Last week, Louisiana Tech Football tweeted an image of a Black football player with his head bowed, fists clenched, and a large chain around his neck.
The caption read “Seven. Days. Away. You ready?”
I don’t know about you, but I am definitely ready for this type of imagery to end.
While chains can signify many things, these particular chains, the swiftness of the backlash on Twitter, and the image’s sudden disappearance suggest that the school realized that the message they thought they were getting across wasn’t in fact it.
In 2020 I taught a course entitled Plantation Politics: The Black Sports Experience that highlighted the ways that the metaphor of the plantation still holds when it comes to conversations about Black athletes at the college and professional level.
This idea isn’t new.
In 2010, Dr. Billy Hawkins published his book The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions where he detailed the ways in which predominantly white institutions (PWIs) “function like plantation systems that internally colonize and exploit the athletic resources of Black athletes, [to such an extent that] they return to their communities injured (physically or psychologically) or poorly educated; despite the athletic expenditures they have given to these institutions” (p. 19).
Those expenditures include mental, physical, and emotional health.
Players who survive those expenditures at the collegiate level and are good enough to play professionally still end up playing in a new plantation system.
William C. Rhoden masterfully captured this transition in his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete in 2006. Even in an “era of multimillion-dollar salaries, slavery remains the model for the power relationship between athletes and their owners,” (p. 237).
In a system where league owners, coaches, and commissioners are predominantly white, and the players are mostly Black, the dynamic remains one reminiscent of a plantation notes Rhoden.
Some might feel this is overkill. They might claim that we see plantations everywhere we look.
Yet it’s hard not to see things that stand in front of your face.
Chains and the Culture
Chains and chain culture are intimately connected to Blackness.
From enslaved Africans who crossed the Middle Passage in chains and their descants who labored in chains to chain gangs following so-called Emancipation and those who now occupy the most heavily incarcerated population within the US, physical and mental chains remain.
The WWE in particular has a sordid history of promoting these images and capitalizing on racial undertones.
Wrestling legend Sylvester Ritter, aka “Junkyard Dog”, manifested plantation imagery with his character. He donned a heavy link chain around his neck and adopted a stereotypical “shuck and jive,” persona. Jesse “The Body” Ventura once referred to him as having “a mouth full of grits.”
Yet heavy chains do not always signify negative imagery with linkages to slavery and mass incarceration.
In hip hop culture, chains became a symbol of “bigger budgets and bolder rhymes”, like the large gold chains of rappers like LL Cool J and Slick Rick. To the culture, which also influences sports culture, jewelry remains a symbol of escaping the struggle that the music seeks to represent.
But to some, it also connotes a connection of bondage to the plantation-like music industry artists like Prince so vehemently criticize.
In sports, the infamous “Turnover Chain” used by the Miami Hurricanes exemplifies the varying dynamics of chain culture.
Taking the nation by storm in 2017, the Turnover Chain is a 10-karat, Cuban link chain weighing 6.5 pounds. The cooperative brainchild of Miami defensive coordinator Manny Diaz, cornerbacks coach Mike Rumph, jeweler Anthony John “AJ” Machado, and former Canes standout Vince Wilfork, the chain was meant to motivate the defense.
Being in Miami, it had to be a Cuban link chain, an homage to the culture and hip hop.
The tactic worked.
The celebratory gesture inspired Miami’s defense to generate 31 forced turnovers in 2017, third-best in the nation that season.
And while the Turnover Chain is both motivational and celebratory in nature, it simultaneously perpetuates a Black male stereotype, one fully encapsulated by the Hurricanes teams of the 90s.
Loud, brash, bold, and Black.
Those adopting the chain culture do so without care for interpretation or fear of reprisal.
From the Junkyard Dog and the Miami Hurricanes to Lousiana Tech, chain culture holds varying degrees of significance related to Blackness, with enslavement and celebration at the tip of the culture’s double-edged sword.
While the message Louisiana Tech attempted to convey is debatable (though its sudden removal seems to favor one form of representation), we must remain vigilant and critical of the representational imagery of Black athletes.
For when coaches are still telling their athletes to remain on the “plantation” in a postgame speech, it is clear that we are not as far removed from racial stereotypes as we would hope or like to believe.
References
Hawkins, Billy. 2010. The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly
White NCAA Institutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rhoden, William C. 2006. Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the
Black Athlete. New York: Three Rivers Press.
