Jocks and Athletes (and Pejorative Labelling)

I have this memory of a discussion in a writing class a couple or three decades ago where a student objected to the use another student's essay of the word "jock," which he considered pejorative (a low-key insult). I pointed out that when and where I was an undergraduate and graduate student, "jock" could be used neutrally, as in saying someone was a "ROTC jock" or "tennis jock" or "math jock": just meaning "(somewhat) dedicated to," "interested in" and/or "good at" the activity.

The student countered with noting that "dumb _____" is completed with "jock," not "athlete," and "the well-respected ______" was completed with "athlete," not "jock." If we wanted a neutral or complimentary term for someone serious about one or more sports, we should use "athlete."

I threw in that "jock" for me suggested an activity someone had talent in, and didn't have to work at, and usually didn't. So if we meant someone serious about a sport, and who worked at it, I'd definitely go with "athlete" — and the discussion continued a bit.

MORAL here for me and maybe thee, nowadays: Screw microaggressions; when we insult people, we should insult them consciously and with intent, avoiding as much as possible — as in a Good Society imagined by Joanna Russ — unintentionally giving offense. In that case, the student-athlete did us a favor in telling us to be careful with "jock." It was a subject I hope I brought up much later, in a beautifully oddball class with a number of jocks/athletes of various persuasions, about half of whom were women. oddball class with a number of jocks/athletes of various persuasions, about half of whom were women.

Colonel Blimp, the 1%. and the Continua of Contempt (23 Nov. 2013)

 "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave 76!" —

Mel Brooks, Two Thousand Year Old Man

            Here's a word and a concept you need to understand politics: "Wogs." More specifically, you need to understand the terms as pronounced by Colonel Blimp, sometime between, say 1897 and the early 1920s, when the British Empire was at its peak.

            Now Colonel Blimp — a stereotype I will use shamelessly — is a variety of British Upper Class Twit but in all surface ways the opposite. Whereas the Monty-Pythonesque twit is weak and withdrawing, when not kicking beggars, Colonel Blimp is grotesquely robust and healthy: Teddy Roosevelt with a "public school" British accent but without Teddy Roosevelt's actual education and intelligence or need to ever — not ever! — overcome disability. When Colonel Blimp's regiment were shitting themselves to death from cholera and wasting away from tropical diseases, the Colonel himself was in tip-top health and thoroughly enjoying a full-on English breakfast (lunch, high tea, dinner, supper, postprandial snack — then cheese with port) before going out to harangue his men for their laziness and lack of good British pluck.

            Got the picture? Now concentrate on the sound as Colonel Blimp heads out for a day of fox hunting and poacher thrashing and pronounces the sentence, "The wogs begin at Calais." That's "Calais," as in the French coastal city across from Dover, England, but pronounced to rime with "malice": like "callous."

            Colonel Blimp's point is that the inferior people's of the Earth begin when one leaves "this sceptered isle […] this England" (Richard II 2.1) and encounters the Others, in this case the French, and then the great land masses of the Old World and their human masses of increasingly wretched refuse of increasingly negligible peoples.

            Colonel Blimp sees himself as good, sound, Anglo-Saxon stock, though he might overlay that with the conviction that his people weren't Anglo-Saxon really but their Norman conquerors. In any event, he was of the English race — a term Winston Churchill could use as late as 1950 — and the English race is superior to the duskier peoples or the "lesser breeds without the law," to appropriate a phrase from Rudyard Kipling "Recessional," but removing any of the nuance or distrust of hubris you might find in Kipling; Colonel Blimp doesn't do nuance, or humility.

            However, as the Python people properly observed about upper-class twits more generally, Colonel Blimp's wogs begin long before Calais, for example a couple or three neighborhoods away in London, when the Colonel and Lady Blimp condescend to travel to London — or among the peasantry in the village on the Colonel's ancestral estate.

            Such common folk are White, almost always in classic Blimp (Victorian) times, and usually Protestant and Anglo-Saxon: WASPs in American terms. But really! The lower orders are, well, lower, as God made them. So, under most conditions, figurative wogs can begin down the hill, among the middle, working, and lower classes.

            Mel Brooks's 2000-Year-Old Man gave as the first national anthem, "Let em all go to hell / Except Cave 76!", and this is quite right as a summary of the essence of patriotism, loyalty to the nation. But the nation isn't always sufficiently threatened that one can see millions of strangers as fellow members of "Cave 76." Indeed, Cave 76 can be very small and not defined geographically. For Colonel Blimp, at various times and under various circumstances, Cave 76 could be the small power-elite sharing his class and accent and illusions of pure Anglo-Saxon or even purer Norman origins.

            Okay, sometimes "Cave 76" can be pretty arbitrary, as when, our paper-delivery boy explained to us, what the grownups saw as a race riot in his high school was more of "a bunch of thugs who wanted to fight," and "Instead of dividing up 'skins' and 'shirts,' they divided Blacks and Whites." That can be dangerous enough, but the result at the high school was only a brawl. When "Cave 76" starts getting sophisticated, those brawls can become feuds, then tribal armed conflict, and then large-scale, full-scale wars.

            When "Cave 76" goes into its Blimpish mode, there is the danger not only of conflict with fairly obvious Others, but an equally pernicious ignoring of the suffering of one's own neighbors.


            We in the US have never seriously competed with our British cousins in the production of upper-class twits, primarily, I think, because of our prejudices against inbreeding. But we are starting to develop our own varieties of Colonel Blimp, whose figurative caves are communities of the rich looking out upon a sea of inferiors, and wishing to hell all of us wogs, 99% and more.

Frat Boys, Jocks, and Deprecation (23 Oct. 2014 [19 March 2015])

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            Fraternities are/were very much in the news with my reposting this blog — I was one of the bloggers "orphaned" when OpenSalon closed in mid-March 2015 — but the immediate occasion for the original post wasn't immediate at all, but an old memory coming back from early in my teaching career, a memory that sent me down a thread of others.
            I have no idea what we were discussing, but it was probably a class in College Composition (I taught a lot of classes in College Composition), and a student said something about jocks, and I picked up the term — and was interrupted by a student who usually didn't say much with, "That's 'student athletes'. The word 'jock' is usually preceded by 'dumb', and I don't like people just assuming I'm stupid." Or something like that: it was a comment that was articulate, to the point, and heartfelt, by a guy who was quiet but definitely not dumb.
            Seizing a teaching moment when it came along — and responding to a legitimate rebuke — I said that when and where I came from, we could use "jock" neutrally and talk about "math jocks" and "chem jocks" as well as "sports jocks."
            The class said that, nah, their usage usually implied "dumb" with "jock," and we went on from there. I think I had the sense to keep that discussion brief and on-task and end with repeating the basic lesson. "Okay, unless you intend an insult, use 'athletes', and if you do intend the insult, be prepared to defend it, and maybe yourself."
            I got thinking of the "jock" comment again when teaching Michael Moffatt's excellent, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989). Coming of Age is a popular report by a professional anthropologist about campus life at Rutgers in the 1970s and 1980s (minus use of illegal drugs and details on illegal use by minors of legal ethyl alcohol: Moffatt refused to narc out his subjects — and people he lived with). Even in a book for a general audience, Moffatt tries to be professional and admits to failure —explicitly admits to it — in noting that he just couldn't keep up anthropological cultural relativity in dealing with Rutgers's fraternities and the inhabitants thereof: he classified many fraternity members among the "Neanderthals" in sexual attitudes (apologizing to the literal hominid species of Neanderthals) and anti-intellectual.
            Systematic headhunting in New Guinea, and occasional headhunting elsewhere: "Different strokes / For different folks"; fraternity culture in New Jersey: too close to home, too atavistic among academics, and something anthropologist Moffatt was prepared to judge and condemn.
            Moffatt has some data and some indirect personal experience, but this is not always the case for his negative attitude.
            I recall one instance, if only one, when, as an undergraduate fraternity member, I kind of anticipated my student-athlete student by telling someone, "We prefer 'fraternity men' to 'frat boys'," maybe or maybe not knowing at the time to add, "'Boy' is an insult." I later learned that some guys in the dorms — "residence halls" hadn't come in as the PC usage (nor the term "PC") — I later learned that some of the guys in the dorms had strong feelings about fraternities, and negative ones.
            This was interesting.
            At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the early 1960s, a young bachelor underclassman had four possibilities for housing: (1) living with his parents and commuting, (2) living in a University men's dorm — it was perhaps 1970 before a private, luxury dorm got built — (3) living in "independent men's housing," or (4) living in a fraternity. And that was living in a fraternity for underclassmen: from pledge semester until senior year or so (when an upperclassman could move into an apartment), one lived in, and mostly at, "the house."
            UIUC was definitely a residential campus at the time, with few commuters, so that meant basically dorms, independent houses, and Greek life (fraternity houses and sorority houses).
            The tripartite division, though, got a little blurred, as I had to explain to this nice guy, poor schmuck of a Sociology grad student who couldn't get a study to work.
            The investigator was doing some sort of work on consensus-building in small groups and was looking at how you get consensus among opponents, with two locally-available ones frat-rats and indies.
            So he brought in guys from fraternities and guys from independent men's housing — University-approved private houses for maybe five to fifteen guys — broke us into groups, and set us some issue to find consensus on.
            Which we did, quickly and easily, undercutting his hopes of getting data to get the fucking dissertation done already and get the hell out!
            (I was to go on to write a dissertation, and I'm pretty certain of how he felt.)
            Pitying the grad student, a couple of us stayed after the session and asked, "You thought 'Indies' and 'Greeks' are opposed, didn't you?" And he said "Yeah," and we said he misunderstood.
            First, guys who lived in fraternities and independent houses agreed on most things, starting with not wanting to live in the dorms. Second, neither group thought all that much about classifying people by where they lived, with the frat rats' — initially a pejorative, but one we'd adopted — with frat rats' lack of interest possibly stemming from a bit of snobbery.
            At that time and place, the disagreement among males would be between dormies and frat rats, with the guys in independent housing usually seeing themselves as the true Independents and above such trivial oppositions.
            And the disagreement got emotional tinge mostly from the dorm side.
            Among those of us who thought about it at all, most frat rats wanted the social life and relative community of a fraternity over the impersonality of the University's dorm complexes. Among those of us who'd been raised political, there was also the issue of not wanting the Big U as our landlord. Even back then, the Big U was big and a pretty total institution, supplying not only education (for those interested in such things) and credentialing, but police, fire department, health services, many of the streets and much of the lighting — and, optionally, public housing. Especially since living in a fraternity could be cheaper than living in a dorm (if you "worked a meal job"), fraternity life could be attractive to a nice liberal, at the time, from a big city and — certainly, with what they called at Cornell ca. 1965, "the White houses" — to political Neanderthals.
            ("White" in that context meant WASP: no Jews, just maybe a Catholic or two. Blacks weren't an issue, since — outside of the chapter of my fraternity, at Cornell at the time — the fraternities were at least de facto segregated: all White, plus the one to three Black fraternities.)
            Anyway, to those who cared about such things at the U of IL in the mid-1960s, the key category was "frat rat," and it was not a friendly act of categorizing.
            This attitude has continued, and I think it colors and "inflects" a fair portion of current debates about campus life, in which there is an unhealthy degree of semi-prurient interest to start with. For example, it's significant that a respectable anthropologist like Mike Moffatt had just about nothing in Coming of Age on religion or sports — two areas usually of interest to students of culture — but two chapters on sex. Less sensationally, in MAD Magazine years before even Moffatt's research, Ricky Nelson (renamed something like "Rickety") came home from school and lamented all the extra parties and mixers and other social events he had to attend. A neighbor asks his mother about Ricky's classes, to which his mother, replies, "Oh, Ricky doesn't go to classes; he goes to college." As the sweatshirt on John "Bluto" Blutarsky implies: COLLEGE has been what has interested most people, not, say, college classes and the frequent failure thereof to mean much to products of US education K-12.
            Fraternities offer community, relative democracy, and a good deal of freedom from what Mike Moffatt called "adult authority" — which I saw as mostly advantages at 18, and still see as such; but these aspects are problematic to those suspicious (with some good reasons) of fairly traditional communities, and of democratic decision-making among those who will often choose wrong.
            The current complaints against fraternities center on sexual assaults, and here, as in many places, I'd like to see (1) the numbers, (2) larger contexts, and (3) fairer and more effective law enforcement across the board, emphatically including better dealing with sexual assault, but with less concentration on — occasionally near-obsession with — sex and safety on campuses: as places go, university campuses, like most schools, are safe places.
            On numbers, I'll note that the instances of rape and/or child molestation that have touched my life involved as perpetrators two Black men and a father from a family fairly new to the US, from a non-WASP background. One of the Black men was a student athlete, and serial rapist, and his choice of crime sites tended to apartments, not fraternity houses. The other Black man raped before I met her a woman I came to love; as she told me the story, the rape — a "stranger rape" — resulted in pregnancy and her attempting suicide. I have no direct evidence of the pregnancy, but her left wrist was scarred vertically, so I infer a serious suicide attempt. With the father, I have only the daughter's version, but assume it to be true, as her husband did, on more evidence; I never pressed for details, but I assume the father had emigrated to the US, or was first generation American-born.
            That background is going to "inflect," minimally, my view of rapists, and is a reason why I need the reality check of looking at the numbers. "A 'for instance' is no proof," as the saying goes, and N = 3 proves nothing. I need the numbers, and so — obviously — does everyone else who grew up in cultures and societies with deep currents of racism and xenophobia.
            And if we need the numbers and larger contexts for Black felons and football players and non-Nordic child abusers, we need the numbers and serious sociological discussion for incandescent White lacrosse players, and jocks and frat rats of all hues and levels of privilege.
            I can use the term "jock" as neutrally as I use "frat rat"; but I try to remember my student's objection and not use the term to reinforce a stereotype of "dumb jocks" as a kind of formula — even if we have the concept, as I do, and can contrast it with "serious student athlete."
            Some jocks are dumb, and there are colleges and universities where "student athlete" is a coincidence or a joke: where the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics brings in semi-pro jocks, for whom academic pursuits may be career-endangering distractions. And some jocks and frat rats are rats (with apologies to the admirably resilient rodent): macho assholes (with apologies to the anus).
            Athletics can be good for people, especially athletics that bring together fathers and daughters and those that give big quiet guys a place to assert themselves — especially those organized by participating athletes and not run top-down like a corporation or military unit. And fraternities can be good places to live, and certainly good given most of the alternatives.
            People can argue otherwise, and there are strong arguments to be made: but those should be fact-based arguments, not casual dismissals with "jock" or "frat boy." They should be rational arguments with sound comparative statistics and a sense of proportion: anthropologists who can be open-minded about headhunters can show a little more tolerance for frat rats and at least consider the possibility that intramural athletics may not be as big a part of life in a dorm as sex, but are there.

"Macho A**holes," "Wogs," and Other Terms of unEndearment

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PATROCLUS.

No more words, Thersites; peace!

THERSITES.

I will hold my peace when Achilles' brach bids me, shall I?

— Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 2.11

            When Right-wing folk complain about "language police" and "political correctness," they're frequently complaining about what my mother would have called decency in language, and simple manners, and I think she would have been pleased to learn that we've reached a point in America where it's pretty much taboo for White folk, in public, to use the word "n*gger." Personally, I'd prefer if we went for a couple generations with "n*gger" taboo outright, maybe especially among young Black males — and I'll throw in for taboo also casual use of the word "bitch." If one wants to refer to a female dog, let's go back to the old word "brach," which can also be used for the "bottom" in an unequal male/male relationship: in Shakespeare's bitter satire, Troilus and Cressia, the on-stage satirist, Thersites, reduces the epic, love of the Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus to just another form of lechery and dismisses Patroclus as "Achilles' brach," later repeated as "Achilles' male varlet," and, since Patroclus doesn't know this meaning of "varlet" gets made totally explicit as "his masculine whore" (5.1).
            If people want to call other people whores of the male or female variety, let's insist that they do so outright. "Ho'" seems to be dropping out of fashion, and we could at least have a moratorium on "bitch" and "bitches," and nothing would be lost. There's nothing you can say with "bitch" that you can't say with "brach," and there's no way nowadays you can just throw "brach" around as a cliché buzz-word, sounding relatively cool just filling out a sentence.
            ("Varlet" I'll give you as a freebie, although in the sense of "bitch" it never really caught on.)
            A complete taboo on "n*gger," though, comes with a price, and going over part of that price is the transition between this introduction and topic indicated in my title.
            Consider the story told by Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time, a University of Chicago graduate student doing a sociological study in one of "projects" on Chicago's South Side. Venkatesh asks the gang leader J.T., "How does it feel to be black and poor?"
 “I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly. “Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him. “I’m not African-American either. I’m a nigger…. Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work."
I've heard, anyway — this one I couldn't track down on the web, but there are some fascinating articles of a more earnest sort — I've heard or read somewhere that some of J.T.'s contemporaries can do extended shtick on all the variations of terms for …, I put it their people and the realities these words point to. Loss of "n*gger" may, for a while, make it harder to speak and hear street-level analysis of race issues in America.
            On balance, though, a taboo on "n*gger" is a good idea: for a while, at least if we can move toward the "Utopia" that Arthur C. Clarke presents in his 1953 novel — soon to be a Major SyFy Miniseries! — Childhood's End (ch. 8). In "The Golden Age" given to us before the end of our species, we meet a character of ultimately sub-Saharan African descent and are told that "A century before," in our time, "his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps an overwhelming, handicap." In the future-present of this novel, "it meant nothing. The inevitable reaction that had given early twenty-first-century Negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away." Indeed, race relations were so ideal that "The convenient word 'nigger' was no longer taboo in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone. It had no more emotional content than such labels as Republican or Methodist, conservative or liberal" — although Clarke didn't live to hear "liberal" pronounced by the more immoderate sorts on Fox News.
            There are two other terms of abuse, though, related ones I'd like see come back, a return useful for naming some unpleasant and dangerous realities.
            The first is "macho asshole," which I was surprised to learn was a term and concept pretty much unknown to my students in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. For my students — at least for those who spoke up — "macho" was a positive term, and linking it with "asshole" surprised them, even allowing for any surprise from a professor's saying "asshole" in class. (I noted in my policy statements and made clear in my speech that the one absolute taboo I observe is not pronouncing the name of God [YHWH]; beyond that my rule was decorum in the technical sense — appropriateness to context — so those who attended class regularly wouldn't be shocked to hear me say "asshole," followed by my standard apology to the anus [an innocent orifice and an important one in evolution].)
            Macho assholes are arrogant bullies, and recent attempts to rein in school bullies are right-minded and long overdue but, as practiced, often a variety of kid-bashing: such small-scale macho-assholitry is presented as a problem of boys and some mean girls, distracting from bigger and more general problems across the culture.
            For eight years, George W. Bush swaggered his way across the world scene, and he and his merry band bragged that "the gloves are off" and showed their manliness with shooting friends in the face (accidentally, Mr. Cheney claimed), kidnapping people, torturing people, and invading weak countries.
            Since the backlash against the 1960s — starting in the 1960s — popular culture in the US has habitually celebrated cowboy cops and "rebels" with badges and guns, who "Serve and Protect" far less than cutting Constitutional corners, "kicking ass, / And taking out the trash."
            Some of my students, who'd grown up on video games, had problems recognizing the rather blatant point that the James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd Terminator movies (1984, 1991), were centered on a literal deconstruction of the ultimate macho asshole: a/the Terminator.
            Pop Quiz.: What actor plays the male protagonist in The Terminator?
            Answer: It's Michael Biehn, who plays Kyle Reese, a normal human male who feels pain and is brave and helps save humanity. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the villain: The Terminator, who is the ultimate macho man, impervious to pain, a stone-cold killer, and, it turns out — for the ethical point of the movie — not a man at all but a machine.
            And, of course, the final hero in the Terminator is "the final 'girl,'" Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor.
            Villains are often more memorable than protagonists, and for a nasty set of pop quiz questions on Shakespeare's plays, a teacher can always ask for the names of the technical (male) heroes or protagonists of, say The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and/or Richard III.
            (If you missed that one, the answers are the bland non-entity Portia romantically wants to marry in Merchant — named Bassanio; Macduff, the Thane of Fife in Macbeth; and Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond and a minor character in Richard III.)
            Still, Cameron and Hurd are explicit in their Terminator films, and it says something that my students, and a whole bunch of other people, deep down inside identified more with the obsessive killing machine than with more humane and human humans.
            And so on for Rambo, Dirty Harry, and the whole set of fictional and real-world bad boys in media from film to games to rap.
            The older macho sorts were bad enough as role models, but they at least tended to be the Terminator sort: the strong, silent type. As American popular culture juvenilized and the male ideal got younger, the understated truly dangerous man got pushed off to the side by the motor-mouth, trash-talking street punk: the loud and pugnacious macho asshole.
            Given current ideas of manliness by, especially, cops and street kids, it should come as no surprise that encounters between the two can get deadly.
            And the frequent violence becomes even more understandable if we take seriously expressions like "taking out the trash" — which brings me to "wogs."
            As the Wikipedia entry saith, "wog" is "a racially offensive slang word referring to a dark-skinned or olive-skinned person from Africa or Asia," but, as the article goes on immediately to note, there is the expression from at least the time of World War I, the "The wogs begin at Calais." This sentence is properly enunciated with a Colonel Blimp, pukka sahib, Rule-Britannia accent, with "Calais" carefully mispronounced to rime with "malice" and one's nose at a steep angle, smelling excrement. Significantly, in Australia, "wog" can (still) be used pejorative or affectionately for "Mediterranean and Middle Eastern immigrants."
            I want to stick to pejorative-abuse and put to use the obvious imprecision of "wog."
            Wogs are the "trash" of the world: all us "wretched refuse" as seen, not compassionately, but disapprovingly by macho assholes and their wimpier, less demonstrative allies. For Colonel Blimp and, with variations, his American cousins, having the wogs begin at Calais was progress, or that stereotypical, reactionary snob was in a particularly generous mood: more often the wogs began in lower-middle-class neighborhoods and could definitely include the uppity working poor, to say nothing of people who "can't find no work" and are "the undeserving poor."
            In America as in England for much of its history, the wogs can be our fellow citizens, living a couple neighborhoods away. They can be wogs in our view because that view is endemic to our family and neighborhood and/or because some powerful group or other has engaged in a "wogification" program, villainizing the other people and making them emphatically, capital "O," Other.
            When macho assholes have to deal with people they see as wogs, there is going to be trouble. When macho assholes deal with people, especially male people, who have had to practice at least some macho assholitry to survive on the streets — there will be blood.
            Arguably worse, when even generally decent people learn about the deaths of distant strangers they/we ever-so-unconsciously see as wogs, the results will be mild sympathy but little practical help.
            And so we get a big portion of the horrendous US statistics on homicide, including police deaths in both senses: death of police and death and injury by police; and so we get in December of 2014 the murder of over 100 children in Pakistan, and even concern over that not lasting two US news cycles.
            We've got the phenomena; we've got the problem; let's bring back the words.