Going Low by Finbarr Curtis

Author:Finbarr Curtis [Curtis, Finbarr]
Language: eng
Format: epub

AMERICA’S GOD

Divisive nationalism is one response to racial division, but it is not necessarily the preferred reaction of multinational corporations. Football fans have ambivalent feelings about the connection between athletics and money. The anger aroused by the protests is an extension of the familiar complaint that professional athletes have obscenely large salaries.34 Some fans feel that protesting athletes are ungrateful for the financial rewards of their profession.35 Ironically, the undiscriminating power of money might have helped to integrate professional sports in the first place. Robinson suggests that the financial power of African American ticket buyers played no small role in his playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers: “Money is America’s God, and business people can dig black power if it coincides with green power, so theses fans were important to the success of Mr. Rickey’s ‘Noble Experiment.’ ”36 The suggestion that green power tempered the nobility of integration plays on the sense that there is something profane about money.37

Trump’s assertion that the proper response to the protests is to fire the protesters raises the question of what role for-profit corporations play in enforcing national obedience. Trump’s speech was directed to a dereliction of duty on the part of NFL owners, who should have forced their players to obey. When he lamented that owners had failed to discipline Black players, he invoked a racialized threat to corporate and national authority. Far from sacred rites that exist outside of the logic of markets, NFL flag waving is a corporate spectacle. Corporate-funded nationalism calls for a consideration of what rituals do. Rituals are often imagined as a physical expression of belief, as an external performance of some interior conviction. Following this logic, standing during the Star-Spangled Banner would be a physical sign of support for America. But Trump did not call for a patriotic conversion of the interior lives of Black athletes. He did not care what athletes believe. In his lack of concern for the sincerity of displays of national loyalty, Trump welcomed the prospect of forced hypocrisy. Noting the irony of forcing people to be free, NFL player Michael Bennett stated: “That’s crazy to me: saying we’ll celebrate freedom by forcing people to stand.”38 Rather than an outward expression of interior conviction, the rites of corporate nationalism are supposed to produce patriotic citizens by compelling Americans to follow rules. The principles themselves are less important than deference to national unity.

Explaining the rituals of civil religion calls for a theory of how rituals mediate between interior belief and exterior performance. According to historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, rituals help to mediate the gap between the ideal and the real, but they do not exactly close it. While rituals can dramatize ideal visions of society, these visions are at odds with reality. In an essay on bear hunting rituals among indigenous people in Siberia, for example, Smith notes that hunters describe an idealized hunt that is nothing like the way bears are hunted in practice. Hunters claim that they follow detailed ritual prescriptions

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