizens. The Maryland state legislature also gave civilians greater oversight of the policing.4 A historic enactment for a state still living with the aftermath of the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a black man, at the hands of Baltimore police officers.

On the other hand, Only A Black Athlete Can Save Us Now is impatient with the reformist discourse as advocated by these athletes, impatient because this movement is so deeply attached to the political. This essay argues against representative politics, not only as it constitutes the entire horizon of possibility, but because representative politics has come to stand as a, or the, democratic end in itself. That is, “democracy” has come to mean—has long since meant—securing the franchise, legally guaranteeing it and ensuring that it is freely practiced. “Democracy” so understood follows the logic that the state is in need of drastic overhaul, rather than working to ensure that the state will “wither away,” as Marx hoped. All the while representative “democracy” maintains the system of late-capitalism, espousing the language of (securing) “opportunity for all” rather than organizing for the systematic dismantling of the state and late-capitalism so that a different future might be imagined. Politics, so conceived, constitutes the very ground of reformism in our moment.

To this end, Lenin’s notion of dual power is pivotal to this essay’s argument. In Only A Black Athlete Can Save Us Now, dual power designates a simultaneous struggle on two fronts. The first takes place within the existing structures of power, named “reformism” here, while the second assigns to itself the work of thinking a much more radical—utopian—organization of society. As such, dual power refuses subreption. Dual power will not mistake the secondary, reformism, for the primary. It is the reorganization of society, wrenching it forever out of late-capitalism, that must, now more than ever, be prioritized. Subreption is that intellectual modality that reminds us not to mistake that which is itself part of the problem, in this case representative democracy, as a panacea. Instead, representative democracy must be properly apprehended. That is, securing the universal franchise is but the temporary means of struggle—much as it enables us to rally against racism, xenophobia, economic inequality and so on. However, in the end reformism itself must be undone. Reformism, then, as the autoimmune means of achieving utopia. Reformism as a political mechanism intended to render itself not only anachronistic, but ultimately subject to superannuation.

In place of Lenin’s soviets and the (rapidly declining) Czarist state, Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now conceives of distinct roles for (athlete-driven) reformism and an impulse toward a utopianism much indebted to Fredric Jameson’s thought-provoking essay “An American Utopia.” Jameson’s thinking is augmented by the spirit of that singular band of mid-nineteenth-century American communists. Also known as Associationists, these communist utopian groups included “Mother Lee’s” Shakers, Robert Owen’s New Harmony project, Charles Fourier’s phalanxes (of which the most famous is the Brook Farm collective, in which Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson participated), Étienne Cabet’s Icarians, and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Perfectionists.5 Living in an antebellum America on the brink of the Civil War and in a society existentially at war with itself, these Associationists were, each in their own way, idealists determined to break with the world as it was. Seeking a different mode of being in the world, they sought to enact a rupture between themselves and their society. These Associationists were, inter alia, practitioners of free love, women’s liberation, and equality and complex marriage; many of them were back-to-the-land Romantics (they almost all failed in their attempts to work the land, in large measure because they lacked the skills necessary to run a farming enterprise). Most of them were proponents of communes in which private property was forsworn. In their ranks were also eugenicists, millennial Christians, agnostics, and atheists. Many were anticapitalist, but there was also one successful entrepreneurial venture—this singular honorific belongs to Noyes’s Oneida community.6 These communists sought to build a world in which they could give full expression to their “free will.” A world over which the state and its representative apparatuses had no hold.

That world in which Fourier’s The Theory of the Four Movements, Owen’s A New View of Society, and Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (a work that echoes the founding utopian text, Thomas More’s Utopia) found its audience and, for a brief moment, flourished, was, like ours, a dystopic moment. Indeed, ours may be more so. Everywhere, in 2020, it appeared that there was chaos. Wherever we turned, there was hopelessness and despair. In the midst of this there was, however, moments of selflessness, concern for the other, and courage too. Largely, however, 2020 revealed lives overwrought by existential precarity, a conjuncture defined by a racism on the rise in the United States and a Covid-19 pandemic that laid bare a late-capitalism in all its ruthlessness.

Saliently, however, we encountered a late-capitalism cutting a wider swathe. It wreaked havoc on, as crises always do, the most economically vulnerable—the working poor, the indigent, the desperate “illegal” immigrants; the pandemic also represented a special threat to the incarcerated, who found themselves entirely at the mercy of the state. More than that, however, our conjuncture witnessed the rise of a late-capitalism that also has those in the American middle class in its sights. The historically poor, people of color, impoverished rural communities, found themselves joined in line at food banks by those who had just yesterday imagined themselves as immune to the predations of capital. Long, snaking lines of cars, stretching for miles across the length and breadth of the country. Understanding themselves to be economically secure and medically safe just a moment ago, that always expansive constituency known as the American middle class took their place alongside those who have long known financial want and material scarcity. Large numbers of Americans with distinct socioeconomic statuses, all of them waiting for a box containing the most alimentary of goods: canned food, bottled water, toilet paper.

Not quite Steinbeck’s Joad family, not quite. But then again, this storm, while dust-free, is showing itself to be a very different animal. Maybe even an all-consuming one. A creature that may or may not be brought to heel by a series of federal works programs. Ours is an economic and a public health crisis, set against the backdrop of what is surely, lest we act swiftly, a looming—looming ever larger—environmental disaster. Ours is a time tailor-made for utopian thinking.

The longue durée that is 2020 is an economic crisis that increasingly seems to resemble the Great Depression of the last century rather than the Great Recession of 2008. And the racism, in its blatancy, at least, would seem to belong to that of an earlier vintage. Racism is energized now, given impetus, no matter that he has been electorally defeated, by a former American president who has a long history of racism. In fact, he has a family history of racism, dating back to his father, Fred Trump, a fascist fellow-traveler, Klan sympathizer, no matter that such unsightly affiliations are now largely ignored.

Arrayed against this onslaught against minority life are athletes, in a variety of sports. At the forefront of this movement, in the most complicated way possible, are players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and their women’s equivalent, the WNBA. Professional basketballers have placed themselves in the vanguard of the struggle against police brutality against black bodies. Most of the players engaged in this struggle, but by no means all of them, are black. They are, all of them, trying to forge a way forward, determined to produce some structural reform in our deeply unequal world; at least some, especially as it pertains to voting and broader minority participation in the U.S. electoral process; intent on protecting the black, Latino and Asian American vote against latter-day Jim Crow legislation as enacted in Georgia in 2021 after the Republicans suffered losses there in the 2020 presidential elections and in the 2021 Senate races.

Most importantly, the protesting athletes are not limited to America. Footballers across the world (as distinct from their gridiron American cousins), as well as cricketers and rugby players, among many others, too made their voices heard. In this spirit, the signal non-American athlete in Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now is a black Briton, Lewis Hamilton, the reigning—and seven-time—Formula I (FI) champion. Hamilton is unarguably the non-American who has done most to champion the cause of black life in America internationally, bringing attention not only to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, but highlighting the cause of Breonna Taylor, a black woman shot to death in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky. Broadly speaking, Hamilton has dedicated himself to shining the world’s spotlight on the vulnerability of black life to police violence in America.

However, Hamilton, a vegan and a man much beloved of the American popular, is central to Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now not only because of his determined antiracist stance. He is critical to this essay because of his commitment to issues such as global warming. Our stewardship of the planet has led Hamilton to be critical of the ways in which the FI “circus,” which covers hundreds of thousands of miles in the cause of its season, from Brazil to Bahrain, from Montreal to Monaco, is responsible for environmental degradation. Hamilton has also been outspoken in the cause of human rights. Although, in truth, if human rights were seriously engaged as an issue, Hamilton would have his work cut out for him. He would have to take aim at not only the usual suspects—those countries that routinely abuse its own citizens. Bahrain, Turkey, China and Russia are obvious but, of course, justifiable, targets. He would also have to account for the United States, Brazil, Hungary and Singapore. In fact, by any strict definition of the abuse of human rights, there is hardly a country on the F1 schedule that would be exempt from criticism.

Bearing this in mind, Hamilton has been an outspoken advocate of planetary responsibility. To this end, Hamilton has long since banned the use of all plastic in his office. In so doing, he may be the athlete to nudge our thinking in the direction of, if not the utopian (although I see no reason to suppress that impulse), then at least a more “wholistic” course of action to reimagining our world.

It is not, then, a matter of pitting Hamilton against, say, a figure such as LeBron James, because each in their own way offers valid critiques of the conditions under which black lives are lived. After all, James’s More Than a Vote advocacy group, an organization founded by athletes to combat voter suppression, played a key role in mobilizing minority voters in the 2020 election.7 After all, in the wake of winning his 7th FI championship, Hamilton clearly stated that, as the only black driver in the history of his sport, he was more motivated to win in 2020 precisely because of his opposition to racism. In short, he identified the Black Lives Matter movement as the raison d’etre of his 2020 triumph. And so, rather than a dialectical framing, this essay presents Hamilton as that athlete who can help us think beyond a single issue—as important as, say, racism is—in order to propose ways in which racism, the threat of environmental devastation, and growing economic inequality brought about by the ravages of late-capitalism be taken up together—that is, as equally important issues, issues bound together in a nonhierarchical relationship. Issues interlinked, issues that demand simultaneous address. What emerges out of this need for an expanded engagement with the perils that threaten planetary survival is the imperative to combine LeBron and Hamilton’s projects. To combine LeBron’s struggle to keep black bodies alive with Hamilton’s injunction that we think how it is we are in the world; that we undertake the work of articulating how it is we want to live.