"But it struck me in that moment that I was essentially, and potentially, a pricey piece of meat, fetishized because I was Black and I played football."
I grew up watching BET’s Comic View. This was a cutthroat stand-up comedy show akin to Showtime at the Apollo that featured some of the most brilliant up-and-coming Black comedians before they became household names. It was like the PG-13 version of Def Comedy Jam, which was the reason it aired on BET, rather than HBO, every Tuesday and Friday night at 9 p.m. EST, 8 p.m. Central. I grew up in Central time, and I remember every detail about the show because that is how much I loved it. This was the only show I looked forward to watching more than BET’s Uncut, because what can I say? I was a young Black teenager who was just starting to feel himself (out) while trying to cultivate an identity called “man,” which was even more overdetermined by hypermasculine sexuality then than it is now. Oh, how I would watch intently as these young Black stand-up comedians told jokes that ranged from sexuality to spirituality, back when I assumed the two were opposites. I was enamored with the different ways these brilliant minds embodied comedic sensibilities, and how they created worlds of alternative meaning that gave me a break from the reality I was living.
Whether it was Bruce Bruce telling a story about talking shit to an old Black churchwoman in the middle of service when he was a kid; or Sommore breaking open the sexual dynamics of Black intimate relationships; or Tyler Craig’s fake drunk routine, where he would draw out these elaborate stories, giving glimpses of hilarity along the way before offering the real punchline, which was always preceded by, “The moral of the story is . . .,” Black comedians gave me a peek behind the curtain of my own cultural reality, but in a much more unfiltered way than the sitcoms available at the time. I loved it, because I was raised in a family that loved to talk shit, playfully. Playing the Dozens was a love language for us. So, it makes sense that Black comedians would become the first social commentators to provoke my curiosity across a range of topics related to my masculinity. But as varied as their jokes were, poking holes in the problem of race as it played out in the context of everyday life was a common theme among them.
Black comedians gave me so many “morals of the story” about race that I began to question the relational rules by which we govern ourselves in society. Not only did Black comedians offer some of the best critiques of white supremacy I had heard, but they did so in a way that laid bare the absurdity of race in the first place. I appreciated how they brought attention to the subtle power dynamics of racial interactions, and how they did it creatively in ways that opened up windows into alternative realities that simultaneously shed light and shit on the racial reality I had to live. It looked increasingly stupid to me that I had to change the way I walked or talked around certain people just because I was Black. It made no sense that I had to downplay my personality so as not to draw too much attention to myself. And I hated the fact that I always had to say “yes sir” or “no sir” to the disrespectful cop who decided to exercise his state-sanctioned ability to harass me behind some bullshit. Really? I would think to myself, “Really, I have to play this game?” It made no sense but made all the sense in the world. I knew I had to play along, because I knew what could happen if I didn’t. I was well aware of how easily the narrative of Black male criminality could converge on my circumstances, on my body, whether I was engaged in criminal activity or not. So, I never questioned it.
Each time my dad reminded me, “Son, you have to know how to play the game,” I never questioned it. I conceded, every time. I downloaded that double consciousness in ways that would have made W. E. B. DuBois proud. And if you knew “Coach Green,” you knew my dad prided himself on thorough communication—he lectured me all the damn time about this need to move with a kind of racial elusiveness that was always one step ahead of even the possibility of racialized mistreatment. No wonder I could make people miss on the field—all of us translates. I couldn’t translate it at the time, but I was being trained to see life as a political game. My attention was being attuned to the subtleties of my own embodied performance as if I was an actor on a stage every day, caught up in a production with an all-white cast, tasked to play a part that I did not write, or else. Between Black comedians and two single parents who trained their son to live strategically, I was gifted with the curse of a comedic sensibility, which meant I couldn’t help but pay attention to the relational dynamics of race before I knew how to say that academically, not to mention to see the charade of it all.
Of all the schooling I received, it was Black comedians who planted in my consciousness a curiosity about the politics of race that both warned me and left me wanting, needing to understand more deeply how a concocted myth about Black men, a caricature, could materialize in myriad forms of mistreatment despite society’s best attempts to be “post-racial.” This cursed gift of paying attention caused my curiosity to grow into frustration every time I watched news reports about Black men being racially targeted by white people who didn’t mean to be racist, especially when there was no mention of the caricature. Never mind the psychological trauma I experienced from seeing Black men murdered and then blamed for their own untimely deaths behind portrayals of criminality. Sadly, I was accustomed to this same old song sung for so long in the United States, even while it does feel like a little piece of me dies every time I see it happen—I learned pretty quickly not to watch Fox News for that reason.
But what really frustrated me was how the caricature was never named on CNN or MSNBC either, when these were the more “progressive” attempts to critique white supremacy. Certainly, there is still the need to call out the “racist” in the white hood, especially given the ways our president has emboldened such blatancy. But watching coverage that leans to the left also tends to leave people lost, because they can’t help but moralize white supremacy. This tendency to moralize complex racial interactions reduces the real culprit to a lone “racist” who is assumed to be acting independently, and willfully, as if locating guilt guarantees that justice has been served. Sometimes the conversation goes deeper, such as when George Floyd was murdered. This blatant act caught on camera proved again the plotline that Black people have been talking about for decades, and a whole new group of white people saw it this time too. But there was still that suspicious sigh when Derek Chauvin was convicted because, once again, we found the “racist.” Usually when that happens, people relax. Society feels a little better about itself, so there is no real need to recalibrate. But finding the “racist” misses the mark because it allows the caricature behind the assumptions of Black male criminality to remain hidden, which makes it easier to maintain the (white) lie that keeps enlivening these circumstances in the first place.
Sport was supposed to be different, and in many respects it was. It offered me a different game to play, in a world where I thought I could create my own character away from the wiles of the caricature. From the time I was a young boy to the time I hung up my cleats after my tenure at the University of Kansas, people knew me as an athlete. I knew myself this way too. Sport provided a space that allowed me the freedom to explore and express my being more than any other social context, especially growing up in South Texas. This was the other game I felt I had to play, the game that seemingly chose me. My dad and uncle played at the highest levels, as did our cousins Jim and David Hill, and each of the “Green Boys” in my generation accepted scholarships to play in college, including myself. Plus, playing the game of football was always what got me recognized in a positive light growing up. This meant a lot to a Black kid in Texas. In some ways, sport was an escape from the stigma of my Blackness—from the caricature—because being an “athlete” meant I had an excuse for showing up in places I otherwise would not have been allowed into. But even then, athleticism was always more than just a meal ticket to me.
Sport was the language I spoke. Outside of comedy, it was the mother tongue I made sense of my world with. And athleticism always felt like my greatest gift, so naturally I put a lot of stock into my identity as an “athlete.” Perhaps this is why one of my high school coaches, Ron Rittimann, would sometimes sarcastically say to me, “Be an athlete,” anytime he wanted to motivate me to do better. His playful nudge would usually come when I had tripped over my own feet or made some other silly misstep that revealed a lackadaisical demeanor, to which he would offer this reminder. He was a coach that cared about me, and he believed in me. And similarly to my dad’s reminders to “play the game,” I knew exactly what Coach Rittimann meant each time he offered this loving critique: Pay attention, because we both know you are better than that.
And he was right, because athleticism was my craft. It was embodied art to me. I poured myself into developing my craft and used it as a tool because sport felt like my best chance at “making it” in life, even though I was a straight-A student. It simply made more sense when I looked at the images of successful Black men that populated my world, whether in my familial network or on ESPN. I studied sport every day, rep after rep, until all the conditioning I had done was second nature, and the once mindful movements that made me excel became muscle memory. I still find myself dishing out dead legs and spinning around corners—or the kids—in my home, because my brain simply cannot forget what has been downloaded, and what worked so well for so long. Being an athlete was always for me another way of paying a deeper kind of attention to life, a full-bodied attention. And it always registered in my brain as much as it did my body.
But no matter how far I went, that damn caricature kept showing up. Twice within the first week as a freshman at KU, he reared his ugly head to remind me that I couldn’t escape—that no matter how much intellectual energy I put into my craft, most people would still only see me for what my Black athletic body could “uniquely” do. Navigating the world of sport always felt more intellectual than people made it out to be. And to be honest, I always felt more nuanced than I knew people were conditioned to think of me, because I was a Black athlete. To be “Black” and an “athlete” was like living with a double whammy of being dumbed down twice, fetishized for what my body could do on the field, but feared for what it might do off it. At least this is the story the caricature tells.
In the first interaction, he showed up in his usual (uni)form based on the cultural fear associated with my body. I was driving back to the Jayhawk Towers from the grocery store with one of my homegirls from the track team when I got pulled over by a police officer who was attending to people who had apparently just gotten into a car accident. If that sounds strange it is because it was. How could I have gotten “pulled over” by a cop who wasn’t driving, but assisting people who might have been hurt? Well, because he left the scene of the accident to walk out into the middle of the street, raised his hand as if to tell me to stop, then walked over to the driver side window and told me, “I’m gonna write you a ticket because your music is too loud.” Already having turned my music down, I said to him, “I’m sorry officer, I didn’t know that was a law.” I was from Texas where having beats in the trunk was a way of life. I didn’t know it was a problem in Lawrence, Kansas. And I was a conscientious kid, my music really wasn’t that loud to begin with. But my Black Hyundai Sonata with rims was, as was my lack of tint on the front window, which allowed him to see clearly who was driving. It was clear that I wasn’t from around there, and probably feeling myself (out) a little too much.
He proceeded to flex, telling me repeatedly to turn my music down until it was on zero—I had turned it down as soon as I saw him, then again once he started talking, then I twisted the knob all the way to zero once it was clear what he was trying to do. He had to make a point. And it was clear to my homegirl as well, who immediately blurted out “this is bullshit,” to which I quickly shushed her because growing up in Texas taught me not to talk back to the police. “Yes sir” and “no sir” only. She was Black but grew up in Iowa and had never experienced this firsthand before. It felt familiar to me. He took my driver’s license, verified that I had insurance—and no warrants—then came back to the car and said, “I’ve decided I’m going to let you off with a warning this time.” He then gave my belongings back and walked back over to the people who were still sitting in shock while waiting for tow trucks and EMS.
The caricature has a more slippery side though, suave even. Whereas he sows hate based on the cultural assumption that Black men are criminals—played out in the first interaction—he preys on softer sensibilities in this second interaction. Me and some of my teammates were walking out of the Jayhawk Towers when a group of white girls in a blue Volkswagen Beetle drove by, and one of them leaned out of the window and yelled my name, in her most excited, endearing way. It was like she was celebrating me as if I had already scored a touchdown. I was heavily recruited coming out of high school, so she probably had already heard my name. But to have developed the wherewithal to remember what I looked like well enough to recognize me walking out of the Jayhawk Towers suggests that she had done some research, which blew my mind.
I remember having two thoughts in that moment. One was definitely, “Ooooo weee it’s finna be lit!”—or whatever version of that phrase we used in 2004. One cannot expect any college kid to get that kind of ego stroke and not at least be curious. I wasn’t that curious though, because it was the second thought I had that reigned supreme: “Man, you don’t even know me.” I think I said it under my breath though, because I didn’t want to reveal the emotional complexity young Black men were taught to hide in that culture. But it struck me in that moment that I was essentially, and potentially, a pricey piece of meat, fetishized because I was Black and I played football. For all I know, all she saw was “BBC” when she looked at me. Who knows, the imagination is expansive. But it is also socially linked, and there was already a market for America’s masturbatory excitement about Black men, especially athletes. What I do know, and what I quickly found out, was that none of that flattening flattery happens when you get hurt.