Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately affects U.S. communities of color, administrators have de-densified student populations on campuses, classes have shifted to a online format, and academic departments and professorships are dwindling because of the financial stress. And yet, young men, disproportionately young Black men, risked their health and ran onto college gridirons every Saturday to play a high-contact sport. Why wasn’t the 2020 college football season postponed or even interrupted for the majority of the most competitive conferences in the country? I answer this question by relying on my ethnographic fieldwork experiences with Black college football players during the 2017-18 football season. By noting how football programs deal with injury and mundane violence, my experiences then and my observations now point to one central fact: since this billion-dollar industry is dependent upon the physical labor of thousands of ‘amateur’ athletes, their participation in any playing season is integral to the perpetuation of the system. None of this would be possible without the actual people who play the sport, so their athletic bodies are seen and used as commodities that have the potential to win games and garner revenue. Thus, I argue that an institutionalized form of care is invested in these athletes to guarantee they are just healthy enough to continue to play, produce, and labor on the football field. This particular performance of care, which relies on the fallacy of amateurism, has allowed for the continued exploitation of young Black athletes during this COVID-19 pandemic.