Book review: Playing While White: Privilege and Power On and Off the Field

According to its author, David J Leonard, Playing While White: Privilege and Power On and Off the Field, ‘explores how and why whiteness matters within contemporary sports and what that tells us about race and racism in the twenty-first century’ (p. 6). More specifically, Leonard’s book details the myriad sporting narratives that have mythologized white athletes to function as potent vehicles of conservative, if not retrogressive, racial ideologies over the past decade. It also responds to recent calls to make socio-cultural analyses of sport meaningful and accessible to broader audiences (Zirin, 2008). This is evident in the book’s endorsements by prominent racial scholars: Michael Eric Dyson and Mark Anthony Neal, and socially progressive journalists: Dave Zirin, Bomani Jones, and Jessica Luther. Indeed, these endorsements acknowledge the critical importance of cultural studies of sport in the United States in this specific historical conjuncture.

Given the unexpected success of the Trump presidential campaign and its unapologetic desire to re-strengthen American white supremacy after the Obama presidency, Playing’s focus on how white power and privilege are naturalized and normalized through sport media representations could not be more timely. Whether using white sportsmen like Bobby Knight, Tom Brady, and Joe Paterno as racial dog-whistles to sell his message of white male victimization to anxious whites during his presidential run (Kusz, 2016, 2017; Oates and Kusz, in press) or demonizing Colin Kaepernick and other black NFL players as unpatriotic for protesting police brutality and racial oppression during the playing of the national anthem, Trump has intentionally and repeatedly politicized sport to support his white supremacy qua ‘America First’ agenda. And while no cultural study can predict socio-political futures with much certainty, the good ones can alert us to social problems looming on the horizon, or help us to make sense of social and political crises as they emerge. Playing is clearly one of those.

The twin, interrelated inspirations for this book, as Leonard outlines in the Introduction, are his own personal reckoning with the ways he has benefited from the social privileges conferred on him as a white man, and his professional positioning at the intersection of ethnic studies, American studies, and sport studies. As he explains it, in any given week Leonard ‘would write on Johnny Manziel and Ferguson, Missouri; on Trayvon Martin and white collegiate athletes; on Mike Brown and NASCAR’ (p. 3). Given these roots of Playing, it is not surprising that one of the central concerns of Leonard’s work is to show how sport media narratives that regularly naturalize stereotypical ideas and tropes of whiteness as innocent and virtuous work hand in hand with the repeated recirculation of what Clarke (1991) once called ‘black man misbehavin’’ narratives (cited from Cole and Denny, 1994) to facilitate the (re)production of ‘antiblack racism within and beyond the sporting arena’ (pp. 10–11). For Leonard, these ideologies of whiteness not only overdetermine how white athletes are rendered visible and legible but they represent the key sites in contemporary American media culture producing (not merely reflecting) the ideas that breathe life into the institutional processes of schools, workplaces, statehouses, police precincts, and courtrooms that lead to the everyday differential treatment and racial injustice.

Following the introduction, Leonard spends the first two chapters interrogating the racial functions of two historically persistent sporting tropes of whiteness: ‘the scrappy white leader’ and ‘the intelligent, hard working white athlete’. Here, Leonard reveals how these tropes are not only ‘central to the history of American white supremacy’ (p. 46) but how they function as an invisible filter operating within the sport media production process that makes stories of the exceptional work-ethic and intelligence of black athletes a rarity in American sport media. Leonard emphasizes how black intelligence is too often rendered unintelligible, regarded as exceptional (rather than normative), or easily forgotten through normative sport media narrative production.

Over the five central chapters of the book, Leonard reveals how a series of racial double-standards is constructed through sport media between white athletes and athletes of colour when it comes to talking trash, committing crimes, using drugs, and having the possibility for public redemption. Particularly enlightening was Leonard’s excellent exposé of the racial double-standards regarding drug use, surveillance, and penalization that exist in American intercollegiate sports between black-majority sports such as Division I Football and Men’s Basketball and white-majority sports such as swimming, lacrosse, and golf. Informed and inspired by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012), Leonard reveals how these racial double-standards become more egregious as one moves down to the less commercial and commodified white-majority Division III level of college athletics where white student-athletes use drugs at a higher rate, yet there is much less surveillance and penalization from the NCAA. In a chapter centered on NASCAR, Leonard focuses on how the sport’s ‘embrace of multicultural corporatism’ (p. 200) is used to mask its white supremacist roots and the continued effects of its enduring white paternal dynastic structure. And in Chapter 9, ‘Playing the White Way’, Leonard excavates media narratives of the successes of the 2013 St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and 2014–2015 University of Wisconsin Men’s Basketball team to demonstrate how the playing styles of white majority teams are frequently racialized and freighted with coded racial ideologies that reify white supremacy through media talking points, storylines and commentaries used to explain their sporting successes. In the book’s final chapter, ‘Sporting cultures and White Victims’, Leonard details how the backlash trope of ‘white men as victims’ recurs with great frequency in the final years of Obama-era American sport media. He makes this case through insightful discussions of Duke Men’s basketball player, Grayson Allen, Tom Brady during the Deflategate controversy, and Ryan Lochte’s conduct out of the pool at the Rio Olympics. Taken together, these chapters provide an amazingly comprehensive guide for racial scholars to the key racial frames, stereotypes, tropes, and logics deployed during the Bush II and Obama eras to make the stories of white male athletes matter in ways that largely recentered white male normativity in American media culture.

One example of Leonard’s innovative theorizing of whiteness in Playing—drawing on insights from Crenshaw, DuBois, Frankenburg, McIntosh, and Roediger—is the way he turns the conversation about racial profiling on its head to focus on the way white athletes are frequently ‘profiled’ in undeservedly positive ways via the implicit use of white stereotyping in sport media representations. According to Leonard, sport media discourses make white athletes visible and legible less through the specific, unique, complicated and contradictory details of their individual biographies and more through the largely positive stereotypes, tropes and official mythologies associated with naturalizing the normativity of whiteness. The common result of this systemic laundering of the stories of white athletes through the sport media is that these tales tell us little about the actual lived experiences of many white athletes. More importantly, this process enables white athletes to enjoy unearned preferential treatment while playing an important symbolic role in American culture reifying notions of white dominance. Leonard convincingly makes this case by exposing the contradictions between the lionizing media mythologies produced about white American athletes like Johnny ‘Football’ Manzel, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, Grayson Allen and Lance Armstrong, and the actual contradictory, and at times sordid, details of their on and off-field actions, shortcomings and/or transgressions.

Leonard’s book deserves serious attention from scholars in sport studies and beyond for several reasons. First and foremost, Playing is an impressive addition to a line of other monographs in sport studies centered on critically examining how white power and privilege organize contemporary sport cultures and the narratives told in and through sport media and sporting cultures (King and Springwood, 2001; Kusz, 2007; Newman, 2010). And this is not even to mention the growing body of journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations (too numerous to cite here) that have ably demonstrated the key symbolic role that sport spectacles, sport media texts, sport formations, and sport figures and celebrities have played in the (re)production of racial formations over the past two decades.

The breadth of analysis in Playing is striking. Leonard weaves his arguments across a wide variety of American sporting cultures—American football, basketball, baseball, NASCAR, extreme sports, cycling, college football and basketball, the Olympics, professional tennis—and through virtually all of the white sport figures made prominent in the American media over the past decade: from Manziel to Tim Tebow to the Duke Men’s Lacrosse players to Joe Paterno to Ronda Rousey to Oscar Pistorius to Josh Hamilton to Riley Cooper to Ryan Lochte. Leonard’s love of sports and keen eye for seeing how race matters in so many sport media discourses is apparent throughout Playing. As someone always on the lookout for American sport figures whose performances of whiteness are ripe for study, Leonard’s book revealed a number of meaningful stories—such as those of white college basketball players, Marshall Henderson, Nik Stauskas, and the 2014–2015 Wisconsin men’s basketball teams—that I overlooked. Playing’s seemingly comprehensive cataloguing of the white male sport figures that enjoyed significant media attention in the first two decades of the 2000s and the multiple ways discourses of putative white victimization, disadvantage, marginalization, nostalgia, redemption, and disenfranchisement were used to frame their stories means the book will long be of value to scholars of race and sports in the United States.

Leonard’s Playing also admirably dares to achieve that holy grail sought by so many cultural critics; that is, to produce an analysis that is at once accessible to publics outside of academia, while still offering critical insights to one’s peers. Indeed, Leonard’s unique choice for how to write Playing—by attempting to minimize academic jargon and stylistically emphasizing the use of hashtags throughout (i.e. #PlayingWhileWhite, #CrimingWhileWhite, #BeingRedeemedWhileWhite)—is not only a symptom of the changing landscape of academic publishing in this time-accelerated, screen-saturated, information-condensed moment of modernity, but it represents his challenge to all of us in sport studies (especially those with tenure) to make our scholarship meaningful to folks outside of academia in real-time.

While there is much to appreciate in Playing, there were also some aspects that left me wanting more. As a cultural studies scholar who appreciates analyses organized by ‘radical contextualisation’ (King, 2005) there were times when I would have liked to see Leonard more thoroughly contextualize some of the representations of sporting whiteness he discusses, particularly within the contexts of post-9/11 America and the Obama years. Relatedly, while I appreciate Leonard’s effort to make his analyses accessible to readers outside of academia, there were parts where his analysis seemed a bit too quick, too gestural, and too reliant on cultural criticism shorthand and key words rather than offering more detailed arguments to make his case (see chapter 10: ‘Sporting Cultures and White Victims’). And while it was nice that Leonard focused his attention more squarely on how the visibility and marketability of American female athletes (of all races and ethnicities) are always already filtered through their ability to embody the traits of an idealized and sexualized white femininity in chapter 7: ‘(White) Women and Sports: Selling White Femininity’, the chapter’s female focus unintentionally exposed how the rest of the book’s analysis was largely centered upon white American male bodies.

Finally, the book might have benefited from a more streamlined organization of the material. But, as a colleague familiar with Leonard’s previous work, I got the sense while reading the book that his passion for the subject matter (and the admirable, all-encompassing amount of loving labor he puts into his scholarly craft) led him to want to unpack every last layer of racial meaning he could discern out of every example and text rather than be a bit more judicious in his analysis. Despite these minor criticisms, Playing While White: Privilege and Power On and Off the Field makes a invaluable contribution to the critical studies of whiteness in sport literature and will be a useful text for both undergraduate or graduate students in disciplines ranging from ethnic studies to American studies to sport studies to communication studies to sociology to English for many years to come.