Abstract

Abstract:

This essay builds from previous scholarship investigating the politics of race, racism, and white supremacy in sports and the history, method, and efficacy of athlete protest. Specifically, this discussion focuses on how predominantly white National Basketball Association (NBA) owners and executives enact racism and maintain white supremacy in a league whose players are mostly Black; it also addresses the ways that players negotiate this racist space and construct subversive, countercultural subjectivities. The author argues that, in 2005, NBA executives and owners instituted a mandatory dress code as a racializing tactic, which sought to further pathologize and control players and Blackness by rendering hip-hop culture both criminal and unprofessional. However, this article also reveals how NBA players co-opted this dress code to usher in a new NBA subculture: Black dandyism. Ultimately, Black dandyism resisted and subverted the league's policing of Black players. It eventually created avenues for players to transform the NBA into a space where fashion operates as a critique of racialized police violence and the criminal connotations associated with the hip-hop aesthetic and the Black body.

pdf

Share