The Past is Never Past: Notes on My New Self

In the words of fellow Southerner Richard Wright (1945/1998), ‘this was the culture from which I sprang.’ Under these socio-economic conditions, I fell into a habitus of contingencies (Bourdieu, 1998): working class in the context of neoliberalism, Southern whiteness in tenuous times of multiculturalism (and its myriad distortions), and heteronormative masculinity at the anti-gay, anti-choice Biblical crossroads. But having been on both sides of oppression (as both oppressed and oppressor), both structuralists and individualists alike might have predicted my turn toward a life of a cultural and economic polemicist. Perhaps an exorcism of that habitus, or more likely an exercise in scholarly re-imagineering of my own South, such an existence bore a value-laden sociology of Southern body cultures; one reflective of an eradication of the ‘self’ in search of a more humane pedagogical modality.

Tales of the Sporting ‘Native’

In my own research, I have tried to craft a politically-committed, contextually-radical critique of contemporary physical cultures of the American South—and particularly those cultures of exploitation, inequality, and oppression that haunt the South in which my old self was formulated—while articulating the practices of the local to the broader formations of oppression acting upon the everyday experience. I have sought to make use of my white, Southern, hetero-masculine body to illuminate and thus complicate the oppressive cultural physicalities of what I have to refer to as the ‘New Sporting South.’ At once an exercise in mimesis and a resurrection of my former self, my various research encounters over the past few years have in some ways constituted a rediscovery of my own whiteness, my own Southern-ness, and my own masculinity. Through ethnographic engagement with the Southern sporting fields in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina, I have both employed, and been made aware of, a habitus-based performative politics.

As such, this type of engaged qualitative research has revealed an [auto]ethnographic dialectic; whereby a politically-driven intellectual project—bent on contextualizing, and thus problematizing, the seemingly banal nature of Southern sporting fixtures such as college football and stock car racing—both constitutes, and is constitutive of, my ‘ethnographic self’ (Coffey, 1999). In other words, as I further immersed my ‘self’ in the sport and body cultures of the American South—namely those of Southern sporting stalwarts Ole Miss (the intercollegiate athletics teams of the University of Mississippi) and of NASCAR—the more I came to realize how 1) the ‘auto’ in any auto-ethnographic rendering of the qualitative world illuminates and is illuminated by the empirical encounter; 2) the empirical encounter is itself produced by, and its actors are subjected to, individual and collective structural and discursive histories; and 3) the qualitative boundaries of ‘the field’ are set and reset based on those histories. In short, and following Spry (2001), performing my ethnographic self has meant producing meaning through the body, whereby the body “is like a cultural billboard for people to read and interpret in the context of their own experience” (p. 719); further, it meant blurring, or perhaps imploding, the traditional anthropological binaries of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider,’ as well as what it means to ‘go native.’

Consider: My first longitudinal qualitative research project took place at the University of Mississippi (commonly referred to as ‘Ole Miss’). Long considered the ‘country club of the South’ and the ‘most racist institution of higher learning in America,’ I went to Ole Miss to graft a better understanding of how physical and sporting cultures were used to promote a pedagogy of the South and Southern-ness; one that reproduced in modern times the race-, class-, and gender-based hierarchies of the plantation-slavery ‘Old South’ and Jim Crow ‘New South.’ In studying the politics and performances of privilege and the architectures of whiteness at Ole Miss, I frequently interviewed white students who refused to enter into black sorority houses on campus, often referring to them as the ‘slave quarters.’ At Ole Miss, such a meta-territorialism acts in meaningful ways, beyond built environment as artistic transponder of taste, toward a restrictive regime of hyper-normativity which regulates the social actions of the participants with the spectacularized space. I have written elsewhere about the prejudicial candor with which these and other slurs were bandied about the spaces of language on the campus; wherein words such as ‘nigger,’ ‘monkey,’ ‘towel head,’ ‘spick’ and so on flowed freely from the lips of many student-subjects I encountered (Newman, 2007b, 2007c).

As another example, from fieldnotes taken within my first few minutes on site in the early morning hours prior to a 2004 University of Memphis/Ole Miss football game[i]:

The tailgating party to the immediate south of where I was located had begun to fraternize with a group I had joined, telling stories and offering predictions on the upcoming game. On his way back from the “pisser,” one of the neighboring tailgaters, a middle-aged white man, stopped by our area to speak with us. He said, in a soft, almost timid voice: “Ya’ll mind if I tell ya’ll a nigger joke?” While I wanted to answer in negative, I held my tongue and the all-white members of my group agreed that they did indeed want to hear the joke. So the man proceeded: “There was this nigger who had bought himself a hang glider. He had ordered it customized from the manufacturer in the color black, and so he had to wait a few days for it to get to him. He kept waiting . . .waiting . . . finally, on the day it arrived he was so excited to use it that he took it straight out of the box and climbed up a nearby hill. In the valley there was a man and his son hunting for deer. The nigger took off and he was flying high in the sky, when the son said ‘daddy, what’s that?’ The father said, ‘I don’t know son, it looks like a giant bat. Shoot it!’ So the son took out his rifle and fired a shot. The son asked, ‘did I get him daddy?’ The daddy said ‘Well, I’m not sure if you got the bat, but you made it let loose of that nigger it was carrying.” And so my day began. (Fieldnotes, September 4, 2004)

These is but two examples of a number of overt racist offerings I noted during my time at Ole Miss. More disconcerting than the content of the bigoted yarn is the hegemonic normalization of [out]spoken racism inscribed in the geometric and anthropological space, one which is allowed to permeate all vectors within the University of Mississippi campus. In this interplay of discourse, bodies, and space, whiteness becomes productive as both the framework of dominant identity politics and the historicized norms by which social power is created and transferred (Frankenberg, 1997; Giroux, 1997; Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault, 1998; Roediger, 1994). And while these are but two of the more problematic of my multivocal ethnographic encounters within that particular cultural ‘field,’ the politics of inquiry beg questions such as: if I were not identified within the boundaries of a white, Southern, masculine normativity (i.e. an ‘insider’), how would these and other interactions have been different?

Consider further my fieldwork in the spectator spaces of the imagined community that has come to be known as ‘NASCAR Nation.’ Just as with Ole Miss, I was drawn to the sport cultures of NASCAR in particular by a political need to better understand the conjunctural politics of Southern sport, what has come to be referred to as ‘neo-Confederate’ identity (Horwitz, 1999), and spatial practice. Over the two-year project, and at racetracks around the USA, I encountered a proliferation of what Roland Barthes (1967) might refer to as ‘logotechniques’ of a conspicuous reclamation of the power imbedded in hyper-white, neo-Confederate identity politics. As a researcher-flaneur wandering about the spaces surrounding NASCAR tracks (in the spirit of a Situationist derivé),[ii] I encountered temporal domestic and corporeal spaces emblazoned with a vast array of white reclamation narratives; namely in the form of bumper stickers, t-shirt script, banners, and other artifacts of visual culture, which read:

“Stop Southern cultural cleansing”: “It’s not racial, it’s regional” (accompanied by an outline of the states of the Confederacy); “I’m offended that you’re offended” (set against a Confederate flag backdrop); “Politically-correct is another way of sayin’ anti-Southern”; “Heritage not hate”; “My ancestors fought the first terrorists” (suggestive of the ‘War of Northern Aggression’): “Pride not prejudice”: “We may be politically incorrect, but we vote too”; “You’ve got your ‘X,’ We’ve got ours” (alluding to Malcolm X versus the Confederate flag); and “Hey y’all, remember, racin’ is a Southern sport.” (Fieldnotes).

These signifying acts, each of which was conjoined in illustrative form to some element of the recuperative Confederate symbolic, comprised the saturated signification of race within NASCAR Nation, producing a composite discursive formation of white reign: white bodies in almost exclusively white spaces are under attack and are calling upon the socio-political magazine of post-9/11 anti-immigrant bigotry, post-Civil Rights Affirmative Action backlash, and post Civil War neuvo Jim Crowism in the fight to maintain their entitlement (Newman & Giardina, 2008).

In these spaces, fans share a “sense of belonging to an imagined community” (Coombe, 1998, p. 33); and as a researcher [re-]entering these cultural spaces and the cultural politics therein, I was able to mobilize my white phenotypicality and Southern vernacularity to again traverse the typical research boundaries of ‘they’ and ‘us.’ While I never donned Confederate signifiers or even those corporatist-sport-symbols of NASCAR allegiance (e.g., a Budweiser cap, DuPont t-shirt, or Home Depot racing jacket), by exercising seemingly natural tendencies—‘being myself’ and ‘dressing the way I dress,’ if you will—I most likely was ‘read’ as one of the crowd: a ‘Southern good ole boy,’ if you will (Newman, 2007a). And as such, I was an articulated flaneur—or what Joe Kincheloe (2001) might more rightly refer to as a bricoleur with guarantees—who gravitated toward, and was symbiotically pulled into, the symbolic and practiced realms of Southern sporting exclusivity.

As such a bricoleur, and following Kincheloe and McLaren (2005), I labored to “expose the various structures that covertly shape our own and other scholars’ research narratives,” while along the way crafting a bricolage that “highlights the relationship between a researcher’s ways of seeing the social location” of my own personal history (p. 316). In so doing, I sometimes drifted toward the most exclusively white, working-class, patriarchal spectator practices, and in many cases I was invited into these cultural circles as what fans perceived to be a researcher-champion of the [Southern, white, neo-Confederate] ‘cause.’

And yet, as Lefebvre (1991) postulates: “Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history” (p. 110). Likewise, practitioners within social space similarly activate, and thus make real, the modalities of lived experience. For example, while shopping for the ‘hottest merchandise’ in one of the NASCAR-sanctioned retail spaces outside the Darlington track in 2007, I encountered the ‘Top Ten’ apparel vendor. After a few minutes of perusing the NASCAR-themed wares on offer by the purveyor, many of which evoked race- or gender-based imagery or wording, I came across one t-shirt in particular that captured the white supremacist tone of the merchandising line. The shirt read:

“TOP TEN REASONS There’s no Black Race Car Drivers”

10. Have to sit UPRIGHT while driving.

9. PISTOL won’t stay under Front Seat.

8. Engine drowns out the RAP MUSIC.

7. Pit crew can’t work on car while HOLDING PANTS up at the same time.

6. They keep trying to CARJACK Dale Jr.

5. POLICE CARS on track interfere with race.

4. No passenger seat for the HO.

3. There are no sponsors for CADILLAC.

2. Can’t wear HELMET SIDEWAYS.

            . . . and the #1 Reason why BLACKS can’t be Race Car Drivers:

1.    When they crash their car they can’t BAIL OUT and RUN

When I asked the fair-haired vendor if he had been successful in selling the t-shirt, he responded: “yep, it’s my best-seller” (Fieldnotes). So in the spirit of ethnographic ‘artifact collection,’ I bought a t-shirt to add to my growing collection of stock car kitsch that I was amassing through my NASCAR racing adventures. In that singular act, and while never donning the racist garb, I became both a cultural and economic endorser of the cultural racism at work within that sporting space. Over the two years, I came to realize that symbolic wares of this nature are commonplace, almost normalized, markers of identity within most events in NASCAR Nation (and particularly those in Darlington, SC and Talladega, AL). More consequentially, as I collected these artifacts, I contributed to normative racist formations which shape social relations therein.