Urban American & Popluar Culture

Michael Giardina and Cameron McCarthy’s The Popular Racial Order of Urban America: Sport, Identity, and the Politics of Culture is no fluffy bedtime read. The authors attempt to push ideas (hard) related to American urban culture and the films that portray this culture (especially the basketball-themed films). Giardina and McCarthy let us know towards the beginning of the article that their field needs some attention. “…we believe that as a formation, culture has and remains significantly undertheorized within both scholarly writing and popular public policy discourses such as multiculturalism.” They take on what they call “a critical cultural pedagogy of sport.” They are attempting to make sense of how oppression plays out in the world of sports and particularly professional basketball which attracts many of its players from urban environments.
However, before Giardina and McCarthy get to sports, they turn the lens on music. I wanted to draw attention to what is one of the better-worded examples of a subject I’ve thought about for a long time – the commodification of hip hop culture and rap music by white America . “However, as Watkins reminded us, it was not until hip hop became intensely commodified-for better or worse-that it began to receive any widespread attention and became an economically viable outlet for the expression of Black culture.” This theme of culture in relation to commodification seems to pop up around every corner as we navigate the American cultural landscape. It’s a frightening thought that creeps into my head – Can Americans only value culture that can be commodified? Or – when the lens of profitability is turned on a culture is it doomed into dilution? Do we wreck anything inherently good for us by trying to make a profit? (By the way, there’s nothing academic about mentioning this, and it probably changes the flow of the paper, but I’m sitting in a very crowded part of a suburban mall teeming with commodified crap. In fact, there are so many manufactured smells, sights, and sounds, I may have to pack up soon. I just had to mention the environment – it’s so beautiful and clean and fake and gross and visceral all at the same time.)
Sorry. On to the sports- I wonder is it any mistake that the men who “escape” their urban landscapes into professional basketball do so by becoming commodities themselves? Spike Lee took on urban culture and basketball in He Got Game (1998). The movie deals with three main ideas in response to the media’s attention to African American athletes.
1. The issue of high school players skipping college in favor of going right to the NBA. (aka Kevin Garnett)
2. The idea that minority athletes are criminals
3. The idea of the absent (Black) male father
Lee weaves these themes throughout the movie and uses interesting imagery (maybe too obvious at times) to tell this story. Farmlands v. fenced in courts, rolling country-sides, v. chain-links are used to make us see the urban landscape as very different from Middle America. Even the authors of this article accuse the movie of being “melodramatic” in its storyline. Giardina and McCarthy’s main point though is how a movie like this actually reinforces stereotypes rather than teaches us important lessons about urban culture.

“In enacting the realist apparatus of depicting allegedly lifelike struggles faced by coming-of-age Arfrican American urban youth, He Got Game remains deeply ingrained in a discursive formation whose stereotypical imagery actively contributes to our recognition, consumption, and understanding of inner-city America.”

I think this is where it gets tough. The authors of this article will not let Lee's work stand without deconstructing what we may not want to see. They're telling not to get to comfortable with Lee's interpretation. Using a critical lens like this makes people uncomfortable, but I think its necessary in holding everyone accountable as well. As educators, as researchers, we cannot shy away from the uncomfortable, and should continue to use the popular culture lens to examine ourselves. One last quote…

“…we must be committed to getting beyond the paradox of celebration and anxiety. Instead, we should consider the full complexity of its prevailing determinate forces by delving into its production of cosmopolitan as well as its reproduction of unequal relations and uneven developments; its expression in movement and migration as well as its reinscription of old practices of colonialism, imperialism, and asymmetrical relations of domination; and its potential to yield progressive interventions into the social arena as well as perpetuate hegemonic understandings of race, class, and gender relations. In short, we must ask how popular culture can help us create race and gender consciousness for the 21st century.”