Playing the Game: Unmarking "Beast" from the Bodies of Young Black Men: A Conversation with Gary F. Green II

This episode features a conversation with theologian and professor, Rev. Dr. Gary F. Green II. Dr. Green shares about his research and his dissertation, Playing the Game: Unmarking “Beast” from the Bodies of Young Black Men. He reflects on the societal creation of realities and the potential of “play space” to release us from cultural codes and routines that recreate race and racism.

Resources

-Black Athleticism beyond “Beast”: Social Transformation Lunch led by Gary Green

-Gary F. Green II

Episode Transcription available here

Host: Ry O. Siggelkow

Producer: Adam Pfuhl

Podcast Engineer: Michael Moua

Music: Kavyesh Kaviraj

Episode Recorded on November 28th, 2022

You can find out more about the Leadership Center for Social Justice on our website and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Transcript

Ry Siggelkow [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. I'm Ry Siggelkow, and I direct the Leadership Center for Social Justice at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. 

Today, I am delighted to be in conversation with one of United's own, Gary Green II. Gary is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Social Transformation here at United. He earned his Ph.D. from Brite Divinity School, where he focused on issues related to young African-American men through the lens of public pastoral theology. His dissertation, which is entitled, Playing the Game: Unmarking “Beast” from the Bodies of Young Black Men, is a project that seeks to humanize young Black men by allowing their voices to challenge stereotypical scripts that cast them as beasts for public consumption. 

Gary's broader research interests involve raising consciousness to issues of race, masculinity and power, particularly when these issues are uniquely disclosed in spaces that are often overlooked by the church and the academy. Gary is committed to highlighting neglected sources in his research as a way to prioritize the revolutionary potential of voices that have gone unheard. His ultimate goal is to contribute to theological perspectives that can more adequately undergird socio-political redress for oppression in marginalized populations in the United States. Gary, welcome to the podcast. 

Gary Green [00:01:34] Thank you, Ry. I appreciate being here. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:01:36]  It's great to have you here. 

Gary Green [00:01:38] It's good to finally be here with you in conversation. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:01:42] Gary, your research focuses on racist representations of young Black men as beasts for public consumption. You attend especially to the way in which such representations are both produced and reproduced in competitive sports. I thought we could begin our conversation by having you share a bit about your research and what led you into this specific area of study. 

Gary Green [00:02:06] Thank you for asking this. Like I was telling you kind of in the chat beforehand, it's been so long since talking about some of these ideas or this whole body of work as a whole. And it came from my own experience growing up in the South, in Texas, and being very aware of the ways that I was looked at or seen in public and the way that and then paying attention to the way that I just inherently knew how to modulate my own presence publicly. Code Switch is the language that a lot of folks will use because of just being aware of the way that my blackness or my young maleness or whatever showed up in the way that it performed, even outside of my own behavior. And then also from experiences of being followed around in department stores, I mean, all of that stuff being pulled over for no reason and harassed by police officers. And these are things that literally have happened.

But then also the experience of being really kind of fetishized because I was always an athlete and so having a lot of success in sports and going to play college football and the Big 12 and the kind of success that came with that. But then also just paying attention to the way that I was treated because I was an athlete. And some of the assumptions and some of the the scripts, as you mentioned in the bio, how they play out and and how my humanity was something that was not really recognized and being aware of a lot of my peers had similar experience where it's like, okay, when I'm in public and you don't know I'm an athlete, there's a certain air, there's a certain kind of assumption that you can feel when you are interacting with people in public space. When I'm in public and you do know I'm an athlete, all of a sudden there's this other kind of air where the language I use in in my dissertation and kind of maybe will still use but probably tweak a little bit now is there's this kind of subhuman and superhuman assumption that plays out devoid of a recognition of humanity. Like the fact that I'm a complex human being, that I think, I have emotions, I have feelings. Those kinds of things were never part of the conversation because I was always related to either as another one of those guys or oh, he's an exceptional athlete. So there's just this kind of fetishization that plays out.

And so this project really comes out of my attempt to understand racism, really, beyond the kind of moralisms or things that only speak to the subhuman history when we talk about black men but I also wanted to understand how the fetishization still escapes a recognition of humanity in a fullness of what it is. And really this move to and this is kind of more now than than when I wrote the project, but now this move toward understanding, really trying to figure out a way to analyze racism and race beyond what I think is a moral impediment for society's capacity to recognize what's actually happening when racial situations play out. That it's more deeply formed and ingrained. And I think I might be getting ahead of the question now, but it lives at a level that is underneath intention, that is underneath moral sensibility. How do we understand how racism plays out by well-meaning participants in death dealing ways? You know, it's not always the kind of evil that every time something happens, you turn on CNN, you turn on MSNBC, maybe you turn on Fox News. And it's always in the language of morality, like this person is a racist. And my sense is it's deeper than that is there's relational science that I think we need to better understand. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:06:48] You describe your dissertation, Playing the Game, as a work of pastoral theology. And I know you are a pastoral theologian. But its pastoral theology of a particular sort, it seems to me. In that you are rather self-consciously engaged in doing pastoral theology as a form of cultural criticism. And while your work demonstrates a deep concern for care in pastoral practice and specifically the pastoral care of young Black men, you situate such concerns within the wider sociopolitical context in which pastoral care takes place. I know that for you this also entails a deep commitment to social transformation and social justice. I wonder if you could talk about how you understand your work I guess within the context of the field of pastoral theology and the ways in which your work also marks out a kind of intervention in that field. 

Gary Green [00:07:38] You know, at the core of that, it's the recognition that traditionally the kind of therapeutic focus that pastoral theology had before the last few decades, has started to shift. Recognizing that if I were to go to therapy, that would only go so far. There are things that happen to Black men in this country that therapy can't account for. I mean, like literal death sometimes. 

But even beyond that, the kind of therapeutic harm that can be done or healing can only go so far if the structures or the sociopolitical practices in public space and otherwise are not altered. Like to not address the reason why many Black men need therapy in the first place is not to truly care. That to truly care for this group of people, of humans, then the therapeutic is one piece of it. But there needs to be some changes to the kind of broader realities that are creating the problems and maintaining them in the first place. And I think that that is just the extent to which I go to that end might be an intervention in pastoral theology. It's the best way that I can understand. You know, if I'm asked the question of care in relation to Black men, we can't talk about care without talking about what that looks like on a social and political level. And so that's really, you know, that's just to speak to that a little bit, I mean, that's kind of where I am. Pastoral theology and the program that I was in at Brite Divinity School had that in mind. But it was not necessarily as explicit as I'm trying to make it where I am trying to to focus on the social and political realities first as a foundational core piece of care, even while my colleagues and other folks are focusing on the therapeutic. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:09:55] So that's already a shift that's happening or that has been happening in pastoral theology away from sort of individualized sort of therapeutic kind of interests, but more into a kind of sociopolitical viewing of questions of care within the larger context. So you see your work as a kind of deepening of the work that's sort of been going on in the field, is that right?

Gary Green [00:10:16] Definitely, definitely. I see that work began decades ago and, you know, to varying degrees, caught on. It didn't catch on. It depends on the scholar that you kind of were conversing with, but the folks that I was formed in relation to were already thinking about. It was therapy. But then there was still kind of that traditional commitment to care that was predicated on a definition of a person really as an individual. And it's not until, you know, later and in a in a little thread going through pastoral theology that understood the human as not necessarily individual but foundationally relational, which meant even the formation of a person is directly connected to their environment, to the cultural realities, social and political realities in which they exist. And so then for me when I was learning that from scholars, from mentors, it was for me, the logical conclusion of that is, okay, then we have to talk about that first. The formation, the kind of reality in which I come to even exist as a human person first before talking about what has supposedly gone wrong in me, to not be able to adjust or stand up under all of this. Right. And so for me, it was let's understand how this inhumanity that continues to play out is not just treated, but how has it been produced in the first place? And how do we continue to produce inhumanity onto and inscribe that on to Black men's bodies, Black men and women's bodies? 

Ry Siggelkow [00:12:10] Your research engages in a series of case studies in which you interview several current and former young Black athletes. You say that the goal of the project is to, quote, "uncover the ways in which young Black men are seen as inhuman evinced through lenses of sub and super humanity". You explore the history of the racialized trope of Black men as beasts, which you note simultaneously represents Black men as subhuman and superhuman, a source of both racialized fears and fetish. Then you reflect on the former NFL superstar Marshawn Lynch, who you say epitomizes both the appeal and problematic racial nature of beast. I wonder if you could share a bit about the history of this racist trope and how you see it on display today in representations of young Black men and perhaps athletes in particular. 

Gary Green [00:13:03] Thank you. I'll enter in through Marshawn Lynch as a model to speak about both that history and the contemporary, I would say, performance of that. When you look at Marshawn Lynch, especially when he was playing with the Seahawks and you know, he's got the dreads, he's got the tattoos. He's a big strapping guy. And he did not want to talk to the media because he understood what the media would regularly do to the narratives of Black players in terms of twisting them and making them, you know, making them come off as something they're not. And so he began to be defiant with respect to the rule in the NFL that one needs to give interviews and there's a minimum amount of time that you have to be accessible to the media. And so he would show up and he would just say the same thing you might remember but "I'm just here so I don't get fined". And that was effectively his protest. To hear all of the language of like thug that came out of that by the media, and by many. I mean, I would hear people talking about Marshawn Lynch as if they knew him. And so that was a problem.

And for me, it pointed to a broader history that we see play out with respect to police violence, with respect to the levels of containment that, you know, the extent to which Black men are incarcerated in this country and how a common refrain undergirding all of those was this sense that this person was a threat in some kind of way. This person is in some way not capable of controlling themselves. So then there's the need to contain or control them or perhaps even kill them because Black men free in the United States and and in their agency and vocal are dangerous, are a problem for many. And so the period of antebellum slavery had to assume that Black men and women were not human in order to be able to treat them like chattel. When slavery, when emancipation happened and you moved into Jim Crow, this is when beast as something even more explicit, became even more politically necessary. Because now you needed another way to control those same bodies that enslavement allowed you to do legally. So now this is when the KKK, this is when the police were formed as a way to continue that legacy of controlling Black men in extralegal ways with different methods. Hence, that's when lynching comes into play. Lynching was based largely on a narrative that assumed that Black men were physically capable, kind of superhuman. But when it came to rational capability, when it came to really what was defined as their humanity, they were less than and therefore needed to be controlled because they were in pursuit of white women. And this was the narrative. They are physical beasts that are overtly sexual, that are physical, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

So when you look at how that plays out today, you know, some of the examples that come to my mind are the language and the ease with which Black athletes are called a beast, in the celebratory way. Because there's a recognition of a kind of dominance or prowess and extraordinary capability in that sport. But how often do we use the language to talk about beast with Marshawn Lynch and it means something more than physical, right? It's always couched in this physical capacity, perhaps devoid of humanity or perhaps devoid of the same kind of sensibility that you would think about with respect to a Tom Brady, for example. I'm trying not to get too much in the weeds, but even my interviewees in this dissertation project had a harder time calling Tom Brady a beast when they had previously defined beast as, you know, this is something like when dude, when you were just dominating, right? Anybody can do this in sport. But there was a reticence to calling Tom Brady a beast, whereas there was a willingness to recognize the same thing in Marshawn Lynch. And underneath that, there was this sense of, well, Tom Brady's the goat. You know, he's not really a beast in that sense. Right. So you hear this undertone, even among Black athletes. 

But, you know, seeing LeBron James on the front cover of a magazine depicted as King Kong, the language of Beast of the East, or when Marshawn Lynch himself talks about going into beast mode and is describing it as going into a flow state, which is a neuroscientific, neurological level of functioning, a kind of an altered state of consciousness that lands more as intelligence than just looking at him as a physical specimen, as running around, knocking people out the way. I probably went way off track. But hopefully, you know, there's what I'm trying to do is there's a through line that to pull through. And I think in the world that we live in now where everybody is exploited and athletes are depicted publicly for the sake of just generating wealth and money and whatever, that it still plays on that narrative historically, but it does so in a way that is more celebrated and therefore is not recognized for the harm that it can can maintain. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:19:12] Well, this leads into the next question, which is what you call the three prongs of the American pitchfork, through which young Black men are targeted. These prongs, and really you describe them as cycles, are containment, crucifixion and commodification. I think this is a good question to kind of transition to because you know, you've been talking about the scripts that are used to to target and to contain and to contain Black men in particular kinds of ways, whether that's in terms of the sub humanity or in terms of framing, in terms of a super humanity. I wonder if you could share about each of these three prongs and how you understand these to function as fundamental scripts or inscriptions of inhumanity, as forms of marking, as you put it, young Black men as beasts. 

Gary Green [00:20:01] You know, I chose that language partly because I'm historically a Baptist preacher and alliteration works. But more deeply, you know, really trying to understand what is the reality that's playing out. What does it look like? And the language of cycles. I even use the language of realities specifically because to me, I understand that to be any kind of closed system of of kind of interrelated functioning that has kind of taken on a life of its own, where the participants are in this kind of ritualized way of relating to each other without having to think much about it. And I would even define capital R Reality that way as well. But it's hard for us to fathom in that crass of terms because we are all participating in it, but we are upholding it at the same time. 

And so this was me trying to understand when I look at what are the realities, the sociopolitical kind of closed systems that seem like they function on their own, that are most pressing to and threatening to Black men? Well, one, you could talk about incarceration. And Michelle Alexander and a host of other scholars have talked about the problem of mass incarceration and the fact that there's a pipeline that begins early in grade school that is designed to feed directly into this reality. To keep it in play. But then also, the crucifixion comes specifically from the routine ways in which Black men are killed by state, are products of state violence- not products of. But the result, you know, is the killing of Black men as a product of state violence, whether physical violence or other forms that you could, you know, theorize in a broader sense. But it's a very public way in which Black men continue to i.e. similarly to lynching historically, but there's a terroristic element to what happened to Mike Brown or what happens to other Black men who may not have been left on the street for hours for all to see. But their pictures are particular kinds of pictures of them that are paraded around on the news. 

And, you know, there's just a public dimension to our death that I think has a design that kind of terroristic designed to it, similarly to lynching and to crucifixion in the way that that was meant to function from empire. And part of this, I think, is because we still have to talk about empire. It just functions in a little different way now. Commodification was my recognition that, okay, if I avoid being locked up, going to prison one day. Right. Beat the statistics in that sense. And if I can avoid being killed by the police or whoever beat the statistics in that place, you know, the design of this thing that we're talking about, I have to acknowledge that at every point of my life, I have still had to consent to certain things that really feel like a commodification of my Black maleness or Blackness or whatever it might be, especially in sport, as a means to get to kind of quote unquote, making it out or as a means to success. The things that I had to say yes to as an athlete, knowing that I was not being appreciated for anything more than what my body could do in front of people and in space. Even that was not recognized as a signal of a complex humanity or even an intellectual capability to navigate certain kinds of space. And having to be kind of okay with that because of the need of doing this or that or that just that was a problem for me. And it truly became a way for me to understand what are Black men having to do and what is the terrain that we're having to negotiate in order to survive, in order to flourish? It's rotten, really, even in the best cases. And I don't like that and want to understand that, to figure out what has to be done for those scripts that continue to play out, to no longer register in our minds so that we can get out of this really kind of ritualistic charade that continues to breathe life into this racist history. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:25:14] I want us to transition now to the constructive dimension of your work, which charts out a proposal for a pastoral theology that takes seriously the suffering that young Black men are forced to endure as a consequence of racist oppression. For you, such oppression is a direct assault not only on the body but also on the soul. Your proposal, if I understand it correctly, is for a mode and method of pastoral care that incites a creative freedom, which might have the capacity to disrupt the markings that dehumanize young Black men, to disrupt the cycles. 

Gary Green [00:25:52] Yeah. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:25:53] Toward this end, you highlight the significance of play as one side of relational performance that can powerfully challenge and disrupt ritualized and routinized cycles of containment, crucifixion and commodification. I wonder if you could share more about this constructive dimension of your work and how it might relate practically to a pastoral practice that is engaged in the practice of freedom, disrupting the violence of white supremacy. 

Gary Green [00:26:23] This is probably one of those parts of the project that has evolved the most since I wrote my dissertation. And one that I've tried to understand the most in terms of, okay, so if this is the reality that continues to play out. How do we change it?  And one of the things that continues to come to my mind, and it's even I'm recalling even growing up and loving stand up comedy in the way that comedians could see through reality and point out things in front of us that we do that is absurd, and yet not in the context of a standup comedy bit. We do it and we are oftentimes very committed to doing it that way. And so it was just like, Well, then why? Why is it? Why can we suspend reality so much in a standup comedy setting or in a barbershop when I'm having conversations with brothers? Or whatever, wherever it might be. 

And for me, it just kept coming back to play space. How, you know, if I'm defining reality largely in this way, that understands it as a kind of a ritualized performance of meaning, of practice, habit, that is on a cultural level. That has become second nature to many of its participants who can carry it out but not be doing anything malicious or explicitly racist. Then the only way to interrupt that or to change that is first to disrupt it because it exists as this kind of flow right. And play or the world of fantasy. Right. If I'm talking about reality, then for me it was like, well, how do I conceive of fantasy as this world of possibilities outside of what we are already used to doing in relation right. Before Covid if you told me that we were all going to be wearing masks in a couple of months, that would have seemed like a fantasy. But all of a sudden, because of a virus and because of the need to protect ourselves and each other, wearing a mask became a second nature performance pretty quickly. And so just seeing the slippage in that, seeing how fickle and perpetually ready to be transformed realities are, then I started paying attention to how play spaces, spaces that are unencumbered by the politics of the realities we're trying to understand or trends or transform spaces that are largely kind of self-determined. 

When I think about the times when I am with a group of of my cousins or other, you know, Black buddies of mine and where it's just us and the healing that happens in that space, the disruptive ideas that happen in that space where we leave with ideas about how we can return to or relate to the realities from which we come and be disruptive in a creative kind of way to change the nature of this ongoing thing that we're living in relation to. This is just one approach to it because there are structural and political policy changes that have to happen. But there's a creative way in which this life that we carry, this life that we had, this vitality can be incited, it can be kind of energized. And it happens almost in this kind of magical way in play space. And so for me, when I had to go back to the question of care and what does that look like in a pastoral practice sense? For me, one of those things is for Black men to be able to create play spaces, Black women to be able to create play spaces. And of course, you could talk more about how you define that space, what should and should not happen in that. But there's the sheer possibilities of what can come out of that and the healing that is inherent to those kinds of spaces. 

That's one thing that no matter what happens on a societal level, we can cultivate. And understanding that even the attempt to cultivate that space is disruptive in and of itself, because so much of our recent history in this country has also been predicated on not allowing those kinds of spaces. Whether you go back to antebellum slavery, whether you go back to Jim wherever you go, the enclaves of Black creative genius that have been untouched have both healed and transformed and have been targeted. Because I think there's an inherent understanding of what can happen when you are in a communal space of being able to be creative, powerful and healthy. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:31:52] Well I think of music too, you know, the spirituals, the blues, right? Jazz, yeah. I mean, music as a site of play and imagination. Yeah. That can be very disruptive. 

Gary Green [00:32:03] Absolutely. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:32:04] And spaces of creativity, right? Where new worlds can be born, where new ideas can take shape, where a different kind of politics that's revolutionary politics can emerge precisely out of those spaces. 

Gary Green [00:32:16] Right, exactly. And I think, you know, I think understanding play more, especially in understanding how it relates to this work reality that we live in or reality as a whole will open up more of those possibilities because then we realize the value of it. And like you said, music, like jazz, I mean, this music born from struggle in those play spaces, born for this, the purpose of sustaining a community, but then also born for the purpose of disrupting a reality. You could probably do a study on, you know, the ideas that fueled movements and where those ideas were born. I would put my money on it in some way. This idea came out of this collective kind of play space, or at least was nurtured in a way that then it became real all of a sudden.   And then society had to adjust to it. 

Ry Siggelkow [00:33:19] Well, Gary, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Your work is incredibly creative and challenging, and I've really learned a lot from being in conversation with you. It's such a pleasure to think with you and to work alongside you here at United. And to listeners, I wanted to add that you can look forward to hearing more from Gary on this podcast in the weeks and months ahead as he will join us as one of our hosts for a number of episodes. 

Gary Green [00:33:45] Thank you, Ry. I appreciate it.

Ry Siggelkow [00:33:48] Gary, thank you. Take care.