Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now
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A call to arms exploring the protest movements of 2020 as they reverberated through the athletic world
Starting with George Hill’s refusal to participate in a playoff game following the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” spurred athletes into radical action. Farred uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the current dystopic crisis offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.
Starting with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to participate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical action. They disrupted athletic normalcy, and in their grief and rage against American racism they demonstrated the true progressivism lacking in even the most reformist-minded politicians and pundits. Farred goes on to trace the radicalism of black athletes in a number of sports, including the WNBA, women’s tennis, the NFL, and NASCAR, locating contemporary athletes in a lineage that runs through Muhammad Ali as well as Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.
Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the dystopic crisis of our current moment offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.
[Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now] should be read by all, but especially by those who see nothing wrong with the racism that has and continues to rear its ugly head.
Duncan R. Jamieson, Nordic Sports Studies Forum
Contents
Prologue
1. The NBA and the WNBA Are the Most Progressive Forces in American Politics
2. From “Fear the Deer” to “Follow the Deer”
3. Out of One, Many
4. Reforming the Unreformable
5. Nur ein Gott kann uns jetzt Retten
6. Strange Things Happen in the Bubble
7. “Hey, Chicago, What Do You Say?”
8. The WNBA Takes Its Stance
9. Colin Kaepernick
10. Silence Reverberates
11. The Peculiar Science of Black Athletic Entropy
12. The Burden of Over-Representation, Curiously Borne by Woods and Jordan
13. Change Is Everywhere, or So It Seems
14. Change Is Everywhere, Even the NHL
15. Biting the Hand That Feeds Them
16. A Pause for a Cause
17. Ontological Exhaustion
18. Inverse Displacement
19. Love, Unrequited
20. From L.A. to Kenosha
21. Harmolodics
Acknowledgments
