33 pages • 1-hour read
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
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Themes
The Historical Exploitation of African American Athletes
Rhoden traces the history of African Americans’ role in sports and finds a persisting legacy of exploitation. His survey dates to slavery, when sporting events among black slaves served as diversions, contributing to the slaves’ “psychic survival.” Slaveowners also frequently exploited their slaves, however, entering them into sporting competitions that provided the plantation owners with free entertainment and possibilities for gambling. From this history of sports on plantations comes Rhoden’s central metaphor, which presents the modern sports industry as a plantation. The comparison also inspires the book’s title: When African American former NBA player Larry Johnson was accused of being ungrateful, a disgruntled fan labeled him a $40 million slave.
In the modern sports world, this exploitation takes many forms. Rhoden cites the Conveyor Belt, a system of recruitment by which promising young black athletes are taken out of their communities and groomed to fit in to white power structures. Among the consequences, Rhoden notes examples of black athletes who, having been made to feel they were untouchable, later wind up disciplined, expelled, or imprisoned.
As athletes are often unaware of this exploitation, Rhoden argues, they do little to stop it or in many cases even ride it to successful careers and stardom. For example, he notes that Michael Jordan “was always on the plantation, he just didn’t know it or acknowledge it because he was flying too high to notice” (208). Likewise, when BET founder Robert Johnson buys a basketball team, Rhoden is wary of whether Johnson will improve the situation of exploitation or simply benefit from it. To end this exploitation, Rhoden argues that athletes must look beyond individual success and unite to create a new system that will ensure fairness for African American athletes.
Black Style as a Reaction and a Contribution to American Sports
The concept of black style is important to Rhoden’s conceptualization of how African Americans, athletes in particular, have been able to succeed, thrive, inspire, and maintain their own psychic dignity under conditions that are often meant to put the black population at a disadvantage. Rhoden explains: “This style would be the source of great entertainment and much hand-wringing for white coaches and commentators” (143).
Rhoden asks what African American style really is and offers insight about its origin. He admits that a simple dictionary definition will not suffice and, instead, offers multiple examples and images. The “chest bumps, high fives, shakes and shimmies” (143), he writes, cannot simply be dismissed as idiosyncrasies. He contends that “African American style is a reaction to racism […] a state of mind; something felt, something seen and immediately identified as one’s one” (143).
Referencing Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other African American athletes and performers, Rhoden contends that white athletes, conditioned to being preferable, had begun to lack the element of showmanship and innovation. In this context: “The black presence, beginning with Robinson, added flavor, color, and, finally drama” (151). Musicians such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker had also introduced the concept of cool to the mainstream.
While African Americans brought to the culture at large “a tantalizing mix of ingenuity and grace, sensuality and grace, beauty and violence, rage and vulnerability” (153), black style would eventually be upended and turned into a marketing tool. Rhoden asks, not rhetorically, whether the elements of black style did anything to empower black athletes. He concludes that black style has served, in the main, as a source of profit for white enterprises seeking to appropriate this style.
The Elusive Promised Land for African American Athletes
Rhoden frequently uses the term Promised Land to describe the goal African American athletes hope to obtain. At one time or another, and for one athlete or another, the Promised Land may be access, self-sufficiency, a scholarship to a white school, lifestyle and prestige, or Olympic glory. Rhoden cites Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough into Major League baseball as one idea of “winning,” followed by the success of Wilma Rudolph, who, competing in track and field, overcame not only racism but also childhood afflictions to win three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics.
As Rhoden writes that “[f]or African Americans, the Promised Land has been a moveable goal that changes shape from decade to decade” (266).
However, as the sports world has evolved from segregated to integrated but exploitive, Rhoden argues, African American athletes have yet to reach a true Promised Land. This assertion about hope being elusive and perhaps transitory is explored in the case of African American Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who, after winning the gold and bronze medals in Mexico City, protested—on the 1968 Olympic medal stage—the “condition of inhumanity that this [American] democracy imposed upon African American citizens” (216). For them, Olympic glory was no longer enough.
With this moving target in mind, Rhoden asks what “winning” looks like in the 21st century, and he locates it in increased power and ownership of not only teams and networks but of communication and image. For Rhoden, the next generation of African American athletes must see themselves as part of a group. The creation of a professional organization for African American athletes, he argues, is a first step toward achieving this concept of the Promised Land.
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