The College Fix

Speaking in the nigh comprehensible language of deconstuctivism, Professor Ben Carrington gave a speech last year stating that the “’white sports media complex’ works to further ‘white privilege’ even as it claims to be ‘post-racial.’”

What makes this talk most interesting is that Carrington was a formal adviser to the university for the hiring of its first black football coach earlier this year. The professor had stated that “the only way for the university to escape its segregationist past was to hire a highly-paid black head football coach.”

The speech, titled “The Global White Sports/Media Complex and the Politics of Sport: Towards a Critical Communications of Sport,” often “referenced Marxist and ‘neo-Marxist’ sources, and

also argued … that “you might think of the sports media complex then as having an important role, a role arguably more powerful than any other social institution, in the ideological transmission of ideas about race and, essentially, of normative whiteness.

“In short, the sports media complex has become the modality through which popular ideas about race are lived.”

Uh huh.

World Tribune.com continues:

“[Charlie Strong’s hiring] reminds them that the institution was a historically white institution. It reminds us of the facts of racial segregation and discrimination that took place at UT and its legacy into the present.”

Carrington then bluntly stated that the whole point of Strong’s hiring was in fact to emphasize race.

“It’s not surprising that [for] some white fans, even mentioning the fact that Charlie Strong is African-American is itself, they’ll argue, a form of racism,” Carrington said.

“That’s to get things backwards. It’s really to acknowledge the existence of race.”

In a more recent lecture on another prominent football school campus, the British-born Carrington detailed how he sees college and professional football as an instrument meant to bolster white racial projections.

On April 4, Carrington gave a guest lecture for the Michigan State University African American & African Studies Department titled, “Love and Fear: Thugs, Sports and the Great White Hope.”

“Taking the so-called ‘epic rant’ of NFL player Richard Sherman as a starting point, I show how the framing of his actions as ‘thuggish’ needs to be located within a longer history of white societal attempts to discipline and control black expressive behavior.

“The invention of the idea of ‘the black athlete’ at the start of the 20th century produces black athletes as both objects for homosocial desire and figures of hate and loathing.

The article notes that Carrington has a history of tweets “on which white people have been the subject of criticism.” For instance:

Read the full article here.

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