Blackness and the Sociality of Sports: A Conversation with Fred Moten

This conversation begins with a question around Fred Moten’s previous statement that “Black lives matter to the NFL just like they did to Thomas Jefferson.”¹ This question brings to the fore the distinction between poetic socialities of “Black life” and Black “lives” as units of countability. Such a distinction leads Athanasopoulos and Moten to meditate on how one discerns the excess sociality within team sports from the logics of individuation and countability which come to manage and evaluate athletes. 

In turn, the discussants begin to ponder the appropriate terms for considering how Black athletes themselves may have their own investments in the logics which reduce them to countable units: perversity, co-dependency, co-option, complicity, ambivalence, do words even go there? How do such terms come each with their own assumptive and diagnostic logics? How do we relinquish our search for purity (of an arena, person, community, object of study) as concomitant with Black liberation? Moten asks us to consider what it might mean to engage, in that sense, in a non-diagnostic form of Black study. Athanasopoulos responds by considering how one might engage in a process of Black radical discernment which both avoids purity diagnostics while at the same time maintaining a reflexive eye toward our own practices of Black study and activism. These questions concerning complicity and purity thus result in a broader meditation on the linkages between sports, art, and the academy. 

Prompted by Sirvent’s questions about fandom, ownership, and enjoyment, Moten reminds us of how the logics of individuation come to bear on academics in his remarks that “academic culture is the only culture in the world where fellowship means, ‘oh, I get to go be by myself.’” He contrasts this with the raw sociality which exists in team sports through the example of baseball legend Clayton Kershaw’s voice breaking when discussing being with his teammates during his retirement announcement, and the importance of Allen Iverson’s constant accompaniment by his loved ones. In discussing Iverson further, Moten critically inverts how we read Iverson’ infamous line on “practice” as a way of thinking about Black sociality. The conversation thus ends with a reflection on how scholars, students, and activists can “see through” the individuating logics of recognition or purity by refocusing on the “practice” and fellowship of Black study/activism. 

The Conversation

Roberto Sirvent: First off, thank you Fred. Obviously, you’ve been tremendously influential to Charles and I just based on your scholarship, but I’ve also always admired hearing stories from friends, colleagues, and graduate students about how you treat them and how generous you are to them, so I’m just really glad to finally be able to meet you in person. 

Charles Athanasopoulos: Yeah, Fred, it’s really great to be able to talk to you. I think you were at the first conference [Cultural Studies Association] I ever went to straight out of undergrad. So, you know, to be able to talk to you today just feels like a full circle moment. Thank you for taking the time. 

Fred Moten: Ah, it’s my pleasure. Thank you, Charles and Roberto.

Sirvent: All right, I’ll get us started; the impetus for wanting to talk with you is to get some of your reflections on the remarks you made in an online symposium on the “university: last words” that “Black lives matter to the NFL the same way they matter to Thomas Jefferson.” I’m curious if you’d like to share a little bit more about that, especially in terms of how Black Lives Matter and that language of value and mattering applies to the NFL? ² Are they, perhaps, trying to locate some kind of linear narrative progress within sports when there really isn’t much, or is it more complicated than that? 

Moten: Well, the underlying notion in that formulation is that there’s a distinction between Black life and Black lives.³ Consider that Black Life isn’t countable; it isn’t subdivided into individual Black lives. And when there is an attempt to do so, it’s usually within the framework that exists as a function of a logic within which speciation, individuation, and racialization are all tangled up with genocide and geocide even when that tangle is made to look like humanization and even liberation. Obviously, with regard to Black life, this is especially pointed and intense in the last 500 years in the so-called “New World.” But I think that’s a general formulation. It comes into relief very sharply within the framework of Black history, but it’s a truth that’s not simply exclusive to Black history. So that’s the sort of underlying foundation of it. 

So, how do Black lives matter to Thomas Jefferson and Jerry Jones? Well, once you’ve taken life and broken it up into individual countable units then those individual countable units can be valued. And, of course, that valuation, even when it is supposed to exalt, is generally experienced as devaluation. They are two sides of the same coin: To be an All-American or an All-Pro means that you can be bought, sold, drafted, traded, starved, injured, tortured, and maybe above all, managed. It’s not an accident. David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch show how scientific management, whether in the factory on the football field, emerges on the plantation and some of it, a lot of it, has to do with that countability and that accountability.⁴ 

One could almost say it’s statistically driven. And those statistics are then immediately indexed to a structure of valuation and evaluation, or grading. Which is, in and of itself, always degrading, right? It’s also about measurement. Not only the measurement of what it is that individuals do, not only the reduction of those individuals to bodily measurements, but also the measurement or, you know, the placement of those measurements on a scale that’s connected to wins and losses. And, to profit and loss, too, right? It’s not very far-fetched to say that all these terms that I’ve just been mentioning are fundamental to the way in which sports, let’s say in the West, are structured.

You know, on the other hand, one way to think about it is that world of sports is an arena in which we see in one of the most acute ways how it is that Black life is reduced to measurability, to countability, and to accountability.⁵ And all the structures of extraction and exploitation that go along with those things. But, Black life has also managed to figure out a way to persist within the plantation, which is an individuation machine. And, Black life persists in sports; is that a reason to celebrate sports, or to believe in it? That is a different question. Is the capacity of Black life to persist in sports endless? Is it perennial and consistently regenerative? That I don’t know. I think not, but I’m not sure.

By the way, I think that sports and art function this way. And so much of my interest in sports is all bound up with, is inseparable from, my interests in art. I really don’t think there’s a single thing I just said about sports that couldn’t also be said about art. Maybe the difference would be that art would tend to produce modalities of psychic danger at a higher level than sports. Maybe. Whereas in sports, we generally would tend to think about it in terms of physical danger. Although the line between the psychic and the physical seems to blur and break down, especially with regard to football and the prevalence of brain injury that we’ve come to understand now. It’s not that it’s greater now thant it was, but we’ve just begun to try to understand it. I imagine there are also modes of physical danger that are in the art world that maybe have been sort of hidden to us in the same way that psychological and neurological damage in football was sort of hidden to us. We just don’t know about it yet. Or, at least, I don’t.

But yeah, that’s kind of what I meant; Thomas Jefferson didn’t give a fuck about Black life. But he gave a fuck about Black lives. That was the foundation of his wealth. It was obviously important to him libidinally. But Black life? Did he care? No. Not at all. Not really. To the extent that he had any consciousness of Black life, he only had a consciousness of it as inferiority and danger: as the potential source of a boomerang effect that might befall the Republic that he helped to found.

Sirvent: Thank you, Fred. You mentioned a bit about libidinal investment. Because a lot of fans sometimes think that they’re being racially inclusive or progressive because they might admire or celebrate a Black athlete’s achievement or ability, I’m curious how that kind of admiration or celebration or appreciation can also be a form of racial terror? And along those lines, also, just how entitlement functions within that libidinal investment. For instance, when Naomi Osaka or Simone Biles wants to take a mental health break, a lot of fans and a lot of people in the media critique them almost as if they use that language of, “well, I pay your salary, so we’re entitled to have you perform for us.” Could you expand on that portion of your comment?

Moten: I mean, the best way to comment on it would be something like, what Tommy DeVito says in Goodfellas (1990): “I amuse you?” ⁶ I mean the kind of cruel and complicated ambivalence of that scene is also similar to the kinds of ambivalence that emerge in sports. Which is to say, everything you’re saying, Roberto, is totally bound up with a certain kind of attitude on the part of the spectator, the viewer, the audience, but the trouble, of course, is that the performer is also libidinally invested, right? And this a thing we don’t like to talk about. I think the reason that we don’t like to talk about it is because it seems like it produces some sort of complicity, and people tend to want to love purity. But it is complicity. That’s the problem.

It’s the kind of problem that I feel like Black academics, partly because of the class formation of Black academia, don’t always want to deal with, you know? Which, if you have a mother or a grandmother who worked cleaning up for white folks, or taking care of their kids, who was a nanny, then you kind of have some knowledge of what it means for somebody to love the child of the people who treat them like shit. It’s kind of hard not to like a little two-year-old baby when you’re wiping their butts and wiping their mouths every day. They do cute things, and they respond to care with love as well as tyranny and disregard, so that along with all the reasons not to care about them there’s also no reason not to care about them when you’re already involved in caring for them. And the fact that you might care about them, or the fact that you might respond with some weird combination of fear and disgust, on the one hand, and pleasure and feeling, on the other, when your master violates you, or when your adoring and supportive audience turns on you, is, again, part of those structures of ambivalence.

Those structures of ambivalence are complicated if what you have been led to believe all your life is that there’s some sort of inherent connection between liberation and purity, right? But there is no such connection. And if there isn’t a connection between liberation and purity, then all that really means is we have to give both of those ideas up. Same thing with sports; it totally makes perfect sense that Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka would say, “I need a break. I can’t keep doing this. I’m operating at a level of intensity which is so high that, in order to preserve some kind of physical and psychic integrity, I need a break.” With Biles, it’s like, literally, “I can’t; my proprioceptive sense has been damaged as a function of intensity. And I could kill myself doing this.” But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t even want to do it on some level for you, right? And of course, we also know that the putatively white audiences’ racial investments, libidinal and otherwise, determine while also being undermined by the athletes’ desires. Naomi Osaka wants to do it for Japanese people watching her, and for Black people watching her, and for Haitian people watching her. Simone Biles wants to do it for all the little Black girls who are watching her. And they also want to do it for themselves which require them actively to attract a gaze that rewards, reifies, reviles and repulses. So, it’s a little complicated there, you know?

Arthur Jafa once wrote to me that when he goes into a gallery in which his own work is being shown he feels like he’s walking into a hail of bullets. And, you know, nobody tied him up and made him go into that gallery; he chose to go in there for all kinds of psychic and economic and aesthetic reasons. He wanted to go to the gallery. And yet it is as if—and maybe it just is that—somebody did tie him up and make him go there. What’s an artist to do? You see what I’m saying? It’s ambivalent; and to the extent that there might be something like Black life that persists in these arenas, it doesn’t persist in some simple oppositional way, where there’s a good part and a bad part. It actually persists in and through that ambivalence just like it did on the plantation.

Athanasopoulos: Yeah, what you’re saying there really, it makes me think about this concept of the dependency complex, and it makes me think of codependence.⁷ This being placed into roles that you feel locked into, these roles that put these burdens on you, these responsibilities, they do damage to you, but in some ways, there’s something about that role that perhaps enables a perverse attachment, maintains this cycle. I’m thinking here of Frantz Fanon when he talked about the white mask and this cycle of, you know, “the white man is locked in his whiteness, Black man locked in his Blackness; how do we break the cycle?”⁸ To me, that statement meditates on a sort of codependence, and when I think about the performer’s investment, the different types of spectators, there’s a general sense of likeness and identification, of wanting to see yourself on that stage. To have a LeBron James, a Naomi Osaka, means something culturally. To have that symbol of positive Black representation. And in some ways, to have a Patrick Mahomes, there’s still that deeper desire to have your version of a Joe Montana, right? There’s still an attachment to a particular kind of pedestal rather than actually confronting that complicity, but . . . 

Moten: Well, Charles, you used the words perversion and codependency. And, those terms, let’s say they’re diagnostically loaded, you know what I mean? On the one hand I don’t want to say that it’s a perversion; and then on the other hand, I kind of want to say, well, if it is a perversion, that’s okay, because I’m a pervert, and I like perversion. So, I don’t accept the premise that people have been sort of placed in a codependent relation, at least with regard to these endeavors. While I think that the relationship between these endeavors and the plantation is real, it’s not absolute. I think that there are, certainly, pronounced relations of power that are politically and economically determined. I don’t think that in any way LeBron James is equivalent on some level, at the level of agency, let’s say to Jeanie Buss, or to whoever owns the Lakers now—I know they just got sold. But if we want to think about this within the framework of individual, you know, agency, certainly, LeBron James has all kinds of autonomy. Which, for instance, you know, the equipment manager of the Lakers does not have. There is a real basic level in which LeBron could wake up tomorrow and say, “I just don’t want to play no more.” There might be consequences for that, but unless he’s really done a bad job of managing his shit, we’d like to believe that he’s got the capabilities of surviving and living through those consequences. Whereas, the people who wash the towels and the jockstraps, if they lose their jobs, they got more trouble. Their ability to just quit is more constrained. So, people have decisions and choices that they can make. Even if it’s within a framework of inequality.

Stefano Harney, my colleague and comrade and writing partner, and I have been trying to find a non-diagnostic and non-judgmental way of thinking of/in complicity.⁹ I think it’s just really important to say the structures of complicity, in the negative and in some possibly positive way of thinking about it, are outside the framework of individual moral judgment. A lot of times when we use terms like complicity, we’re sort of saying that if you’re complicit it’s because you did something to make yourself complicit. Even though I want to acknowledge that Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka and LeBron James, they can make choices that maybe you or I can’t make, there is a level of complicity that is, in fact, outside of their own choice. That level of complicity works two ways, right? It’s a complicity that exists not only in some way between them and their bosses. But it’s also a kind of structure of complicity that exists between us and them, too. So, really, there’s a distinction that has to be made roughly between their complicity, the complicity that the bosses might be said to control and impose and organize, and in our complicity, right? The way we do what we do. And even those two forms of complicity are complicit. They’re literally folded together in all these ways that, again, generate and produce the very ambivalence that I was talking about before. Complicity, in this regard, is inseparable both from and within a general and generative incompleteness. What if it turns out that the problems we’ve been dealing with, and suffering within, have way more to do with what happens when people try to stand alone rather than when they are complicit? What if complicity and incompleteness are inseparable?

I think what it all boils down to is: How do we begin to understand a set of possibilities which somehow emerge from “our” complicity but are not determined by “their” complicity? I think this has to do with how it is that we choose to array ourselves against the metaphysical foundations that undergird the plantation structure and the structure of the NFL, and of these other big sports. And the metaphysical foundation that undergirds it is a reifying belief in individuation. And that’s where the question of life versus lives comes back in. So, to make a long story short, while I really genuinely do love and admire Fanon, I’m pretty certain Fanon is deeply, deeply committed in his own work and in his own thinking to that same metaphysical foundation. People get mad when you say shit like this but it’s not my fault; Fanon is a revolutionary liberal. He’s a liberal insofar as he assumes and believes in and actually wants to fight in defense of individual subjectivity as the locus and the agent of freedom. Everything that he says and does is sort of structured by that thought. The trouble, of course, is that Thomas Jefferson was a revolutionary liberal, too. And he was also committed to that same metaphysical assumption. Now, obviously, if you make me choose, it won’t take but a half a fucking millisecond: I choose Fanon over Jefferson every fucking time, and I can tell you exactly why. But still, I don’t think that our current condition is such that it absolves me from the responsibility of seeing that affinity between them. Just so I can claim some kind of easy psychic victory simply by assuming an absolute difference between them. So that’s why I sort of rudely interrupted, because even though these notions of codependency, or complicity, are irreducibly important for us and they are, at the same time, on a practical level and as a matter of underlying structure, essential in sports. And what was the other term? I’m sorry, I’m getting old.

Athanasopoulos: I think I said a perverse enjoyment or attachment? 

Moten: Yeah. My sense of it is that the sort of the moral diagnostics that surrounds those terms sometimes still presumes and assumes that kind of individuation. But a paradox emerges, because people will say, “yeah, but you’re the one who brought up LeBron and Simone and said that they have a choice,” right? And yeah, I think they do; I think they sort of have a choice. But then there’s some shit on which they have no choice, and I’m interested in that part of it. There’s something about the way that you and I might receive them, and we do get something from them, that exceeds their decisions. I mean, I was just having this conversation with my son in the car, but it wasn’t about them, it was actually about Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj.

Athanasopoulos: That makes sense to me. I guess I was thinking of this particular example in relation to LeBron and the NBA. So, when I think about codependence or perverse enjoyment, I don’t mean to suggest that an individual like LeBron James is irredeemable or anything like that. I actually was thinking almost sort of what I think you ended up saying: There’s levels of choice that he has, but I also think part of that increased over time, right? Like, the choices that 16-year-old and 18-year-old LeBron had trying to get to the NBA to secure that life for himself differ from 41-year-old LeBron.

Moten: Mm-hmm. Sure.

Athanasopoulos: And so there’s a gradation of choices that end up occurring in there, while there are things that, as you said, aren’t within his choice. There are certain roles or representations of his body, as this public symbol of Black athlete protest, for better or for worse depending on who’s covering it. And some of these representations are outside of his purview. When I think about his role, for example, in the NBA, it kind of makes me think about this shared vein between the narratives offered by both liberal and conservative sports leagues or teams or fans. On one hand, you have the overt suppression of Black protests by the NFL, and on the other, you have ostensibly progressive incorporation of Black protests by the NBA. The NFL is like, “we’re going to force Kaepernick into exile,” whereas the NBA is like, “we’re going to place BLM decals on the courts, and we’re going to call our team owners, team governors, because we think that avoids connotations with slavery,” right? Which, you know, that in of itself is interesting. This sort of framing of it mystifies something essential about the relationship that they have to Black lives, to Black life, to LeBron James. 

Within these differing responses, though, we must remember that they are just that: responses. They are responses to something that they’re trying to contain, something that is exceeding the roles that have been placed on them, right? So, there’s this icon of LeBron James. For better or for worse, by Fox News or CNN, but something about what he does still exceeds both of those roles placed on him. This is something Roberto and I had been thinking about: The Lakers and the Clippers at the time were really the strong holdouts for not returning to play the 2020 NBA playoff games after Jacob Blake was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.¹⁰ And so, this is a moment of Black athlete protest that I think fractures the narrative that the NBA was trying to offer at the time, of being progressive. It creates a crisis for them, where they want to force their players back to competing in games at risk of their progressive image. There’s something worth attending to there: that persistence, that excess, despite, you know, this management that occurs. The responses to that management similarly provide an opportunity for further experimentation in the sense of managing Black athlete protest, or re-folding that protest back into the NBA’s progressive image. I’m thinking of President Barack Obama making the call to Chris Paul and LeBron and trying to manage their desire to stop the playoffs completely. Obama says to them, “no, actually, the best thing is for you to return to the court and use your vantage point from within the industry.”¹¹ So, you have this push and pull that is occurring in this situation. That’s what I was thinking of in terms of, like, complicity and codependence. There is something to be said about the complicity of sports icons with narratives of American progress, for example, while at the same time considering the ways in which they exceed those roles and push back. At the same time, it also makes me think about that shared vein between liberal and conservative; nowadays it seems harder to identify how liberal discourse—that of Biden, Harris, and the NBA—shares a vein with discourse emanating from Trump, Vance, and the NFL. So, how do you think we can keep emphasizing that “there’s a shared vein between liberal and conservative” when liberals continue to frame the enemy as a figure that only threatens our imagination, implying that therefore concerns about co-option are simply a distraction?

Moten: Oh, I see, okay, yeah. Well, I think I agree with you in the sense that thinking that co-option, as you describe it, is important. All the time. It’s never not been important. And it’s debilitating to ever turn that thinking off. Again, there’s just a little nugget of attenuated urgency that the term co-option tends to want to cover over, which I think should be revealed. I guess I prefer the word inclusion. Although, while I prefer the word inclusion, I revile the actual practice of it. But inclusion has just a little bit more of a sense that the people who were included wanted to be included whereas co-option always seems like it’s somehow slightly against one’s will. We have to accept the fact that the people who have been co-opted, and who have been included, they kind of wanted to be. And when they get mad, when they get upset, when they start to feel put upon, it’s because they feel that they’re, you know, their rights as the included have been violated. And of course, one of the sacred rights/rites of the included is to withhold inclusion from others even as they decry their own non-inclusion.

So, I’m totally with you in the sense that I feel like, yeah, we always have to call into question the structures and the protocols of inclusion, or co-optation. But we have to be so careful about it, in fact. We have to be so rigorous in our analysis of it, that we get down to the, literally, you know, to what Bernie Mac would call the white meat of it. We gotta dig down deep where we can get to the root of inclusion and co-option. And again—sorry just to beat a dead horse, or to keep repeating myself like old men do—for me, the roots of inclusion, metaphysically, but even in this instance, mathematically, is individuation. I mean, when Obama wanted to tell the players that they should play anyway, he called Chris Paul and LeBron. He didn’t call Patrick Beverly and DeAndre Jordan. You see what I’m saying? It’s always already predicated on the fantasy of the exceptional individual, the leader. And this, by the way, is one of the things that’s interesting to me about LeBron.

And it’s interesting to me about LeBron in a similar way that it’s also interesting to me about somebody like Naomi Osaka, or maybe the figure who I think of as something like her immediate predecessor, Venus Williams. Not Serena. Obviously, Venus is deeply committed to a certain kind of individual achievement, and I know she’s a highly competitive, great player. I’m sure that every time she played Serena, she wanted to beat Serena. And I’m also equally convinced that every time Serena beat her, she was sort of secretly relieved. She’s just different from Serena. She was always thinking about Serena in a way that allows Serena to be free to not think about any other person but herself. I mean, I just feel like that’s something that’s in the way that she played. That’s why I’m sort of glad to see her hang around this long, just so she could have another few years without Serena. It’s also something that I think is interesting about a player like Chris Paul who is a point guard. Maybe the point guard’s function is similar to that of the big sister, as Venus performed that role Point guards have within their, you know, portfolio the imperative to defer and to disburse It’s like the substitutive—Joy James would say “captive”¹²—maternity of the bass player in a jazz ensemble. A kind of distributive domesticity. It’s very problematic because it is an individuation that is somehow both emphatic and submissive in the way it keeps the system going, in the way it makes the team function. And that’s also part of what you know, we would also say about LeBron—that’s the great paradox or contradiction that, imprecisely, he could be said to embody at an unprecedented level. LeBron’s a special, weird case. Because his psychic tendency appears to be to defer. But physically, you know, he embodies the very possibility of dominance. And the people who don’t like him, the people who, you know, are in this endless silly debate about who’s the GOAT, are the people who don’t understand why he won’t exercise the will to power in that megalomaniacal, all but tyrannical way that Michael Jordan did, and then misremembers so that his cruel submission of them to his will, which is always just an acknowledgment of the complicity and co-dependency they share, is refigured as a desire to “bring them along with him” on his way to a private destiny.”

In another way, the other person who, to me, is the most fascinating with this is Allen Iverson. What I’m interested in is the difference between Jordan’s grudging and practically submerged realization that he couldn’t stand alone and Iverson’s refusal of the imperative to act as if he could. Maybe there’s something on the order of a kind of non- or anti-individuation in both instances, right? Like, Iverson just was never going to separate himself from his boys, you know, from his folks. Like, he just wasn’t going to do it. And I don’t like that the term that we use for that is, represent. It’s technically not representation; it’s accompaniment. He was just never going to put himself in a position in which he wasn’t accompanied by his folks as however distasteful his folks might have been to the mainstream. Starting with his mom, right? She was with him, and she was going to be with him. Again, that’s another place where the force of life undergirds, you know, or undermines, rather, the force of individual lives. They just had folks who were just with them, and not as subordinates, not as support staff, you know, but as accomplices. Accomplice is a cool word which has the same root as complicit; it’s just two different modalities. Complicit is just such an indispensable word that you have to try to save it by saying it in a different language. Stefano taught me this. You know, complicity in English is all fucked up, it’s morally distasteful. If you say that shit in Italian, though—complicità, you know?—all of a sudden, that shit sounds better in your ear and tastes better in your mouth. Even in French, complicité. Whatever kind of weird moral reaction you had to it is at least chastened a bit by the beauty of it in another tongue.

Athanasopoulos: I’m still thinking about the relationship between co-option and inclusion, and I thought your take on that was fascinating. I feel like, I guess, when I think about co-option, I kind of think of it as what makes it so insidious, is that it meets you: It’s the meeting point of your desires and forced choices. There’s a force there that is pulling you and it meets you in just a way that it satiates a particular desire to make you take the deal. I don’t mean this to say that there are some people who take the deal and other people who don’t, and that we must search for purity. I mean it more to say that we all have that element, and that element is always present. You know, like, was it Gilles Deleuze that says we all have a little fascist inside of us, right?¹³ The other thing I was thinking about was the language used around being a “point guard” and the way that it symbolizes a sort of deference, right, to incorporate the other players in the team, and how that is devalued in a LeBron James versus, they literally call it the killer mentality, right? Like, I can hear, like, Stephen A. Smith, in my head, like, “he doesn’t have that dog in him, that assassin mentality,” right? Um, in reference to that guy. And, but it’s interesting, the reverse . . . 

Moten: I mean, it’s sick when you listen to that shit, you know? You’re like, really? Do you even hear yourself and what you’re saying? You know? I’m talking about Stephen A. Smith; you know what I mean? 

Athanasopoulos: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s interesting to think about the reversal when I think about a figure like Brittney Griner in the WNBA as this center who, you know, part of the draw was, you know, she can dunk, right? And in fact, a lot of the discourse in the media representation of her around her detainment transformed her into almost fodder for these conservative and liberal discourses. So, she becomes this icon of intersectionality in the public imagination as this masculine-presenting lesbian, right? This image of her dunking, of protesting the US flag, and now this image of her “smuggling” marijuana via a vape pen which is in fact the language used by Russian and conservative US news outlets.¹⁴ And so, like, you get the US conservative and Russian news talking about her as this drug smuggling criminal and sexual deviant who shows the failure of “woke culture” in America. This of course leads to the invoked comparisons with Griner and Paul Whalen over who deserves to be brought home which is really just a foil for this whole diversity–meritocracy debate. You know, they even go as far to misgender Griner as, like non-binary, to suggest that Griner is trans, right, because of her being masculine presenting.¹⁵ And on the flip side, you have the Biden and Harris administration invoking Griner’s release as this symbol of progressive policy, of successful US diplomacy.¹⁶ And so, like, after it was politically viable for Biden, he uses her as an example of racial progress in the United States which covers over the fact that there’s these disputes for months before that where Brittney’s wife calls out the Biden-Harris administration for a neglect of her wife’s situation.¹⁷ But when Griner returns to the United States, there’s this conversation that occurs where she says she would no longer protest the US national anthem, she would never play abroad again.¹⁸
And Griner sort of says I understand why I shouldn’t have kneeled during the US National Anthem, and this kind of parallels a history of the US using sports icons, especially during the Cold War, as these, like, symbols to use against, you know, against Russia, for example.¹⁹ So I’m interested in the way that the Griner case is another example of this management. Griner is this figure who’s helping organize the Say Her Name campaign and BLM protests in the WNBA, you know, is ultimately detained in Russia, and alongside that there’s this sort of management of her image, some of which is perhaps part of her choices, but most of which is primarily outside of the realm of her choices. 

Moten: Well, so here’s the thing, right? The underlying logic and metaphysics of sports discourse, and of art discourse, produce this tremendous kind of gravitational pull. And it’s the gravitational pull of something like a binary system, right? So, the first element of the binary system is what white folks do or the white power structure does. We experience this pull as the effect of a monolith, as the function of an overwhelming mass or weight. And our analysis of it leads us to a double operation, one in which we see (after having already refused the simplicity that we are supposed to bear) that there are internal differences within the monolith. Once we acknowledge those internal differences, we can deconstruct the monolith, but in a way that allows and requires us to see it as something like what Amiri Baraka would call a “changing same.” So, the monolith is white people doing white people shit with genocidal constancy. But there’s a liberal version of it, and, you know, let’s say, a fascist version of it. And, fascism is either liberalism’s big brother or little brother, depending on how far back in history you want to go. But one thing seems relatively clear, as a function of how their pathology might be said to inspire, if not necessarily initiate our interminable analysis. Biden is my enemy, and Trump is my enemy, and whoever aligns themselves behind either one of them is still my fucking enemy, the differences between them notwithstanding. And we keep knocking our heads against the wall that’s made out of the brick of their sameness and the mortar of their difference. I guess I just have a kind of feeling that to continually engage in the analysis that rightly arrives at that conclusion succumbs to a kind of law of diminishing returns, within which we all but comply to their complicity, until it animates practices that exceeds the assumption that turns out to undergird both their cruelty and our calculus of that cruelty in whichever navy blue suit—liberal or fascist—it decides to wear.

That’s what brings us back to the problem of the individual exceptional Black figure: LeBron James, or Chris Paul, or Brittney Griner. What we must inevitably come to grips with is that they might have a certain kind of autonomy for a minute that allows them to do some things that we admire and that we like, and that we would like to join in with. But ultimately, we see that that autonomy is extraordinarily limited, and that, under the prevailing circumstances, they will have to turn back. And again, that happens again and again. Obama could be said to at a certain point, have been a victim of this condition. At the same time, he actively communicates this condition; it is a condition which he has caught, and it is a condition which he also spreads. We just don’t know who made the phone call to Obama. He called Chris Paul, but who called him? I don’t know, I mean somebody did, right? Somebody said, “Yo, I know what you want to do, I know how you feel, but here’s what you have to do.” We tell that story repeatedly, wistfully, with a certain amount of disappointment, and at the same time, with a certain amount of empathy. And like I said, for me, there’s a law of diminishing returns in both of those analyses. It’s not that they’re not true, it’s just that, there’s this other part of it that I’m interested in.

And what I’m interested in is what it is that remains uncontained in that interplay. What if refusal of the (necessarily complex, ambivalent monolith) is a matter of some kind of communal surround rather than counter-individual confrontation? That’s what feels worth talking about to me. And interestingly, what remains uncontained surrounds two relays. It operates not-in-between two positions, if you will. Part of what remains uncontained is what actually happens on the floor. I believe there’s more liberatory possibility in the way that Brittney Griner plays than in the things that Brittney Griner says about politics. Same with LeBron. By the same token, it’s not a straight comparison, but I feel like I sense liberatory potential, if you will, when I see Jack Witten painting or, when I hear a Miles Davis record, rather than when I read Whitten’s writing about his painting or listen to Miles Davis talking about his music. And it’s not because Miles never says anything interesting about his music. He does. He says all kinds of brilliant shit about his music, and the shit that he says about it is totally indispensable. But there’s still a gap between the music and what he says about it. Because what the music is doing is constantly undermining the metaphysical foundations of what he says about it. And this is not just endemic to Black folks. It’s not because of some inherent incapacity or ignorance; this would be the same shit about any artists. Same shit about Sir Philip Sidney.

So, there’s something going on in the work that’s in excess of the way they talk about what they’re doing in the work. In other words, I don’t know that Brittney Griner has ever said anything about Say Her Name or Black Lives Matter that wouldn’t fold itself pretty seamlessly within the metaphysical foundations of liberalism. There’s something happening on the floor, or on the bandstand, or on the canvas, or whatever, that is in excess. And the question is, can we figure out a mode of criticism that is involved in rather than regulative or reductive of that excess. Something that allows us not simply to see or hear, or see and hear and speak against, what they say about what they do but to see through what they say about what they do and, in turn, to see through what they do, because we are all up in the richness of what we do. This excess of and in involvement messes up both spectatorship and participation. Sometimes it feels like we can see things on the floor that remind us on a structural level of the modes of sociality and mutual aid that Black folks have had to engage in in order to survive. But this is to say that we see through those things so that we can see through the sociality with which we are involved. The indovisual object, and whatever individual subjectivity that is supposed to have experienced it disappear, in a sense, like a lens or a window. And that’s what I’m interested in. That’s what I want to study. I know that I can’t study that in absolute isolation from (a) the fucked-up shit that white people do, on the one hand, and (b) the complicated ways that exceptional Black individuals have of responding to the fucked-up shit that white people do. But my primary interest is in what happens in the complexity of what goes on on the floor, on the ground, when we are grounding, which exceeds individuation. I’m interested in sports to the extent that it provides chances to study that. Does that make any sense at all?

Sirvent: Yes, it does. Thank you, Fred. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on what kind of sociality and mutual aid you see as interesting or necessary for Black people who work within the university, because you’ve done a lot of work on the university and Black study. What are the “things on the floor” in the university context that might relate to what you were saying in terms of sports?

Moten: I’m sorry, but as we were planning this conversation, I kind of figured that maybe implicit in that is that y’all played sports. Is that correct?

Athanasopoulos: Yeah. I like basketball and baseball. 

Sirvent: When I was younger, I did, yeah, but . . .

Moten: So, did you like it?

Sirvent: Yeah, I was younger, yeah. I’m teaching a Cultural Politics and Sports class right now, and I was telling students that it took me years, like, decades after the fact to be able to reflect on this with any kind of actual thought, but I just remember, for instance, when I played baseball. It was such a different experience when my head coach was gone, like, he was traveling that week. I had a lot more fun when his brother would fill in, because there wasn’t the pressure and that anxiety and stress that came from coaching. And I don’t really think it’s just a case of abusive coaching practices. I just feel like whenever competition is present, then there’s going to be that kind of stress and anxiety. Constantly being ranked, sorted, and evaluated. But I just remember that as kind of my earliest memory and I think that’s why I’ve been turned off just by competition in general.

Moten: I think the competition is one thing, which, again, connects to these modalities of measurement and individual accounting, and, um, an improvement. The imperative to improve. That’s also, right? And it’s also bound up with those same metrics, right? Did y’all see that, Clayton Kershaw announced his retirement?²⁰ 

Athanasopoulos: I saw the video clip and some reporting on how he became emotional during his announcement, and how he was trying not to get emotional during the announcement.

Moten: Well, the interesting thing to me was what it was that got him emotional. When did his voice break? When was it that his capacity to speak sentences in English broke down? What was the topic? Being with his teammates. And I’ve heard this said time and time again, you know? He’s like, oh, it’s time, it’s time. He was good with it, you know? He’s broken down, he lost ten miles an hour off his fastball. He’s managing to get people out, but that ain’t gonna last forever. You know, your body is limited. You got a very specific kind of half-life, and he’s been luckier than most. Eighteen years in the major leagues and he can no longer improve within a structure that is more and more obsessed with a really vicious kind of statistically based optimization. So, he was okay. He was like, “yeah, I can quit.” He says, I’ll miss playing, but that’s okay. He says, “but what you realize, though, what I’m really going to miss is my teammates.” That’s when he started crying. And I’ve seen retirement speeches again, and again and that’s what they say. It’s just the everyday routines of sociality, which are not, in the first instance, structured either by competition, the imperative to win, or the imperative to improve. And which are, in fact, separate from and not under the, you know, evaluative—what’s the word I’m looking for—”surveillant,” you know, imperative of coaching. Right? It’s being in the clubhouse. It’s being on the plane rides. It’s being with other people in that way. And there’s a kind of sense of commonality. The thing is, that shit exceeds winning and losing. And it kind of exceeds being good or bad as a player, right? And you can be valued by, you know, the other people you are with, that’s all I’m saying.

So, what’s that got to do with the university? See, that experience of being with teammates, that social experience is part of what constitutes the bridge, if you will, between what happens on the floor and the discourses that could be said to emerge from that and to sanction our desire to emerge from that. I’m thinking here specifically of team sports, because what happens on the field could never be reducible to one person. It all depends on cooperating with other people. So, this experience of being with other people off the field is part of the relay between what happens on the floor, and what happens, say, in your living room, with you and your uncles and whoever, when you’re watching the game, or talking—as opposed to talking about—the game. That’s the relay between those modalities of sociality. That’s, in a way, that’s where our sociality in criticism connects with their sociality as a team. And to tell you the truth, when it comes to academia, I don’t think most people really either have experience of or have the capability of wanting the experience of held in something like that.

The structures of individuation in academia I think are more severe than they are in team sports, and I think that the art world, when it comes to, like, writing, individual writing, or individual visual art, is very much like academia. Music feels to me more like the team sport thing. Right? If you’re in a band, you have to know what it feels like to be in a band. And when bands break up and lose or cede the capacity to be together in that way that blurs the boundaries between rehearsal and performance and the road-tripping criticism that rehearsal and performance are immersed in, the players are forlorn. But bands break down so that new bands can form. Musicians play until they die. Sports people usually have quite a bit of life left ahead after they can’t play anymore and, depending on the sport, it’s a life where physical and sometimes mental and emotional debility accompanies the loss of sociality. I feel like that’s what’s interesting to me about this rise of the whole podcast culture with retired sports figures. People love to watch that shit, and they talk about the game, but they don’t sit around and just talk X’s and O’s. They’re telling us shit that happened on the bus. They’re telling us stuff to happen in the locker room. They’re telling us stories of their sociality and their renewing that sociality even when they are reveling, also, in tales of dominance and submission. They’re figuring out a way to get the team, or the band, back together. But this invaluable team thing, or the band thing, is devalued in academia. Generally, I think we’re trained to think of teamwork as punishment or is a kind of payment that you have to make in order to be by yourself. Academic culture is the only culture in the world where fellowship means, “Oh, I get to go be by myself.”

Athanasopoulos: Yeah. I guess the reason why I personally was interested in this conversation was, so, for about two years, I taught at Gonzaga University, which is, you know, known for being a top basketball school, and so, like, Chet Holmgren was there while I was there, you know what I mean? Actually, one of the players, Julian, was in my class on Politics of Social Memory. I think I was one of the last classes he took, and so I got to actually see a player who was going through the NBA draft, you know, getting ready for the process. And we are both Afro-Puerto Rican, so we sort of bonded over that. In that course, the conversations between the two of us really revolved around the social memory of Black athlete protests, and the management of his and his teammates’ expression. These forms of protest or agency, I guess, if you can even really call it that, and having that imagination of those possibilities come up against the management of the coach, the team, the public image, you know, the attempt to get onto an NBA team, and so that’s why, I guess some of the questions or comments have been sort of this relationship between that imagination, that sociality, and then dealing with the process of that thing being managed. 

And it’s something that I think about even in my own writing; it’s like there’s the “on the floor part” of the writing, the sitting with others, and studying with them, like, outside of grades and tenure all of that, that’s where I feel that teamwork, that sociality. Honestly, studying and writing with my life partner, Corinne, stretching a decade back now to undergrad, has always been a way we express our love for one another. This sense of fellowship, and joy for the practice, I feel like is something that I have a conversation with my students about all the time, especially when they start to ask this question, of, for example, “even when I’m in a Black Studies department, there are certain ways of being disciplined and evaluated, managed, even gatekept. How do I deal with that?” It seems they are asking me about the gap between that and the love of the practice of Black study that is beyond that, right? Like ultimately, I do this shit not for tenure or anything else, but because I love it. But when that passion and management come up against each other, it becomes hard for many of us—faculty and students alike—to try to hold on to that joy amidst those pressures and forces.

I love the music metaphors. That’s kind of how sometimes when I think about writing, and I get into the process, I kind of think of it like composing a song, you know? Like, I’m sitting there, I feel like I’m in the studio, I’m rewriting the verse, and, you know, I’m like, is this one a banger? Is this one not? Right? And so that creative joy is beyond what happens with how the university recognizes that, or how people necessarily receive it, whether it’s legible, and whether, to bring us back to your Goodfellas reference, you get your “button” as a “made man” of the academy. And so, I keep thinking about that meeting point of that joy and that process of study or playing the sport, and when all that other stuff comes in and weighs it down, you know?

Moten: Well, I mean, I think the key thing, at least for me, is when you say, when all that other stuff comes in and weighs it down. One way to put it would be, the other stuff that comes in and weighs it down is the fucked-up shit that white people do who run the world, and also the fucked-up things that we find ourselves caught up in, even in the midst of our attempt to oppose the fucked-up things that white people do. Which is to say, the various compromises that we have to make. But my whole thing is, like, there’s a deeper level to it. What are the metaphysical foundations of the fucked-up things that white people do? And what are the metaphysical foundations of the limited and incarcerated ways in which we respond to the fucked-up things that white people do? Is there anything happening on the field, or on the canvas, or on the bandstand, or in the books that we read that gives us access not only to a better and sharper understanding of the metaphysical foundations of what weighs us down, but also helps to give us access to something which is undetermined by those metaphysical foundations?

I’m repeating myself, I know, but that’s the question. Like, that’s the question. I believe that there are things, But, you know, I mean, look, man, I mean, you wrote a book about it, right? So, I don’t, you know, I have nothing to tell you, right? There’s a tension between a certain kind of liberatory force that we see in Black iconoclasm, right? ²¹ And the fucked-up modes of incarceration that we feel that exist as a function of Black iconography, just like what you were talking about with regard to LeBron. There’s an underlying metaphysical structure that leads to his you know, to the exceptionalist fetishization of his hyperbolic body. And that also creates the tension between you know, the racist white dude in the Senate, or whoever, who says, shut up and dribble, on the one hand, and our desire for LeBron to not shut up and dribble, but to speak for us in an iconoclastic way, right? But the tension between those two things is all bound up with the fact that there is an irreducible relationship between those things. And what we gotta do is to try to get at something which is not held within that gravitational field. And so that’s why I feel like I want to try to see if we can cultivate in a more general way, a kind of discipline that will allow us to do two things: To refuse to be held within the interplay between that iconoclasm and that iconography and, at the same time, to enjoy and to honor and to not simply denounce or, you know, or pathologize either the iconography or the iconoclasm. I don’t want to dismiss it, you know? But I don’t want to depend upon it, or simply accept that I am somehow trapped between those two poles, right? And I hope I’m not getting it wrong, but my feeling was that that’s what your book is about. You know, ultimately, there’s a structure here that we have to move through.

Athanasopoulos: I mean, you know, I tried to say that; maybe not as well as you put it, but, yes, that is a correct reading of Black Iconoclasm [Laughs].

Moten: Well, the only way I could say it is because I looked at your book. I wouldn’t have been able to say it if you hadn’t written it. It’s in there somewhere as far as I can tell. 

Sirvent: Thank you, Fred. Well, we want to be respectful of your time and how generous you’ve been, so maybe one final question? As you know, there’s a lot of language in sports around, owning.

Moten: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sirvent: Some examples might be, like, “we own this city,” “we own this division,” “she owns the record books,” or “he owns the paint.” Aaron Rodgers, I think, a few years ago, told Chicago Bears fans, “I own you.”²² Sports media commentators saying, “they own real estate in his head.” So, bringing this conversation back full circle, what are your thoughts on this ownership rhetoric that’s prevalent throughout sport? How might it connect to that plantation language and plantation logic, in terms of how sporting culture values Black lives or Black life? What do you say to many of us who respond with, “oh, well, that’s just a figure of speech, I don’t really mean ownership literally?”

Moten: Of course you’d mean it, literally, you know? Relatedly, I mean, let me just say this, too, speaking of owning things. I fucking love sports. Okay, like, let me not, let me be clear, okay? I’m not trying to talk about this shit as if I’m above it. You know, if there isn’t a game on, I mean, come on, you know, I’m gonna be looking for a game when I hang up with y’all. Like, I’m sick. I grew up, you know, look, man, okay, Julian, I know what you’re talking about Charles: Julian Strawther. He’s from Las Vegas. You know, I grew up in Las Vegas, I know every Division I player who comes out of a Las Vegas high school, and I have a special place in my heart for them, and I root for their success. You know, I’m sick. 

Athanasopoulos: Yeah, it’s alright [laughs], I love watching every LeBron game I can. I watch the NBA religiously.

Moten: I watch the NBA all the time, you know. I grew up in Las Vegas. I’ve been a Lakers fan since, you know, since I was born in 1962, that’s my team, you know? I used to listen to the Dodgers on the radio in Las Vegas at my grandmother’s house when I was little with Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, you know, announcing the games on the radio and shit. I remember, I grew up, I wanted to be Wes Parker, the first baseman. I know all of those guys. You know, so, fucking Aaron Rodgers. I was happy to be walking around for much of the last twenty years hating his semi-surreptitiously right-wing ass. But he fucked around and signed with my team. And now I love Aaron Rogers, you know? And so, I’m sick. I get it. It’s a problem.

And I played football in high school, and I played my first year of college. And if, through some miraculous act of God, I woke up tomorrow morning with my twenty-year-old body, I would be looking for a football team to go practice with. I don’t even want to play. I just want to go to practice. And it would include being in the locker room and all that social shit, but it would also include scrimmaging, because one of the things that you recognize when you play is that that sociality that you love that’s off the field exerts a force that is on the field. And in football, the folks who mostly understand that are linemen because line play, especially offensive line play, requires that the players play together and, really, that they hang out together, creating this feedback loop between on the field and off the field. Receivers, it seems to me, but this is the prejudice of a lineman, are a bit more entrepreneurial. And quarterbacks and running backs are all but aristocratic. They depend upon the scut work of others, right? You know, receivers at least have to get out there and hustle and get open, right? But, you know, the linemen, they’re the workers who are really on the ground. Linebackers depend on defensive linemen getting in the way of the people who are gonna block them. Okay? And defensive backs, they’re more entrepreneurial. They gotta cover somebody, but they have individual responsibilities that they have to fulfill. They are also compelled to market their fulfillment of them. Linebackers generally don’t do that kind of ostentatious celebration, partly because we’re not athletic enough to make it look good. So, playing on the line gave me, you know, a certain kind of prejudicial insight. Anyway, I just want to be clear, I’m not talking about this shit like I’m above it.

Sirvent: If I can just connect this to the last part: I would love to hear if you’ve thought much about the ways fantasy sports and sports gambling have intensified both: the libidinal investments and economic investments that fans have, especially since you’ve talked about statistical individuation. How do fantasy sports and sports gambling kind of get people killed behind that, particularly regarding boxing? 

Moten: And it won’t be long before some kid who’s like, coming off the bench as a shooting guard for Appalachian State is going to get killed because he gave up a steal in garbage time and somebody lost on the over and under. Online violence is already inflicted on people behind that shit. Somebody’s gonna get killed, you know, and I guarantee you that all these people whose delicate sensibilities are so offended by our lack of empathy for Charlie Kirk’s widow won’t have shit to say about that. All of it has to do with what it means to be invested. It’s deeper than just ownership. You don’t even have to own the team to feel it, to be invested in the team, and to feel like that gives you all kinds of rights to be an asshole. Not only to say fucked up shit to the opposition’s players, but to say fucked up shit to “your own” players. It’s not the managers of the ones who have controlling interests Real Sociedad, who’ve been seen doing racist shit to Vinicius Jr. after he kicks their ass, right? It’s the fans, it’s the ultras. They don’t really own shit, in the way we might normally mean but they are invested. Maybe what they’re trying to do at that moment is trying to assert ownership not over the team but over their assumed whiteness. In this instance, maybe more emphatically because the claim upon whiteness is more attenuated, something general is revealed about white people doing white people shit. The cruelty corresponds to the futility of the claim, the impossibility of substantiating it, and the privilege of being able to assert it even in its non-substantiality.

Here’s the problem, okay? And it’s one of the reasons why all our sensibilities, I think, are offended by these things. Okay. There’s something good about sports in the same way that one could say that there’s something good about art and good about literature. And, what’s good about it is that there’s something about it that is not supposed to be owned. Ownership ain’t really supposed to have nothing to do with it. It’s really not. And this is the dilemma that I have where my thinking as whatever I am, a scholar or whatever I’m supposed to be, comes up against my fandom. But it comes up against it, not only at the level of sports, but also of art. There’s something about this shit where it ain’t supposed to be owned. Or, more precisely, there’s something that runs through it, and something that surrounds it, that can’t be owned, something that’s never coalesces into anything countable or nameable or identifiable at all. There is supposed to be basketball without something called a basketball game. There’s, like, running without something called an individual event, you know? There’s painting and decorating without something called a work of art. And the minute it enters into the frame of countability, that’s, again, where the individuation comes in. The individuation is not just at the end at the level of the person who does it, or the individual who views it; it’s in the very idea of the individual artwork itself, the individual game, even the individual play. 

This is one of the reasons why the most profound moment in the philosophy of sports in the last twenty years, you know, was the famous Allen Iverson, “practice” moment.²³ Watching it is like watching an intense and highly concentrated extra-philosophical movie. And you don’t know until you start to learn something about how movies are made, that what you’re actually seeing is the reversal of the image. It’s actually something that I came to know from another sports movie, The Pride of the Yankees (1942). Because, you know, Lou Gehrig was a lefty. But Gary Cooper in the movie took all those swings with his right hand. Originally, he started trying to take the swings with his left, like a lefty. And it fucked up the movie, because the movie reverses the image. That’s what the cinematic apparatus does. So, they were like, no, just do it right-handed, you’ll be alright. It’ll come out right.

Same thing with AI. We hear him say, “practice.” “They’re talking about practice. Not the game.” But in my view, what he really was saying was, “Y’all talking about a game. Y’all talking about the game. I’m talking about practice. I’m talking about this practice that we engage in. Do I give my life for a game? I ain’t playing. I go out there every night and die on the court, and y’all talking about a game.” The game is where shit is counted, evaluated. Where motherfuckers win or lose. The game is what people bet on. The game is where all we’re concerned about is the outcome. I fully acknowledge Michael Jordan’s greatness. That’s what he wants, that’s what he demands, and so, I do. I acknowledge his greatness and his dominance. Okay, but he was the king of the game. When it comes to the game, he was the GOAT. When it comes to practice, there’s others whom I love more, you know?

Okay, I’ll tell you a story, and then I’ll let you go. I should respect your time. This was the Olympics—must have been probably the 2012 Summer Olympics—and Hortense Spillers used to do this thing at Vanderbilt. She founded an organization called Issues in Critical Investigation. We’d have, like, a big meeting every other year, and it was kind of like a little, just kind of a cool moment for a lot of people in Black studies to get together, and people would bring their students, and it was really something nice. And so, I was in Nashville at a hotel. We were all waiting to have dinner, and it just happened to be the night Usain Bolt broke the 200-meter world record. I hope I’m not getting it wrong. And I’ll never forget it. Because he was running, and Professor Spillers just happened to be looking at the TV, and she just said, “Oh my god, he’s beautiful!” If you know Spillers, if you’ve heard the way she talks, then close your eyes and listen: “he’s beautiful,” That’s what we’re talking about. I think what she kind of meant was, “we’re beautiful.” But you have to ask her about that.

Athanasopoulos: Yeah, this is just, so brilliant; what you were saying about sports as somehow uniquely rife with complicity as opposed to other arenas, I feel like people feel that way about the academy. It’s almost, like, trendy to be above teaching classes and writing essays. Like, some people are just like, “Oh, I left the academy because, you know, I’m above that. And, like, yeah, there is all this fucked up shit that happens there.” And, you know, and it’s not all great, but there is something else that occurs there. You know, like, you’re not gonna tell me that, that there’s not this beauty that is occurring in the practice of studying, at least I think you’re saying, there is this impulse to in every situation where perhaps we might see an icon or an iconography and initially dismiss something, that there is something underneath that portrait, right? A network of relation that exists, and that togetherness that is, you know, I’m thinking of Édouard Glissant here, like, against that kind of projection of root identity.²⁴ Rather a kind of being, thinking, feeling together that is not—you can’t determine the trajectory of such, you can’t calculate that thing, and that’s what I kind of find myself trying to hold on to. It is something that I feel like is just pressing in my conversations with my graduate students constantly. You know, this feeling of, like, the academy can really try to destroy your spirit as you’re trying to hold on to the passion of the thing that brought you here to do that project, to do that study. That joy of that little Charles who would go and read books and who fell in love with the practice of Black study, and I can see my students trying to wrestle with that as well, so I feel like it’s, yeah, it’s important to not . . . I don’t know. Everyone’s looking to have that purity, to be in that place that it does not have those residues of that fucked up shit, and it’s like, it’s always there, but the other thing is always there as well.

Moten: Well, right. Yeah. I don’t think it’s very satisfying. Again, as you show, it’s not satisfying to become an icon. None of them ever seem happy. But I think a lot of folks kind of think about music, or the academy, or sports as some sort of entryway to icon status. And in fact, what I think is more true, is that these are endeavors which will allow you to see through the icon. Not to be the icon, or become the icon, but to see through the icon. The greatest moment in the history of iconology, as far as I know, is this great film by Andrei Tarkovsky called Andre Rublev (1966). And there’s a moment at the end of that film when this sort of glorious thing occurs, when the film becomes a kind of transparency. What you thought you were in the midst of was this unfolding of a great work of art, which is about the unfolding or the making of a great work of art. And then you realize at the end of the film that, no, what you’re interested in is what you can see through, not merely what you come, or came, to see. Again, what you see through disappears. It falls away, you know? The objects to which we are devoted disappear. And we learn that what we were devoted to was that disappearance and to something which was pre-apparent before the appearance ever happened, you know? And, to me, sports is just a lens through which we see the constancy and beauty and sociality of our seeing through, in seeing with. The constancy and beauty of this sharing. It’s like a hall of lenses that we have to try to keep from being turned into a hall of mirrors. When we have to confront all the ways in which business fucks it up, it makes you feel shitty, you know? But anyway, yeah, that’s what we have to do. Thank you, thank you so much, and I don’t know if you have another question, Roberto, but it was great to have this conversation.

The interview has been slightly edited for clarity and length.