| This thesis is an explication of the controlling of hip-hop blackness within the National Basketball Association. It supports the idea of the construction of a monolithic black masculinity that simultaneously protects white hegemonic masculinity. This project seeks to illuminate the manifestations and intersections of race, labor, and bodies among Black athletes within the NBA. I argue that black NBA players are critiqued, analyzed, and governed based upon a false invention of 'authentic' black masculinity that creates a monolithic idea of blackness, especially in reference to Blacks of the hip-hop generation, which inhibits individuality and agency among the black players, and works toward curtailing their self-determination. This false black masculinity of the NBA is grounded in the stigmas associated with blackness and black machismo that historically justify the perpetuation of institutional racism and the inequalities born of that discrimination and informs how lower-class-origin Black players in the NBA are distinguished as employees, men, and individuals. Their class literally colors managerial and societal perceptions and interpretations of them. By controlling black aesthetic, bodies, and language, it abdicates the necessity to critically engage with the effects of hegemonic whiteness, nor to engage the conceptions of blackness that are created in opposition to this whiteness, nor the subsequent varying structural inequalities that whiteness creates in order to maintain its dominating position. "Controlling Blackness" is about maintaining a system of inequality that is capable of turning black bodies into objects for capitalistic commodification, taking away their own agency, and dehumanizing them to undermine any real criticism that lower-class-origin Black people may produce in order to combat the very system of racial formation that marginalizes and 'otherizes', many black people. |
