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A different contender? Barack
Obama, the 2008 presidential
campaign and the racial politics
of sport
Mary G. McDonald & Samantha King
Version of record first published: 04 Apr 2012.
To cite this article: Mary G. McDonald & Samantha King (2012): A different contender?
Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential campaign and the racial politics of sport, Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 35:6, 1023-1039
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A different contender? Barack Obama, the
2008 presidential campaign and the racial
politics of sport
Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
(First submission September 2010; First published April 2012)
Abstract
This paper explores popular representations of Barack Obamas relation-
ship to sport during the 2008 US presidential campaign. It delineates how
white normativity framed the candidates passion for basketball and his
participation in a highly publicized bowling game. We argue that
Obamas athletic activities became key vehicles for reading his body
and by extension his identity and his politics. The question that could
only be asked in a white supremacist context is Obama too black or not
black enough to be President? mirrored long-standing tensions in
Americas affective relation to black male athletes. Representations of
Obama bowling further illuminate the complicated ways in which
whiteness operates. The essay concludes with a brief discussion suggesting
the importance of analyses of sport for ethnic and racial studies.
Keywords: Whiteness; blackness; race; Obama; sport; presidential body.
Introduction
On the day before he was sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the
USA, Barack Obama played basketball in the gym of Washington,
DCs Coolidge High School. One photograph of Obama, shooting
hoops and wearing dress slacks and a rolled-up long sleeve shirt with
no tie, was included in the official White House release of images
documenting the hours immediately before and after his inauguration
as the nations first black President (Figure 1). That the official
materials commemorating the inauguration included this picture is
unsurprising given that sport figured so prominently in the 2008
presidential campaign. Obamas preference for pickup basketball
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 6 June 2012 pp. 10231039
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.661932
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games and other physical activities while on the trail had been well
chronicled by the American press.
1
His apparent inexperience with
bowling was also the subject of great interest, as were the athletic
strengths and weaknesses of the other major candidates: New York
Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton spent time during the Democratic
primary reminiscing about her love for her hometown Chicago Cubs
baseball team and her own sporting childhood; Republican Senator
John McCain reached out to National Association for Stock Car Auto
Racing (NASCAR) fans and attended the annual Sturgis motorcycle
rally. McCains choice of running mate, then-governor Sarah Palin, a
self-described hockey mom, outdoors enthusiast and former high
school basketball point guard and sportscaster, also contributed to the
significance of sport in the presidential race.
For US election campaigns to be filled with images and narratives of
sport is nothing new. In contrast to other national contexts, US history
is particularly rife with examples of politicians mobilizing discourses
of athleticism in order to suggest both a common touch and a sense of
rugged masculine individualism. This latter point is evident in the
numerous stories told about the active, strenuous life of Theodore
Roosevelt, John F. Kennedys love of touch football, the bowling
ability of Richard Nixon, and Gerald Fords glory days as a football
player at the University of Michigan. The effectiveness of such stories
rests on the powerful feelings and attachments generated by sport; but,
as sport scholars have long contended, these sentiments are far from
Figure 1 Barack Obama playing basketball in the gym of Coolidge High
School, Washington, DC
Reproduced with permission from CALLIE SHELL/Aurora Photos.
1024 Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
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innocent. Although sport is often romanticized as a space of play and
freely chosen leisure, it is better understood as an ensemble of
knowledges and practices that disciplines, conditions, reshapes, and
inscribes the body (Cole 1994, p. 15).
Jeffrey Montez de Ocas (2005, p. 150) research on the muscle gap in
the Cold War USA makes clear how sport and physical activity have
been mobilized as regulatory mechanisms. According to Montez de Oca
(2005, p. 150), athletic participation became a key vehicle through which
political and military leaders sought to firm up the soft white male
bodes that were deemed open to communist penetration during that
period. Framed in the language of anti-communismand democracy, key
messages about heteronormative masculinity configured as desirable
citizenship were communicated through the conflation of the nations
human geography (i.e. the health of its human resources) with its
political geography (i.e. its fear of invasion and loss of empire), and both
of these spheres with the body of the President. Montez de Oca (2005,
p. 162) explains that John F. Kennedy responded to Republican claims
about the effeminacy of the Democratic establishment by:
[F]raming his candidacy and administration in muscle gap discourse
that took Teddy Roosevelts rugged white masculinity as a model of
vigorous leadership. Kennedy constructed himself as youthful,
vigorous, and healthy in opposition to an aging, unhealthy
Eisenhower administration that, like the nation, had become flaccid.
Building on the work of scholars such as Montez de Oca, this essay
explores the preoccupations and silences that characterized discourse
about Obamas relationship to sport during the 2008 campaign. This is
a difficult task given the multiple and shifting ways that Obamas
persona has been imagined. While recognizing the multiplicity of
dominant, subjugated and competing narratives at play, we draw upon
cultural studies sensibilities to tease out one particular strand of the
complex Obama phenomena. That is, we investigate how (white)
mythologies of difference were constructed and resisted through
narratives recounting his long-standing connection to basketball and
his participation in a highly publicized bowling game at the Pleasant
Valley lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania during the Democratic pri-
maries. We suggest that these stories helped constitute the multiple and
contradictory meanings that have been attached to Obama: cosmo-
politan and community minded, yet elitist and aloof; athletic and
engaging, yet intellectual and effete; cool and unflappable, yet
feminine and metrosexual; black, yet not black enough; and the new
face of modern, multiethnic America, yet the anti-American, Islami-
cized, other.
A different contender 1025
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There is much to be said about how Obamas relationship to sport
has been narrativized after his ascendance to the presidency, but as a
way to manage our argument, here we focus only on the 2008
campaign. The road to the White House of the man who was widely
understood as the first viable African American presidential candidate
offers a useful place to explore the workings of racialization and, in
particular, of whiteness. In approaching our analysis in this way, we
build upon the work of scholars such as Adia Harvey Wingfield and
Joe Feagin (2010, p. 29), who argue that while the Obama campaign
forced recurring discussions of racism into the public mainstream . . ..
much of the language, framing, and interpretations of race-related
campaign issues have been, and continue to be, communicated through
some version of the dominant [white] racial frame. These insights help
to explain why we mobilize whiteness as an important analytic concept
in an essay that focuses on a black figure, albeit one born of a white
mother and a black father. Here we join a growing number of sport
scholars who have answered Toni Morrisons (1992) call to shift
attention from an exclusive focus on racialization, as promoted and
experienced through the bodies of people of colour, towards an
interrogation of the knowledges and practices that produce identifica-
tions with and which are (imperfectly) reiterated through white
bodies and ideologies of white supremacy (McDonald 2005). White-
ness studies turn the lens on what are often unmarked and unspoken
modes of racial identification and stratification. Read from this
perspective, whiteness functions not merely as an identity, but also
as a set of normative, legal, and institutional rules for behavior and
practice, and also as a set of cultural representations that privilege
images and metaphors of whiteness (Owen 2010, p. 115). Such work
recognizes that racism is enacted through whiteness, and that white-
ness, as a form of power, has important consequences for life,
opportunity, and psychic security for all (McDonald 2005, p. 250).
Although we highlight the operation of whiteness in our analysis,
our argument is based on the premise that whiteness operates through
other modes of power, including class, nation, gender and sexuality. As
a relational category (a performative social interrelation (Ellsworth
1997, p. 260)), whiteness is frequently articulated to middle-class
norms and ideologies (Hughey 2010). As demonstrated more fully via
the contrasting narrative construction of Obama in the case of
basketball versus bowling, these complicated interactions mean that
whiteness is not uniform but enacted in a multiplicity of ways. It is
additionally important to emphasize that there is no way to write
about whiteness and basketball in the contemporary USAwithout also
addressing blackness. Certainly one of the dangers of a focus on
whiteness is that the historically specific experiences of people of
colour once again get evacuated from scholarly analyses. We do not
1026 Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
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draw an equivalence between whiteness and blackness but instead
detail how white supremacist discourses serve to regulate blackness,
albeit in complex, incomplete and highly contested ways.
In order to map howracialization shaped representations of Obamas
relationshiptosport, we conducteda content analysis of mainstreamUS
newspaper, magazine and internet sources gleaned from the Factiva,
Readers Guide, Lexis-Nexus and Google News databases. We focused
on items published between February 2007, when Obama launched his
campaign, and November 2008, when he was elected to office, paying
particular attention to those that centred on basketball and bowling.
After initially identifying thousands of articles, we embarked on a
streamlining process. We excluded short news briefs to focus our
attention on texts that offered in-depth discussion of Obamas relation-
ship to sport. Our final sample included outlets with national distribu-
tion such as the New York Times, as well as more regional publications
such as the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Our coding process was based on
themes derived frominitial close readings of our sources. We continually
reassessed and modified these themes as we sought to map this complex
social conjuncture in the tradition of contextual cultural studies (King
2005). Our goal is not to offer an exhaustive, quantified account of
media discourse, but rather to reconstruct and examine prominent
themes in the coverage of Obamas sporting practices.
We argue that Obamas athletic interests and abilities became key
vehicles for reading his body and, by extension, his identity and his
politics. The question that could only be asked in a white supremacist
context is Obama too black or not black enough to be President?
mirrored long-standing tensions in white Americas affective relation
to black male athletes. Thus, Obamas games of basketball were
carefully managed to tame his blackness and distance him from
associations with urban grittiness and hip-hop culture. Whereas in the
bowling incident in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where Obama scored
thirty-seven points out of a possible 300, the racial and class
resentments towards him, which throughout the campaign were
depicted as emanating mainly from blue-collar men, were mobilized
to explain Obamas poor performance at this particular activity, to
expose him as not white (or working class) enough.
Racing the body: whiteness and sport
Over the course of the last century the blackwhite binary was
enshrined in sport as broader ideologies of racial science came to
organize a discourse that equated blackness with physical superiority
and whiteness with intellectual superiority. Such thinking worked in
concert with profound economic and cultural inequalities to constitute
organized sport as a prominent locus of racial hierarchy. To be sure,
A different contender 1027
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visible sporting spectacles have also worked against this logic serving
as sites of more progressive imaginings as evidenced by Jackie
Robinsons integration of Major League Baseball and the pro-
immigration stance taken by the National Basketball Association
(NBA)s Phoenix Suns in the wake of a 2010 Arizona law designed to
mandate racial profiling.
2
Vestiges of hierarchical orderings of
difference remain, however, albeit with a contemporary twist.
In the post-civil rights era, sport serves as an important constitutive
site of white power as it conjures myths of meritocracy, fair play and
notions of a level playing field for all (Brooks 2009). Celebrity
athletes of colour, such as basketball icon Michael Jordan, tennis star
Serena Williams and baseball player Alex Rodriguez, are positioned in
media accounts as proof that hard work and individual initiative are
paramount in achieving the American Dream. Thus, long-standing
mythologies around sport help reinforce the contemporary colour-
blind creed that suggests that race is no longer of social significance
because racism has been eradicated and that if inequalities persist,
people of colour have only themselves to blame (King 2007; May
2008). Common-sense imaginings of race as a set of stylistic
commodity signs e.g. hair, clothing, musical tastes detached
from the inequitable distribution of resources such as housing,
employment and education, thus help to legitimate contemporary
systems of stratification and undermine critiques that detail the
persistent power of whiteness to arrange social relations.
Basketball represents an especially key site for the circulation of
stylistic signs of blackness. As Grant Farred (2007, p. 71) writes:
basketball, like all American sport, is always spoken in a language
that is historically racialized. From pickup games on inner-city courts
to NBA contests watched by millions around the world, basketball
represents a central staging ground for the frequently contradictory
practices that constitute, reconfigure, discipline and brand contem-
porary black masculinities in particular. This is most visibly manifest
in the promotional apparatus of the NBA, which in the 1980s began to
exploit the edginess associated with its black players. League marketers
attempted to evoke both dread and desire in an effort to win back
white middle-class audiences who had lost interest as the game became
too black (Leonard 2006; Andrews and Silk 2010). The mediated
image of Michael Jordans expressive athleticism and black exception-
alism (articulated largely through his reputation as a dedicated family
man) was particularly key in helping to revive the leagues fortunes
during this time.
David Leonard (2006) has argued that a ghettocentric logic white
Americas fear of and fascination with black urban bodies, spaces and
poor communities now fundamentally shapes how basketball is read.
On the one hand, the sport has been sold to white bourgeois men who
1028 Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
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constitute the NBAs most prized market segment through a commo-
dified urban authenticity signified through the masculine bravado of
particular forms of hip-hop style and also through narratives about
the poor and gritty upbringings of the leagues black players (Andrews
and Silk 2010, p. 1636). On the other hand, the league has consistently
sought to manage and contain the fears that such signifiers simulta-
neously provoke. This strategy has produced the introduction of the
unabashedly racialized and classed dress code which prohibits hip-
hop clothing, chains and medallions, among other signifiers of urban
blackness and a number of exaggerated disciplinary responses to
behavioural infractions on the part of black players (Hughes 2004;
McDonald and Toglia 2010).
Dressing down to win the vote: Obama and basketball
Given this historical legacy and over-determined racial context,
Obamas well-documented devotion to the game, as both a player
and a fan, had to be carefully managed. Perhaps more than any other
cultural space he negotiated in his bid for the presidency, basketball
represented a litmus test for this biracial, cosmopolitan candidate in a
white supremacist context. Was he too black, or not black enough?
pundits repeatedly asked their binary thinking mirroring the logic
that has for the past three decades shaped the administration of and,
affective response to, the NBA. Discourse about the degree of
blackness that (white) America can tolerate thus came to be played
out not only explicitly in diatribes on Fox News or critical essays in the
New Yorker, but also implicitly and thus perhaps more dangerously
through narratives about Obamas relationship to basketball.
Importantly, the same white bourgeois men who have enjoyed such
a fraught relationship with the game over the past three decades also
comprised the group that pollsters and pundits insistently claimed
would be the hardest for Obama to win. The Obama campaign was
clearly conscious of the racialized connotations that basketball carried
for potential voters. Sports Illustrateds Alexander Wolff (2009) wrote
about the games associations with inner city pathologies in a long
post-election analysis of Obamas relationship to the game. He goes on
to describe how, in the spring of 2007, New Hampshires Democratic
campaign director requested, unsuccessfully, that the candidate play
with a group of high school youths. Wolff (2009, p. 3) writes:
David Axelrod, who has a track record of persuading white voters to
support black candidates, balked. People didnt know him well yet,
and I didnt want him to play into a stereotype, he says.
A different contender 1029
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After losing primary elections to Hillary Clinton in Ohio and Texas on
4 March 2008, however, the campaign saw an opportunity to win
critical votes in the basketball heartlands of Indiana and North
Carolina. We wanted to do campaigning that got us closer to the
ground more dinners and less platform speeches, Axelrod told
Wolff. Basketball was a no-brainer, he continued, Besides, any excuse
to play is one hell take (Wolff 2009, p. 3).
Obamas forays on to the court at the University of North Carolina,
where he practisedwith the mens team, and in Kokomo, Indiana, where
he played against high school players with Womens National Basket-
ball Association (WNBA) player Alison Bales on his team, prompted
animated discussions about his basketball skills (Wolff 2009). These
appearances, however, did not provoke the overtly ideological responses
that emerged after his bowling performance when he was framed as too
black, or at least not white enough. This may be because his preferred
attire for basketball a neatly pressed grey T-shirt tucked into high-
waisted cotton sweatpants are far removed from the hip-hop styles
that are the target of the NBAs dress code policy.
In removing himself stylistically from associations with the working-
class masculine tenor of urban blackness (which, to put it bluntly, is
blackness in the present hegemonic mindset), Obama also made room
for narratives to emerge about the colour-blind and unifying nature of
sport. In his first biography, Dreams from My Father, Obama (2004)
did not shy away from pondering the racial dimensions of his favourite
game. He writes of raising himself to be a black man in America,
when no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant
(Obama 2004, p. 76). The sentence that follows, which can be read as
an endorsement of the colour-blind lens that views sport as a great
equalizer, is frequently cited in media coverage of Obamas (2004,
p. 80) passion for the game:
At least onthe basketball court I couldfinda communityof sorts, with
an inner life all of its own. It was there that I would make my closest
white friends, on turf where blackness couldnt be a disadvantage.
Tellingly, the words that immediately succeed these lines, which point
to the racial alienation and frustration that characterized Obamas
early years in Hawaii, where he grew up, are usually omitted: And it
was there I would meet Ray and the other blacks close to my age who
had begun to trickle into the islands, teenagers whose confusion and
anger would help shape my own (Obama 2004, p. 80). The absence of
this latter sentence serves an ideological function in encouraging
readers to focus on micro-level interracial friendships highlighted in
the previous lines and deflecting attention away from any indictment
of the racial inequities produced via white supremacy.
1030 Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
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Such discursive strategies were key in the election of Obama to office,
additionally helping to distance him from claims that he was a Muslim
born in a foreign land. Ben Carrington (2009) argues that Obamas
opponents highlighted the candidates otherness (which was dependent
on, but not reducible to, his racial identity) to Middle America to instill
not just uncertainty, but fear in the electorate. In response, Obama
would leave the fissile material of race well alone and largely refuse to
confront white supremacist discourse and Americas systemic racism
(Carrington 2009, p. 116).
Carrington (2009, p. 113) additionally observes:
He had to make himself into the non-racial candidate in order for
the myth of a post-racial America to last long enough for him to get
through an implicitly racialised campaign even as his opponents
tried to portray him as a radical black nationalist who, if not quite
an Arab, was still intent in turning America into a communist state.
Of course, such representations are always negotiated, never complete,
and pre-existing racial scripts will inevitably fail to fully contain
those bodies and identities that they produce and interpret. It became
something of a cliche in media coverage of the 2008 presidential race
to remark on the slipperiness of Obamas identity, his irreducibility to
stereotypes or neatly demarcated boxes. But if there is a universalizing
claim at the heart of anti-universalist post-structuralist theory, it is
that all human identities are irreducible. The repetition of this
observation about Obama can therefore be read as an implicit
acknowledgement of the post-structrualist position at the same time
that it testifies to the weightiness of the white normativity with and
through which power works.
Buddy, can you spare a vote? Obama goes bowling in Altoona
Obamas quick visit to a bowling alley in Altoona, Pennsylvania during
the Democratic primary in March 2008 offers a rather different arena
through which to explore the complicated workings of whiteness. The
media response to his outing to the Pleasant Valley bowling lanes was
saturated by concerns about his credentials as a normative American
and replete with narratives about the blue-collar resentment he faced.
This particular venture, in which Obama scored thirty-seven points out
of a possible 300 (other reports had Obama, who allowed children to
bowl for him, withforty-seven), came at one of the lowest moments inhis
campaign. Sound bites from the sermons of Obamas former pastor,
Jeremiah Wright, had become the subject of a media frenzy that focused
explicitly on the candidates patriotism and implicitly on his ability to
transcend race. The rush to condemn Wrights highly energized and
A different contender 1031
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unapologetic critiques of racial politics and US foreign policy which
struck broad swathes of progressive Americans as relatively mundane
served as yet another reminder that colour-blindness and a carefully
constructed historical amnesia remain key discourses for the achieve-
ment of black legitimacy in US political life (Bonilla-Silva 2010).
Although he had garnered a large lead over Hillary Clinton heading
into Pennsylvania, a key narrative during this and the West Virginia
primary suggested that the Obama message was not resonating with
working-class and rural whites. MSNBC televisions Chris Matthews
framed this issue as one of relatabilty in asking guest and Missouri
Senator Claire McCaskill about Obamas chances:
3
Let me ask you
about how he hows he connect with regular people? Does he? Or
does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American
community and from the people who have college or advanced
degrees? (Media Matters for America 2008a, p. 1). This normative
appeal to regular people (articulated by Matthews as whites without
college degrees) also anticipated a key narrative that would emerge in
the Obama campaign against John McCain, especially in reference to
the Republican candidates vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, an
Alaskan whose political image is centred on a white, working-class,
rural identity. Narratives about both Obamas alleged inability to
connect with everyday people as a highly educated, cosmopolitan
professional and Palins apparent appeal to rural, white, working-class
voters articulated rurality and poverty to backwardness and con-
servatism (Darling 2009, p. 18). In deploying common-sense stereo-
types to explain Obama and Palins respective appeal, journalists
rarely investigated the role of white supremacy in constructing images
of resentful abject whites, or interrogated the history that enabled
racist animosity toward the first viable African American candidate.
In the context of controversy over Wrights remarks and in an
apparent effort to garner populist appeal and connect with a segment
of the white working-class voters whom pollsters claimed favoured
Hillary Clinton, Obama found himself bowling in Altoona, a city with
a median household income $16,102 below the national median of
$51,235, and a population that is 95.6 per cent white and 2.5 per cent
black. While he was ostensibly there just to shake hands with
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr, he and Casey proceeded to put
on bowling shoes and engage in a friendly match (Figure 2).
Read against John Kerrys attempt during the 2004 US presidential
race to appeal to working-class and rural whites by goose hunting in
Ohio, the choice of bowling appeared to be a safer strategy for Obama.
The racially saturated history and politics of fear meant that staging a
photo shoot of a black man wielding a weapon would have been
outside the realm of possibility if Obama were to remain a viable
candidate. Bowling also holds a unique place in the American
1032 Mary G. McDonald and Samantha King
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imaginary. The distinguished social class historian Paul Fussell (1992,
p. 114) once referred to bowling as the classic prole sport and
additionally observed that taking it up can instantly declass an upper-
middle-class person. According to political scientist Joseph Di Sarro,
this visit to the bowling alley represented an effort to counter the
media-fuelled notion that Obamas Ivy League education and elitist
Figure 2 Barack Obama bowling in Altoona, Pennsylvania
Reproduced with permission from STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images.
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sensibilities meant that he could only appeal to college-educated
whites: Hes in a bowling alley. Some people even might think he
probably had a beer and a hot dog (cited in Nasaw 2008, p. 10).
While bowling has a long connection to working-class culture, the
sport is most often framed in relation to white working-class culture.
Playing on common-sense sporting racial tropes, Chris Matthews
admitted his response to the Obamas bowling game gets very ethnic,
but the fact that hes good at basketball doesnt surprise anybody, but
the fact that hes that terrible at bowling does make you wonder
(Media Matters for America 2008b, p. 1).
Mythical understandings of gender are also at play here. Maureen
Dowd of the New York Times characterized the bowling event as but
one of Obamas strenuous and inadvertently hilarious efforts to woo
working-class folk in Pennsylvania, which, she continues, have only
made him seem more effete. Keeping his tie firmly in place, he
genteelly sipped his pint of Yuengling beer at Sharkys sports cafe in
Latrobe and bowled badly in Altoona. Challenging Obama to a bowl-
off, Hillary kindly offered to spot him two frames (Dowd 2008, p.
1). Other commentators were not so kind. MSNBCs Joe Scarborough
was typical in dubbing the event the Altoona Massacre and
characterizing Obamas bowling form that day as dainty and prissy
(Media Matters for America 2008c, p. 1). Matthews also observed
that Obamas bowling style isnt the most macho form (Media
Matters for America 2008b, p. 1). David Grimes, a columnist for the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, added: I think I understand why Barack
Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary election to Hillary Clinton:
Voters there saw the video of Obama bowling (Grimes 2008, p. 1).
According to Grimes, Obama threw the ball like how can I put this
delicately? a little girl (p. 1) Obamas other deviations included
bowling while wearing a tie and not drinking beer: Bowling and beer
go together like liberals and white wine, Grimes wrote, a beverage
Obama is probably far more comfortable with (p. 1).
Here, the author draws on a familiar metonymic chain that connects
gender nonconformity (and specifically male femininity and effete-
ness) and homophobia signified by poor athletic performance and
abstinence from alcohol, to the bourgeois privilege that is commonly
understood to go hand in hand with liberal politics. Of particular
interest is the way Grimess response simultaneously whitens Obama
(through reference to wine-swilling liberals) and implicitly taps into
anxieties about his lack of normative national credentials. This
weakness was coded through discourses of gender deviance given
meaning through Obamas failure to excel in a sport whose popular
connotations are intimately tied to white working- and lower-middle-
class culture, and, more tellingly, its political and economic decline. In
this way, Obamas low score came to represent not simply his distance
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from the realities of life in de-industrialized regions of the USA, but
also his limited potential for remedying the intensifying hardships that
communities like Altoona continue to endure.
While elements of the press continued to question whether or not
Obama could personally relate to white working-class voters, other
critics eschewed this emphasis on lifestyle signifiers, personality and
character to instead discuss the persistence of racism as expressed in
the attitudes of the white working class. Around the time of the
bowling event, a Pew research poll revealed that white Democrats
(articulated here as less educated and older) who held unfavourable
views of Obama were more likely than supporters to feel that equal
rights for minorities have been pushed too far and more concerned
about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values with
23 per cent of those polled and holding negative views also believing
that Obama is Muslim (Pew Research Centre for the People and the
Press 2008). Then Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha, a
supporter of Obama, called rural western Pennsylvania a racist area,
later apologizing for those comments. A month later, in a speech at a
fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama himself referred to rural
Pennsylvanian whites as bitter (Whitesides 2008).
Indeed as Eliza Darling (2009) argues, bigoted working-class politics
has a long and complex history that is not merely reducible to static
stereotypes of rednecks but is traceable through the European
colonization of America, white supremacist legitimations of post-
slavery plantation systems, the rise of American capitalism and the
persistence of the Southern Strategy designed to garner white votes by
playing intoracist fears inthe post-civil rights era. That racializationand
class structures position working-class whites in an inequitable relation-
ship with elite whites and divide the white working class from working-
class people of colour has been extensively documented by critical race
theorists, feminists and labour historians (Davis 1983; Roediger 1991;
Lipsitz 2006). These complex and shifting relationships reveal that
whiteness works through what Garner (2006) terms as contingent
hierarchies, a status that the pragmatist and centrist Obama himself
seemedtorecognize whenhe notedinhis famous speech, AMore Perfect
Union, that racism is still endured by blacks and that globalization and
economic restructuring has resulted in fewer well-paying jobs for people
of colour and working-class whites in the USA.
4
The affective attachments played out in the Altoona bowling
incident illustrate the complicated ways in which whiteness operates.
The medias focus on Obamas sporting failure came to represent his
otherness while also personalizing politics and shifting attention away
from what we understand as the more pressing concerns of dominance
and subordination. In a similar way, the persistent accounts of
working-class resentment placed the responsibilities for racism solely
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on the bodies of working-class whites who were represented as less
sophisticated culturally (e.g. preferring bowling to golf) and politically
than their middle-class counterparts. While working-class whites
continue to play their part in white supremacist history, making
them solely culpable for racism reduces the complex workings of
whiteness to matters of personal belief and attitude. That is, this
framing of racist attitudes draws attention away from the persistent
structures, public policies, legal entities and representations that
continue to promote white privilege (Feagin 2010).
Conclusion
In the wake of Obamas victory on 4 November 2008, fresh narratives
have emerged about the now-President, and sport figures prominently in
these framings. In one post-election analysis, sportswriter Mike Bianchi
(2008) suggested that athlete celebrities like Michael Jordan and Tiger
Woods have helped to pave the way in conditioning white America to
accept and even celebrate black success. In March 2011, Obama made
predictions about which mens and womens basketball team would win
the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) collegiate basket-
ball championships. And it was reported during the 2009 G-20 summit
that President Obama could, if he wished, take abreakfromnegotiations
since his Italian hosts had provided access to a basketball court.
The narratives articulated through these and other sporting
associations carry multiple meanings that help to constitute contem-
porary understandings of race and its effects. As we have argued in this
paper, the discourses surrounding Obama, basketball and bowling are
embedded in US racial formations, a critical analysis of which reveals
the multifarious status of whiteness and the contingent workings of
power (Garner 2006). In sum, this analysis reveals that the power of
hegemonic whiteness is not a coherent project but instead frequently
operates through the dual process that positions those marked as
white as essentially different from and superior to those marked as
non-white and via marginalizing practices of being white that
fail to exemplify dominant ideals (Hughey 2010, p. 1306).
Narratives about Obamas basketball and bowling exploits proble-
matize any suggestion of a stable, coherent identity and analyses that are
grounded in this assumption. While we do not advocate embracing
narratives of race-lessness attachedtoObama, it is important toreiterate
how conventional categories of race have never mapped neatly on to
Obama or indeed to raced bodies in general. Rather, the presidential
candidate carried shifting and conflicting discourses of whiteness and
blackness articulated through gender, class, sexuality and other con-
textual modes of power. Understanding the instability of these
categories necessitates a theoretical shift towards a broader engagement
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with non-identitarian sensibilities and a deeper engagement with the
place of sport in provoking and repelling the passionate attachments
that bothadhere to andexceed established categories of identity within a
white supremacist culture. In the case of the latter, scholars of race and
ethnicity must continue to take sport seriously as an important site from
which to theorize difference and the complex workings of power
(Hartmann 2003).
In Carringtons (2004, p. 2) words, affective attachments to sport
demonstrate that as a form of physical culture, sport has a particular
corporeal resonance in making visible those aspects of social life that
often remain submerged in other domains. Stated differently, close
connections between various discourses of sport and social relations
compel scholars of race and ethnicity to take sport seriously as an
important realm of popular culture. A close reading of the signs and
signifiers of race as they play out in narratives about basketball
and bowling helps to illuminate the interconnections between sport and
other key realms of social life in this case the world of politics, the
multifarious operations of whiteness and the 2008 US presidential race.
Notes
1. Pickup basketball is a term used mainly in North America that denotes local, loosely
organized games generally played in recreational settings such as on playgrounds, within
gyms or in parks.
2. Known as the Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act or Senate
Bill 1070(SB1070), this law was highly criticized by opponents for allowing police to single
out and racially prole Latinos and Latinas. A federal judge did subsequently block
enforcement of the most controversial components of the bill including the provision that
allowed law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the
country without ofcial documentation.
3. MSNBC is a cable news station known for broadcasting liberal viewpoints on political,
social and economic issues. Once a speechwriter for US President Jimmy Carter and an aid
to Democratic Speaker of the House Eugene Tip ONeill, Matthews hosts a weekday
MSNBC talk show, Hardball with Chris Matthews. The show features conversations, debates
and political analysis between the host and guests regarding a wide range of issues.
4. Presidential Candidate Obama gave this speech at the National Constitution Center in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 18 March 2008 at the height of the controversy regarding his
relationship to his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The title uses language from the
preamble to the US Constitution and the speech spoke about the state of race relations in the
USA including black inequality and white resentment.
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