Abstract
This chapter reinterprets John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side (2009) as an indictment of the black family. Misread as a feel-good story extolling the value of organized sports, in which the sad fate of a poor black urban youth is redirected by the intervention of a professional white woman, this work represents something more than an example of the patronage motif. Here the figure of the black male athlete is conflated with the figure of the black female welfare recipient and the question of reproductive justice raised by her predicament. This not only interrupts the redemptive fantasy of racial capitalism promoted by Michael Oher’s unlikely story, but also productively undermines the quest for hegemonic gender differentiation, even within the confines of mainstream narrative cinema.
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Notes
- 1.
It remains to be seen whether the NFL will incur any significant losses in light of challenges by players and medical researchers over the devastating consequences on players’ health outcomes (McDonald 2015).
- 2.
Robinson writes: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as an historical agency” (Robinson 2000, 2). Though they do not share a common theoretical orientation or conceptual framework, a growing literature regarding the economic history of capitalism attributes a central role and function to racial slavery, throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, with lasting effects to the present and into foreseeable future. See, for example, Baptist (2014), Barrett (2013), Beckert (2014), Johnson (2013), and Schermerhorn (2015). John Carlos Rowe noted in the preface to Barrett’s Racial Blackness: “Slavery was not an oversight of the Founding Fathers, subsequently corrected in that second revolution, the U.S. Civil War and abolition; slavery remains an integral part of a capitalist system dependent on racial, sexual, and class hierarchies to maintain its power” (Barrett 2013, xvii).
- 3.
Not for nothing, Gardner has expressed abiding admiration for the late “King of Oil” Marc Rich, a well-known international white-collar criminal whose dealings helped to finance a range of military conflicts around the world. Rich, while living comfortably in Switzerland to avoid extradition for federal prosecution, was belatedly pardoned by President Bill Clinton after making generous political campaign donations to the Democratic Party (Baghdjian 2013). Gardener named his brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Company in Rich’s honor.
- 4.
The themes of dispossession and reparation are, of course, particular to Michael’s biography in this case. But they also evoke the entire history of racial slavery that provides the basic conditions and coordinates of Michael’s lived experience and of the disavowed inheritance shaping the interracial encounter eventuating in his adoption. On the fundamental assault against the possibility of black family under slavery, and the central role played by the control of black women’s sexuality therein, see Sublette and Sublette (2016). On the living legacy of racial slavery in the contemporary operations of child welfare, see Roberts (2009). Sublette and Sublette provide some very germane comments in the coda to their massive study: “we have seen that no matter how bad we thought slavery was, it was even worse. There’s no end to it” (668).
- 5.
To contradict the highly restricted viewpoint of The Blind Side, the book and the film, Oher published his own autobiography with former Sports Illustrated writer Don Yeager in 2011. I Beat the Odds provides much of the crucial missing material about Oher’s early life, the years prior to his adoption by the Tuohys. In so doing, he points out that he was not, as it were, raw material molded by his well-intentioned and highly-resourced adoptive white family, but rather someone already involved, with a range of limitations, in his own academic development and athletic training, and someone already cared for, however intermittently, by friends and relatives and neighbors throughout the black community. Regarding the former, Oher said that one of his main issues with the film was that it “portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who had never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it” (Noland 2011). There are other examples of such corrective statements throughout the text. And while Oher’s testimony serves to challenge powerfully the relative silencing of his flattened characterization in the book and film, it nevertheless fails to address the structural dynamics analyzed in the present chapter more generally.
- 6.
The idea of “akinship,” which could be read as both akin-ship and a-kinship, is borrowed from Chamberlin (2014), who offers that: “Akinship… gives one name to the proximity between sexuality and violence.”
- 7.
“There was one final piece of unfinished business in Michael Oher’s Briarcrest career. The senior yearbook picture was due, and Michael didn’t have one. It was a Briarcrest tradition for every senior to have his baby picture in the senior program. Her lack of a baby picture for Michael drove Leigh Anne to distraction. ‘You don’t want to be the only senior who doesn’t have a baby picture in the annual!’ she told him. […] But the picture didn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t a baby picture. One spring night Leigh Anne had an idea. She flipped on her computer and went online and found, as she puts it, ‘the cutest picture of a little black baby I could find.’ She downloaded the stranger’s photo and sent it into Briarcrest” (Lewis 2006b).
- 8.
Beyond the racist animalization involved in this all-too-common description of black athletic talent, the staff of Memphis Child Protective Services shared the basic assumption of inherent black male rage. As Noland (2011) recounts in his review of Oher’s autobiography for the Los Angeles Times: “By his own admission, Michael Oher preferred to observe rather than participate in social settings when he was a young man. In fact, his silence was so disconcerting to social workers in Memphis, Tenn., he says, that it was misdiagnosed as repressed rage, and he was locked up in a hospital for observation.” Note the pat hydraulics of his medical incarceration. The hospital inverts his silent, passively observing disposition, locking him up for not saying or doing anything in particular. His rage—and the threat it entailed—was presupposed even in its apparent absence. When it is later discovered that he is not especially enraged, he becomes a charming peculiarity—not unlike Ferdinand—to the people of the Wingate Christian School.
- 9.
In a cultural project committed to sanitizing racism, it is worth noting the sheer volume of epithets used to refer to Michael in the film and book—“colored boy,” “black bear,” “blue gum,” “brute,” and “King Kong,” to name a few. He is also compared to a cow (after being weighed on cattle scale), a dog (in relation to his “protective instincts”), and so on. But, crucially, none of these slurs are ever subject to challenge.
- 10.
The NCAA investigator, Jocelyn Granger, is the only other significant black woman character in the film and she is drawn so harshly as to evoke hostility toward the very idea of regulatory oversight she represents. For a critical response from the actual NCAA assistant director for enforcement, Joyce Thompson, see Lawrence (2011).
- 11.
The attentive viewer will notice that Alton refers to Michael specifically as “fat ass” in the same manner as the junior “redneck” from Milford during the game. Though Michael is insulted in many ways by many people in The Blind Side, this particular put-down binds the two racialists—one white, one black—into a common domain and each is dealt with by force. In both cases Michael is, to repeat, defending Leigh Anne, imaginatively during the game and preemptively during the apartment brawl. But even with his demonstrated loyalty and asexual presentation, Leigh Anne still threatens castration if he impregnates a woman outside of marriage.
- 12.
Evers would be assassinated in his driveway by the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in 1964 (Williams 2011) and, two years later, Meredith would be shot by an unknown white gunman while marching in support of black voter registration in Mississippi (Meredith 2012). For critical reflections on the political fate of the Brown decision, see Bell (2004), Klarman (2007), and Patterson (2001).
- 13.
- 14.
There is a vast literature on the twentieth-century conservative movement in the United States, especially in its postwar renaissance. For recent work on this history in Mississippi, see Crespino (2007).
- 15.
Compare Mitchell’s closing narration to Meredith’s sardonic commentary about the anniversary celebration. Mitchell muses:
Yes, some of 1962 remains. But much of it has been replaced by a new world born from its ashes. The kids playing football in the pregame glow might not know the inscription on the nearby statue. Yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is. They might not know, but they can see it everywhere they look. James Meredith can see it too. Fifty years after it took the United States Army to get him on the campus, he is now invited by the Chancellor, honored on the same day as the 1962 Rebels. He never got to watch that team play, but at long last he is watching it walk on the field. Yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is.
Meredith, in turn, remarks: “You know, I got a degree from Ole Miss in political science, history and French. I ain’t never heard of a Frenchman celebrating Waterloo… They not only kept me out… they kept all of my blood before me out forever, and I’m supposed to celebrate that” (Elliott 2012)?
- 16.
A comparative reading of Lewis’s text and Hancock’s film, and of these sources against Oher’s subsequent publication, reveals the considerable artistic license exercised in the biography and its screen adaptation. It was important, on that score, for Oher to clarify that he did not learn to play football, much less acquire the necessary on-field aggression, at Briarcrest, but rather much earlier in life (Oher 2012). Moreover, Lewis’s account shows, contrary to the pat rescue scene in the film, that Michael only eventually settled at the Tuohy residence, at Sean’s suggestion and not Leigh Anne’s, after staying with various families, black and white, during his first year at the private Christian academy.
- 17.
According to the conservative Mississippi Association of Independent Schools, private schools in the state mushroomed from less than 20 member institutions in the 1960s to over 120 at present.
- 18.
The literature on “the new African-American Sport Studies” (Lomax 2002) generally falls short of the radical analysis necessary to do justice to its various topics, opting instead to argue for diversification of the upper echelons of the industry, ceteris paribus, alongside capitalist development proposals for wealthy black professional athletes. See Hawkins (2013), Lewis (2010), Rhoden (2007), and Smith (2009) for recent examples. For a longer view on the field, see Leonard (1998) and Hartmann (2003).
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Sexton, J. (2017). Origins and Beginnings: On The Blind Side . In: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_4
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