Grant Farred - Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now

Forerunners: Ideas First

Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

From the University of Minnesota Press

Grant Farred

Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now

Anna Watkins Fisher

Safety Orange

Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson

Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun

Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods

Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk

Daniel Bertrand Monk and Andrew Herscher

The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief

Catherine Liu

Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

Christopher Schaberg

Grounded: Perpetual Flight... and Then the Pandemic

Marquis Bey

The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender

Cristina Beltrn

Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy

Hil Malatino

Trans Care

Sarah Juliet Lauro

Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance

Alexis L. Boylan, Anna Mae Duane, Michael Gill, and Barbara Gurr

Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road

Ian G. R. Shaw and Marv Waterstone

Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism

Claudia Milian

LatinX

Aaron Jaffe

Spoiler Alert: A Critical Guide

Don Ihde

Medical Technics

Jonathan Beecher Field

Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation

Jennifer Gabrys

How to Do Things with Sensors

Naa Oyo A. Kwate

Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Arne De Boever

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

Steve Mentz

Break Up the Anthropocene

John Protevi

Edges of the State

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer

Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology

Nicholas Tampio

Learning versus the Common Core

Kathryn Yusoff

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Kenneth J. Saltman

The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance

Ginger Nolan

The Neocolonialism of the Global Village

Joanna Zylinska

The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse

Robert Rosenberger

Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless

William E. Connolly

Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism

Chuck Rybak

UW Struggle: When a State Attacks Its University

Clare Birchall

Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

la paperson

A Third University Is Possible

Kelly Oliver

Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention

P. David Marshall

The Celebrity Persona Pandemic

Davide Panagia

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics

David Golumbia

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

Sohail Daulatzai

Fifty Years of The Battle of Algiers: Past as Prologue

Gary Hall

The Uberfication of the University

Mark Jarzombek

Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

N. Adriana Knouf

How Noise Matters to Finance

Andrew Culp

Dark Deleuze

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derridas Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift

Sharon Sliwinski

Mandelas Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming

Grant Farred

Martin Heidegger Saved My Life

Ian Bogost

The Geeks Chihuahua: Living with Apple

Shannon Mattern

Deep Mapping the Media City

Steven Shaviro

No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Jussi Parikka

The Anthrobscene

Reinhold Martin

Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City

John Hartigan Jr.

Aesops Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach

Grant Farred

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Copyright 2022 by Grant Farred

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-5179-1337-3 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-4529-6716-5 (Ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4529-6742-4 (Manifold)

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

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Available as a Manifold edition at manifold.umn.edu

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

To Ian Balfour: Raptors partisan, Expos loyalist, music aficionado, and possessor of a truly capacious mind

O NLY A B LACK A THLETE C AN S AVE U S N OW 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 aspiringsoon-to-be teenblack 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 markedand marred2020, 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 dowhat 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 officers 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) 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 meanhas long since meantsecuring 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.