Ph.D. Octopus

by Weiner

Here we go again. Only a short while after the Grant Hill versus Jalen Rose “Uncle Tom” controversy, and a few months after former middleweight championship boxer Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins played the race card in the Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather Jr. debate, the same Hopkins has brought his politically incorrect opinions into the limelight again.

This time, B-Hop, a life-long Philadelphia sports fan, has gone after former Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. We’ve heard this tune before. Both men are prominent African American athletes. McNabb‘s crime? Like Grant Hill, he comes from a middle-class family. Read the rest of this entry »

by Weiner

With the Final Four coming up this weekend, I figure it’s better late than never to weigh in on the Grant Hill vs Jalen Rose controversy. Well not exactly weigh in, as I don’t really feel the need to pick a “side,” but rather to put their spat in some kind of historical context.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice summary with far better commentary than I can offer over here. But I’ll give you some basics:

Rose (left) was a member of the 1990s Michigan Wolverines men’s basketball team, known as the “Fab Five” for their five African American stars, including Rose, Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson. As wikipedia notes, the “Fab Five” became well-known for bringing a hip hop style into college basketball, and later into the NBA. The team reached two NCAA championships, losing both, including the 1992 championship to the Duke University Blue Devils, led by future NBA star Grant Hill.

The class contrast was stark. Hill’s father, an NFL running back, had been educated at Yale, his mother at Wellesley College, where she roomed with Hillary Clinton.

In the recent  ESPN documentary, The Fab Five (which Rose produced), Rose, who grew up poor and never knew his father, reflected on this divide:

Read the rest of this entry »

by Nemo

What does Judith Butler have in common with Ronald Reagan? How about Jerry Falwell and John Rawls? Cornel West and Milton Friedman? In his sweeping history of American social thought during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers argues that these figures share more in common than one might think.

According to Rodgers fracture or what he (less poetically) calls “disaggregation” characterizes the main currents of intellectual life from the early 1970s to our own day. He argues that a mid-century focus on the social power of tradition and institutions, whether economic, political and religious, gave way to competing models of social life that stressed individual agency, historical contingency, and the amorphous power of culture. Early on in Age of Fracture, Rodgers sharply contrasts the social thought of the Cold War and the period that followed in terms of human nature. Rodgers writes,

Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. (Rodgers, 3)

In economics, Rodgers argues, this transformation was especially acute and would have serious consequences for social policy and social thought more generally. As the repeated financial crises of the 1970s seemed to discredit the effectiveness of Keynesianism, a number of schools of economic thought stepped into the fill the vacuum (often with major funding from recently established conservative think tanks)—all with strong libertarian tendencies.

harbinger of fracture?

Proponents of monetarism, rational choice theory, and supply-side economics might have disagreed on certain principles, but all believed that the best economic outcomes were produced when individuals made their way into the open market without interference from labor unions and government regulators. Individualism ruled; deep notions of power waned. At the same time, social theorists started to blame the rise of an urban “underclass” on the very government agencies created to serve them (while downplaying years of de-industrialization, institutional racism, and declining tax revenues due to white flight).

One of the most striking contributions of Rodgers’ book, however, is to show that shrinking ideas of the “social” were not limited to free-market economists, but also characterized nearly every sphere of the period’s intellectual life.  Across the era’s social sciences, Rodgers notes an interest in thought experiments involving game theory, prisoners’ dilemmas, and “veils of ignorance” (in John Rawls’ famous Theory of Justice) that showed little concern for context, history, and power. Attention shifted toward abstraction and individual choice.  Legal originalists discounted centuries of jurisprudence and social context to uncover the “true” meaning of the constitution at its foundational moment. Meanwhile, leading economists believed they could ignore the legacy of the past and shepherd Eastern Europe into a capitalist future through “shock therapy.”

As the social movements of the 1960s moved forward into the 1970s and 1980s, Rodgers sees fragmentation across the board. Inspired by the New Left idea of participatory democracy, influential liberal thinkers embraced pluralism and communal participation, which served to downplay earlier visions of a national social contract and economic redistribution (on the right, many showed a similar concern for the well-being of “mediating institutions” supposedly threatened by an intrusive federal government).

Feminists who had once believed “sisterhood is powerful,” now debated the usefulness of the concept of “woman.” Did it risk further marginalizing the distinctive voices of black women, working-class women, and queer women? At the same time, influential black intellectuals in the United States and England such as Paul Gilroy, Cornell West, and Henry Louis Gates rejected one-dimensional understandings of a unified black experience—and instead called for an understanding of blackness that conformed to the complex legacies of life within the African Diaspora.

For all the commonalities Rodgers sees running through the period’s social thought, this is not a consensus history of the 1980s. Even with though he sees the pull of “disaggregation” leaving a mark across the period’s ideological spectrum, he remains sensitive to political conflict, for example, noting contentious battles over Central America, nuclear weapons, and social issues such as abortion.

Nor is Age of Fracture yet another declension narrative about irresponsible radicals and “identity politics” somehow bearing responsibility for the revival of the country’s political right. In fact, Rodgers sees a major difference between the social thought of the 1960s, which tended to focus more closely on the power of institutions and social forces such as the government, the military, and capital in shaping inequality, and the period that followed with its emphasis on fracture, agency, and culture. Rodgers also sees much to praise in social thought since the 1970s, particularly the way it has helped legitimize racial and sexual difference.

A rite-of-passage for many graduate students.

He does believe, however, that the era’s strong emphasis on culture, rupture, and agency has lead to a neglect of key questions about power and history. At the end of his chapter on race, Rodgers argues that the,

growth of more complex understandings of identity was also the retreat of history. A culture reshaped in the choices and present moment preoccupations of a market-saturated society had transposed the frame of argument. In a liberation that was also the age’s deficit, a certain loss of memory had occurred. (Rodgers, 143)

Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors? Or was it that they aimed to capture a more nuanced and sophisticated version of the way history unfolded, power functioned, and identities were created?  No one who has read Foucault for a graduate seminar would be unfamiliar with questions of power and institutions—even though the answers he encourages might not be as straightforward as a Marxian or even an “interest group pluralism” reading of the concept might provide. Does a focus on everyday performances of power really have to come into conflict with one attuned to the power of history and institutions?

In addition, is Rodgers correct to lump most of the period’s social thought under the concept of disaggregation? Can we really see any commonalities between the interpretive strategies of an influential anti-foundationalist literary critic like Stanley Fish and a biblical fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell? Rodgers acknowledges that the period’s conservative thinkers (and many self-proclaimed liberals) tended to obsess over combating the moral relativism and multicultural fragmentation that they saw characterizing intellectual life. Conservative Christians, in particular, proclaimed a universalistic understanding of human nature and longed for fixed gender binaries totally at odds with celebrations of gender trouble or the indeterminacy of texts.

Rodgers argues, however, that even among the religious right and cultural conservatives, one finds dissension on questions of gender, free speech, and foreign policy. While this is surely the case (when was any social movement wholly unified?), Rodgers might have done even more to explain how evangelicals fit into his broader theme of fracture.

While some readers may take issue with the book’s conceptual preference for lumping rather than splitting (though Rodgers always does an excellent job describing particular ideas), others might feel that the question of causality is left too open-ended. If fracture characterized the age, what exactly caused it to break out? Rodgers notes the value of works by David Harvey and Frederick Jameson, which examine the economic roots of the “post-modern condition,” but rejects what he sees as the determinism implicit in such models. Rodgers believes that ideas about fracture often preceded economic change and helped condition responses to it.  It’s hard to disagree with this point, but it’s not surprising that discussion has already begun over the question of causality and the book’s principal argument.

Whatever minor issues readers find with the book however, they are likely to be impressed by its scope, its analytical ambitions, and its sensitivity to nuance, not to mention its readability. For many years it will serve as a key reference point for scholars investigating particular questions about social thought since the 1970s. In addition, Rodgers implicit normative stance, which calls on scholars to engage deeply with history, institutions, and power—particularly when dealing with questions of inequality—rings very true today, as we continue to live through the legacy of the age of fracture that he describes so effectively.

by Weiner

With all that is going on in Egypt right now, I thought I would share a little gem I plucked from the Alain Locke Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. It’s a letter from Egyptian Oxford student Hamed El Alaily to his friend, the African American Rhodes Scholar Alain Locke. Both were members of the Oxford Cosmpolitan Club. El Alaily wrote the letter to Locke sometime after the assassination of Egypt’s Prime Minister Boutros Ghali, a Coptic Christian (pictured below), in 1910. Here it is:

Dear Lock [sic]. The day at last have [sic] come. A nobler man man than Digla [sic?] has murdered the traitor Egypt’s Prime Minister. My beloved country is in revolt and is on the glorious path for freedom. Goodbye my friend for I am going to offer my humble life to the glorious cause. Remember your friend and pray for me and for my country. I have great hope in my people. We shall soon do wonders and exterminate tyranny from the golden valley of the Nile. Keep the motive of my departure secret and keep this historic letter. Yours for freedom, H. El Alaily.

He also wrote on one side of the letter:

I suppose you will read tomorrow the glorious news. Hamed El Alaily.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this tells us about the situation in Egypt today, except to say that at least some Egyptians have been craving freedom for a very long time. What freedom meant to El Elaily and Locke, and what it means to the current citizens of Egypt, is of course up for debate.

by Weiner

Growing up in Canada, I was never required to read Mark Twain, so I never did (I do remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes where he appears as Samuel Clemens though). With the controversy surrounding the editing of the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve decided to go out and read it. I’ve also realized that as someone who aspires to teach American history, this particular controversy is rather important to me. I know I don’t support the changing of the text, but I do think that teaching the “n-word” is difficult, no matter what the race of the students or teacher. With that, I link to this outstanding essay from Autumn 2005 issue of The American Scholar, “Teaching the N-Word,” by University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard. Here’s a taste:

Over the next 30 minutes or so, Eric and I talk about “nigger.” He is uncomfortable; every time he says “nigger,” he drops his voice and does not meet my eyes. I know that he does not want to say the word; he is following my lead. He does not want to say it because he is white; he does not want to say it because I am black. I feel my power as his professor, the mentor he has so ardently adopted. I feel the power of Randall Kennedy’s book in my hands, its title crude and unambiguous. Say it, we both instruct this white student. And he does.

Read the whole thing. And also read the post from the US Intellectual History blog by Lauren Kientz Anderson which directed me to Bernard’s article.

by Weiner

It being Martin Luther King day, I figured that I’d discuss Malcolm X instead. The latest issue of Ebony has an article (print only) by Kevin Chappell titled “The Battle for Malcolm X.” The author interviewed three of Malcolm’s six daughters, Ilyasah, Gamilah, and Malaak, who have been attempting to reclaim their father’s legacy ever since their mother, Betty Shabazz, died in 1997.

Like Che Guevera, Malcolm X went from being an inspirational symbol to a commodity. In Chappell’s words: “Books were being written, T-shirts printed and hip-hop artists were using Malcolm X–and everything that rhymed with–interchangeably to push their often-convoluted ideas of Black power and nationalism.”

The sisters’ ideas, however, don’t seem entirely clear either, at least, not from this article. They do emphasize a few things that their father was not. Most strongly, they argue that for the importance of Malcolm’s own parents on his intellectual development and activist fervor, while denying the significance of the Nation of Islam. According to Malaak: “Our father took the baton from his father, not the Nation of Islam.”

The sisters also think their father has been mistakenly remembered as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, when in fact he was a global figure concerned with human rights. “He was the one who let us know that we were descendants of Africa.” They note that they get greater praise and recognition as children of Malcolm X in the Caribbean and Europe than they do in America.

Interestingly, though Chappell uses the universalist language of “human rights,” the sisters’ universalism is rather particularistic, or to be more precise, Afrocentric. Entertainment lawyer L. Londell McMillan, who helped bring the sisters together after years of infighting, stated that “the sisters want to connect the struggle and journey of Black people worldwide the way Malcolm did.”

Strangely absent from this article is significant discussion of religion. My knowledge of Malcolm X is far from expert, but from my understanding it was his discovery of traditional Islam, rather than the racial version espoused by Elijah Muhammad and The Nation, that led him to his more global perspective. For Malcolm, Islam was his path to universalism, to human rights. As Malcolm X, he was leader to African Americans, but as El-Hajj Malik El Shabbazz, he aspired to be a leader to people everywhere.

This reminded me of Nemo’s shout-out to Andrew Hartman’s post about ethnic studies, of using the particular to get to the universal. As Hartman wrote about Mexican-American nationalist and poet Corky Gonzales:

[Corky] Gonzales saw Chicano nationalism as a stepping-stone to an international movement of oppressed peoples, in turn a springboard to universal human liberation. However, there was a proper order of struggle, and the particular preceded the universal.

It strikes me that Malcolm X, at the end of his life, hoped to use Black nationalism in precisely the same way. Of course, Malcolm never abandoned his loyalty to African Americans or Black people around the globe. His importance as a Black leader should not be downplayed or forgotten. But neither should his universal significance as leader and inspiration to the downtrodden everywhere, a symbol of power and pride to all human beings, irrespective of race or religion.

by Weiner

I’m not sure if David Kirkpatrick, author of the pro-Mark Zuckerberg The Facebook Effect, and David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times journalist recently reporting from Tunisia, are the same person. I suspect not. Still, I thought it was a remarkable coincidence when David D. Kirpatrick cited the following as evidence for Tunisian strongman General Rachid Ammar’s growing popularity:

On Facebook, a staging ground of the street revolt, almost 1,700 people had clicked that they “like” a Web page named “General Rachid Ammar President” and emblazoned with his official photographs.

The coincidence proved especially powerful because the first few pages of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect celebrated Facebook’s ability to organize popular netroots opposition to FARC in Colombia.

This in turn reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent New Yorker article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.” In response to those who praised the role of Twitter and Facebook in bolstering Iran’s recent and shortlived “Green Revolution,” Gladwell noted that real protest, like the 1960 lunchcounter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, takes place with tremendous effort, face-to-face organizing, and genuine sacrifice: putting jobs and school on hold so you can sit at a segregated lunchcounter for days on end. That kind of movement takes much more energy than simply clicking “like” on a Facebook page or retweeting a political tweet. Of course, people did actually take to the streets in Iran, but the point is that they were the real revolutionaries, not the ones who watched safely from their computer monitors.

I have no idea what’s about to happen in Tunisia, or Lebanon, or anywhere else where revolution is brewing. I hope that Facebook and Twitter can aid progressive and popular social movements. But with an eye to history, I, like Gladwell, suspect that real change comes only with real sacrifice, with solidarity forged through strong emotional ties rather than cyber-friendship.

by Nemo

Over at the excellent U.S. Intellectual History Blog, Andrew Hartman has written a provocative post on the relationship between neo-liberalism and the “spirit of the 1960s.” Citing a number of recent theorists including Wendy Brown, Slavoj Žižek, and Walter Benn Michaels, Hartman argues that activists in the 1960s, with their demands for “public tolerance of things that were once intolerable, such as racial and sexual difference,” helped pave the way for “unfettered capitalism with a smiley face.”

The Spirit of the Sixties?

Through the cunning of history, Hartman argues, capital has learned to thrive off of movements that “many thought was formed as resistance to capitalism, or at least, as resistance to the symptoms of capitalism: imperialism, racism, sexism, etc.” From this perspective, it appears that one of the most significant–but historically neglected–legacies of the 1960s was the way it provided establishment institutions multicultural ploys to feign progressivism while reproducing inequality.

While I think there’s something to be said for this view, especially the way that corporations and universities undertook the bare minimum of action to address the many grievances launched against them, it also risks downplaying the period’s genuine radicalism.  As historian Jeremy Varon has observed, by the late 1960s activists tended to understand inequality as a total “system” perpetuated by the nation’s leading institutions: universities, corporations, and government each played a role in protecting the interests of patriarchy, racism, empire, and global capital.

Or is this the spirit of the Sixties? Or just an awesome hair day?

In this era, groups such as the Black Panthers, the New York Radical Women, and even Students for a Democratic Society (and its various offshoots) demanded much more than diversity programs and corporate restructuring. This explains why the United States government saw the period’s activists, particularly the Panthers, as a major threat, and did everything in its power to destroy them (often breaking the law in the process).

On his larger point, I think Hartman’s correct to highlight capitalism’s newfound love affair with a United Colors of Benetton style of “multiculturalism” in the post-1960s period. These corporate reforms came on the cheap and did nothing to address the intertwined tyrannies highlighted by the late New Left: economic inequity, male privilege, black ghettoization, and American militarism. Today, corporations and universities–key institutional reproducers of social inequality–make use of the language of diversity to present themselves as the protectors of egalitarianism and social mobility. The fact that they get away with doing so—I think—says much more about the power of the American establishment than it does with the goals of 1960s radicals like Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Hayden, or Shulamith Firestone.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton: Harbingers of Neo-Liberalism?

While American institutions might have found ways to co-opt much of the period’s dissent, this should not detract from the real gains that the era’s activists have won, even when up against some of the most well-entrenched and well-funded opponents imaginable. In the face of massive hostility, sixties radicals played a major role in electing the first generation of black political officials since Reconstruction, transformed rape and abortion laws to give women more control over their own bodies, witnessed the rise of the gay liberation movement, and helped launch modern environmentalism. While never as successful as their conservative critics claimed, the era’s radicals also transformed the teaching of American history–making the stories of the poor, of people of color, and of women, for example, central to the discipline’s mission. If the period’s activists failed to stem the rising tide of economic inequality in this country, I think that says a lot less about them than it does with the power of their opponents.

Which brings me to the Tea Party.  Hartman concludes his post by asking whether he is “crazy” for sympathizing with Benn Michaels’ view that the Tea Party represents America’s only significant resistance to neo-liberalism (even if its members don’t realize it) because of its opposition to illegal immigration. Our own Wiz has already addressed many of Benn Michaels’ principal  arguments here.

As for me, I don’t think that Hartman’s crazy, but I do think that describing a movement largely composed of affluent and well-educated white people, who attack undocumented workers (one of neo-liberalism’s chief victims) and call for the elimination of an already pitiable welfare state somehow “anti-capitalist” wishful thinking at best. (Whether or not the Tea Party has some legitimate grievances is another point entirely.)

Resistance to neo-liberalism in action.

What does all this all mean for today? As Wiz noted in his critique of Benn Michaels,“one of the main effects of neoliberalism has been to create a global working class that is increasingly female and people of color. So any movement which seeks to empower this new working class has to take issues of gender, race, and sex seriously.” Creating alliances among opponents of neo-liberalism, while recognizing difference, it seems to me, remains crucial to any movement that aims to achieve social justice. This, perhaps, requires honoring the best of what the “spirit of the 1960s”–at least its radical side–has to offer.

by Nemo

For the past few days, thousands of Georgia prisoners have been striking against their poor working conditions. The strikers—by demanding actual wages and fair working conditions—risk undermining one of the America’s few areas of global economic competitiveness. Ever buy packaged Starbucks coffee? Ever buy a mouse from Microsoft? Ever shopped at Wal-Mart? Chances are you have benefited from a quality product made in the USA—by prisoners. Prison labor represents one of the few ways that American companies can compete with the low wages offered in the developing world. Prison authorities must break the Georgia prison strike—the fate of the American worker might depend on it.

Although Georgia–unlike dozens of other states–has barred the age old right for prisoners to work without pay for private companies, it has managed to cutback on many costly state and municipal jobs by making prisoners do them instead. With their irresponsible protests, the strikers risk creating better working conditions at prisons more generally.

This is especially the case since Georgia has been so innovative in making prisons economically productive. It spends less on prisoner upkeep than nearly anywhere else does in the country. As one journalist has observed “Prisoners are confined in overcrowded cells, with very little heat in the winter months and sweltering heat in the summer.”

Georgia has also cut back on wasteful government spending by denying prisoners access to any educational opportunities beyond the General Equivalency Diploma. After all, if prisoners had access to education, it might increase the chances that they would never return to jail, and thus deny the state its right to their unpaid labor. With nearly 1 in 13 of Georgia’s citizens either in prison, probation, or on parole, these huge labor reserves provide a great way to reign in runaway government spending.

Snake River Correctional Institution Call Center, Oregon. Ensuring that those telemarketing calls you receive during dinner are "made in the USA."

Georgia’s prison employment has been a particular boon to the state’s black community. While comprising 30% of the state’s population, African Americans make up 63% of the state’s prisoners. This provides the community with well-needed jobs. On this point, Georgia has established itself as a leader in a broader national trend.  As Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has observed, “Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males.  African-Americans–males and females–make up .6 percent of the entire world’s population, but African-American males–alone–make up 8 percent of the entire world’s prison population.” Thus, the prison strike threatens not only American financial competitiveness, but also employment opportunities for some of the nation’s most economically disadvantaged citizens.

The good news, however, is that America holds the world’s largest prison population. If prison officials make sure to shutdown this peaceful protest with maximum force—as they seem intent on doing—this important system of competitive labor management stands a high chance of remaining in place. In fact, if Georgia succeeds, President Obama might follow the state’s example in launching the “job creation” package that his liberal supporters have long been demanding. Indeed, with federal judges now ruling the health care mandate unconstitutional, Congress should consider re-opening debtors’ prisons for Americans who cannot afford to pay their health care bills. This might not solve the health care crisis, but it would go along way to reducing unemployment.

by Weiner

It was not long after Filipino congressman and champion boxer Manny Pacquiao defeated Antonio Margarito in a masterful 12-round unanimous decision that somebody decided to play the race card.

In boxing, this sort of thing is inevitable. The sport has long been racially charged, perhaps most famously when Jack Johnson fought Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada in 1910. Much of the American public imagined Jeffries as “The Great White Hope.”  Johnson dashed those hopes, brutally battering his opponent for 15 rounds until Jeffries’ corner called it quits and riots erupted across the country (often simply in response to blacks celebrating in the streets), killing 23 African Americans and two white people.  The story of Jack Johnson has achieved legendary status, immortalized in a 1967 play, The Great White Hope, starring a young James Earl Jones, and later in Ken Burns’ documentary Unforgivable Blackness.

That story, of course, extended far beyond the ring. Johnson broke many racial taboos of his time, most infamously in his very public relationships with white women. He played upon stereotypes to suit his purposes, purportedly even wrapping his penis in gauze underneath his shorts to make it appear bigger. Johnson’s effect on American conceptions of race and masculinity is best explored in Gail Bederman’s introduction to her excellent study, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917.

The story of race and boxing doesn’t stop there. As NYU historian Jeffrey Sammons chronicles in his Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, discussion of race played a huge role in the career of Joe Louis, the first Black heavyweight champion after Johnson, and of course in the life Muhammad Ali, perhaps the most famous athlete who ever lived.

Today, racial discourse in boxing usual surrounds the action inside the ring. We live in strange times for spectators of the “sweet science.” The demographics of fighters and fans has shifted dramatically. Boxing has always been popular among American immigrants. Every young Jewish schlemiel who aspired to some sort of masculine ideal has devoured books like The Jewish Boxer’s Hall of Fame or When Boxing was a Jewish Sport. In the beginning of the 20th century the sport was especially popular among Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants, as many fighters of that era drew the colour line and refused to box against African-Americans, especially after the “Great White Hope” affair. At this time, boxing was the second most popular sport in America, after baseball, the national pastime.

With the rise of Joe Louis, African Americans began to achieve prominence in the sport in greater numbers. After WW2, Jewish participation in boxing fell off dramatically, though other white ethnics, especially Italians, continued to succeed, most famously Rocky Marciano. For this reason, the image of the Italian fighter resonated enough to make the 1975 Oscar-winning movie Rocky so successful.  By the 1960s, however, Blacks dominated most weight classes. This began to change, though, as Latinos earned championships, especially at the lighter weights. In the 1980s, though Mike Tyson ruled the heavyweight class and Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns all achieved stardom, fighters like Roberto Duran and Alexis Arguello ushered in a wave of Latino champions. In the 1990s, many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, along with Puerto Ricans and Cuban defectors, entered the ranks of boxing’s best. Boxing in the United States remained an immigrant sport, but the immigrants had changed.

Still, African Americans dominated much of boxing, like they came to dominate baseball, and to an even greater extent football, basketball and track and field. Scholars reached for scientific explanations. Books like John Hoberman’s 1997 volume Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race takes a historical and cultural perspective, while Jon Ensine’s 1999 work, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, tackles the “science” more directly, concluding that a combination of biology and culture has led to Black athletic success. While Ensine’s conclusions are controversial and questionable, his contribution to the dialogue on this “taboo” issue is extremely valuable. To this day, when we see the runners line up for the 100 meter dash in the Olympics, most of us can predict accurately that the top three sprinters will be people of African origin. Why this is deserves to be studied.

In boxing, however, things are a bit different. Today, the fight game is not nearly as popular as it once was to the broader American public, but it remains extremely popular among Hispanics. And while African Americans once dominated the heavyweight class to such an extent that it was mocked in the 1996 parody, The Great White Hype, now the sport’s glamour division is ruled by two Ukrainian giants, the brothers Vladimir and Vitali Klitschko. Great Black athletes who weigh over 200 pounds are turning to football and basketball, and to a lesser extent baseball, where there is more money, less risk, and the possibility of getting a college education through athletic scholarships. The integration and growing popularity of America’s other major sports sounded the death knell for boxing’s prominence in American life. In a sense, Jackie Robinson killed the African American heavyweight, though he died a slow, illustrious death, and lived long enough to give the United States Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, and Mike Tyson, among many other greats.

At the lower weights, however, things remain different. If you’re a great athlete, but only 5’5” and 125 pounds, your options are pretty limited if you want to make money in sports. Boxing may be your best or even only route. Indeed, this is probably true for men under 6 feet tall and 175 pounds, with some exceptions among middle infielders and point guards, and maybe the odd running back or tennis player. And so while Latinos (from the US and elsewhere) and now Asians and Europeans are an enormous presence in the ring, Black fighters in the lower weight classes still win championships, none more famously than Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Mayweather, aka “Pretty Boy Floyd,” aka Floyd “Money” Mayweather,” may be the best pound-for-pound fight in the world. The only other candidate is Pacman, Manny Pacquaio. Mayweather has already hurled ethnic slurs at Pacquaio, making fun of Manny’s Filipino heritage. Mayweather also may have beaten his ex-girlfriend. Leaving that aside (which, I recognize, is a lot to ask), many believe a fight between these two men, despite their relatively small size, could be the biggest boxing match in years. Both men stand to make millions from it. Unfortunately, they’ve had trouble agreeing on drug testing specifics before the fight. Most observers agree that Mayweather seems to be the one ducking Pacquaio, though at this point his legal troubles might derail the whole thing even if the two boxers do come to an agreement.

If they were to fight, however, who would win? Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins, aka B-Hop, the Philadelphia fighter and former middleweight champion, clearly favours Floyd. Why? Because of his race.

“Floyd Mayweather would beat Manny Pacquiao because the styles that African-American fighters — and I mean, black fighters from the streets or the inner cities — would be successful,” said Hopkins, according to Fanhouse.com. “I think Floyd Mayweather would pot-shot Pacquiao and bust him up in between the four-to-five punches that Pacquiao throws and then set him up later on down the line.”

Interestingly, Hopkins does not attribute Mayweather’s advantage to any biological or genetic superiority. Essentially, his strength is one of culture. For as the article notes:

Pacquiao fought and defeated Joshua Clottey of Ghana earlier this year, but Hopkins discounted that win, saying “Clottey is ‘black,’ but not a ‘black boxer’ from the states with a slick style.”

Hopkins also said this:

“Maybe I’m biased because I’m black, but I think that this is what is said at people’s homes and around the dinner table among black boxing fans and fighters. Most of them won’t say it [in public] because they’re not being real and they don’t have the balls to say it,” said Hopkins, a 45-year-old future Hall of Famer and a multi-division champion. “Listen, this ain’t a racial thing, but then again, maybe it is,” said Hopkins. “But the style that is embedded in most of us black fighters, that style could be a problem to any other style of fighting.”

So Joshua Clottey, from Ghana, doesn’t have it, though it’s “embedded” in most Black fighters. This a new, and interesting form of racial essentialism. It’s the same kind of rationale behind the argument that China will never produce a great point guard, because Chinese basketball players don’t develop the toughness that African American guards practicing on inner city playgrounds do. Is there any truth to this? Who knows? I do agree with the ESPN commentators that it is strange and surprising that Pacquiao has never faced an African American opponent. But I also agree that this has nothing to do with race.

In any case, I’m not sure if these race and sports questions can be answered. But I do want to see Pacquiao and Mayweather fight. Lord knows I’ll be rooting for Pacman, and not because of his race, but because he’s a class act and Mayweather’s a criminal and a dick. Also, I think Pacquiao should be the underdog, and I always root for the underdog.

Who do I think would/will win? I think Mayweather will be much harder to hit than Margarito was. Mayweather is a defense master and he hates getting hit. Pacquiao has incredibly fast hands, but they used to say that about Oscar de la Hoya until he came up against Shayne Mosley and Mayweather, both of whom were faster. I think Mayweather might have faster hands than Manny as well. I also think Floyd’s punching power is underrated. Though he’s not a brawler, he can punch.

At the same time, Pacquiao hits very hard, and he will eventually hit Mayweather. I don’t think the strategy he used against the bigger Margarito, in-and-out, pot-shot from different angles, will work against Floyd. He’ll have to crowd him, stay busy, stay on him, go to the body. I still think Floyd probably wins by decision or late stoppage. But then again, Manny has surprised fans over and over again. He started his career at flyweight, and now has won a junior middleweight belt, beating a guy who weighed over 165 pounds on fight night. Manny was able to hurt Margarito, so he will definitely be able to hurt Floyd. I don’t see Manny winning a decision, but just maybe he knocks Mayweather out. If he does that, he may be the greatest fighter of all time.