Ontological (Free) Agency: the Erasure, Commodification, and Autonomy of Black Athletes

Abstract

The National Football League wields a powerful influence on American society and holds an authoritative sway over various sociopolitical discourses, each influencing the degrees of interaction between people of different origins, cultural backgrounds and identities. The purpose of this research is to examine how the NFL is product of a network of racial discrimination directed at Black people within the league. This research examines how the National Football League functions as a white-dominated structure of power in order to manipulate, exploit, and erase Black bodies for the benefit of multi-billion-dollar profits. This study focuses on how Black players are subject to other, more aversive forms of racism through team ownership, executive decision-making, and through the mainstream media. In short, this thesis analyzes various racial paradigms undergirding the NFL’s infrastructure and corporate practices, which includes the material components that undermine the existence of Black life in the NFL, such as the playing field, the various sports television networks, and social media. Utilizing Afropessimist metatheory as its point of departure for political thought and action, this study examines how Black bodies are essential to the NFL’s brand all while that same brand simultaneously promotes anti-Black images, rhetoric and violence in mainstream media. In other words, this research claims that although Black bodies are essentially tied to the NFL’s capitalist enterprise, many of the league’s policies and practices reduce Black bodies to the status of available equipment meant to garner the profits for white team owners. Specifically, this thesis argues that the NFL ontologically erases Black being by 1) transforming Black bodies into biological and capitalist commodities through processes of commercialization and 2) through racist rhetoric and discursive modes of speaking that are distributed by mainstream media and sport fandom. These two critical points postulate the “Afro-Athletic Spectacle,” which is the ontological reduction of the Black athletic body into available equipment via processes of commercialization and through discursive anti-Black rhetoric and imageries. Finally, using the work of Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton and Calvin Warren, this research analyzes the several facets undergirding the complex superstructure of the NFL to argue that Black NFL players’ individual agency allows them to navigate in Gramscian discourse categories like work, labor, property ownership and wages. Put differently, this argument contends that despite Black NFL players' ontological reduction to commodity entertainment value, Black athletes can achieve a unique type of agency from several discourses that control and exploit them.