Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

History and Power: On Pride

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Download book PDF
Download book EPUB
Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing

  • 3854 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter takes up Sunu Gonera’s Pride (2007), a biopic about the life of Jim Ellis, a competitive swim coach who eventually produced the first black swimmers for the US Olympic Team. It discusses the film’s favorable portrayal of Ellis within the history of racially segregated swimming, and the exploitation of African swimming skills under slavery, in order to comprehend the construction of the stereotype that “blacks can’t swim.” Although Ellis challenges government bureaucracy for the opportunity to help his team, his bid for patriarchal protection requires him to call directly upon the state’s police powers. Ellis, not unlike his own white male coach before him, counsels young black men to stand up to racist assault by refusing to fight back in their own defense.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Koppel, not missing a beat, retorted: “I think it may just be that they don’t have access to all the country clubs and the pools” (Johnson 2007).

  2. 2.

    He writes: “From the age of discovery up through the nineteenth century, the swimming and underwater diving abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants” (Dawson 2006, 1327). Or again: “Over more than three centuries, western travelers to West Africa reported that Africans were sound swimmers; several noted that they generally swam better than Europeans and described their use of the freestyle” (Dawson 2006, 1331).

  3. 3.

    Regarding the latter role, Dawson writes: “Most westerners, however, probably did not believe that aquatic clashes demonstrated slaves’ bravery. True, whites seemed impressed. But many presumably perceived slaves’ ability to swim with ease while overpowering dreaded creatures as proof that they were animal-like savages. […] In short, people of African descent were typically viewed not as brave, but as ferocious” (Dawson 2006, 1343–1344). Condescension notwithstanding, the specialized skills honed by enslaved swimmers and divers afforded them a circumscribed leverage: “Though the work was grueling, enslaved swimmers and divers welcomed the escape from the monotonous, backbreaking labor their enslaved brothers and sisters performed in the agricultural fields of the Americas. But slavery, no matter the occupation, was always hard work, and the privileges divers enjoyed were restricted by the fetters of bondage. Being a slave, even an enslaved diver, meant subjugation, harsh treatment, and never-ending toil. Still, enslaved swimmers and divers used skills of African origin to make slavery more bearable, sometimes winning existences of privileged exploitation” (Dawson 2006, 1354).

  4. 4.

    “As Africans were taken to the New World, many of them carried swimming and underwater diving skills with them. From the early sixteenth century on, slaveholders realized that slaves’ swimming and diving abilities could be profitably exploited. […] Thus swimming may have come to the New World as the corollary of skills slaveholders desired” (Dawson 2006, 1339).

  5. 5.

    Snead described racism as “a normative recipe for domination created by speakers using rhetorical tactics” (Snead 1986, x).

  6. 6.

    Wiltse’s book won the 2007 Author’s Award from the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Ellis, for his life’s work as coach and mentor to hundreds of Philadelphia-area swimmers, won the 2007 Presidential Honor Award, also from the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

  7. 7.

    Since the initial allegations levied in a suit filed by several campers’ parents and the US Department of Justice, and an investigation by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission which found probable cause and issued a $50,000 fine for slurs against one child, The Valley Club filed bankruptcy and the property was sold at auction for roughly $1.5 m to the Philadelphia-based Congregation Beth Solomon Synagogue and Community Center (Nunnally 2010). Proceeds from the sale were distributed to creditors, to several local community organizations and to plaintiffs as damages (Roebuck 2012). The 2009 events at the Valley Club represent one of several recent high-profile incidents of antiblack racism at swimming facilities, including the 2011 Ohio Civil Rights Commission ruling against Jamie Hein, a white Cincinnati landlord who posted a “whites only” sign on the gate of an apartment complex swimming pool (Mandell 2012), and the 2015 police assault of 15-year-old Dajerria Becton in McKinney, Texas, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb (Elizalde 2017).

  8. 8.

    “For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle—to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream” (Bai 2008).

  9. 9.

    Noted Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron wrote about the matter: “It is worth remembering why the summer camp, Creative Steps, Inc., contracted with the Huntington Valley Swim Club in the first place. The answer, of course, is that Philadelphia was only able to open a token number of its public pools this summer because of the nation’s devastating financial crisis, which has hit cities especially hard. The reduction in pool operations is just one more example of how America’s fifth biggest metropolis is unable to provide its citizens with the sort of quality-of-life amenities that suburban dwellers take for granted. Not that anyone would have ever confused Philadelphia’s no-frill public pools with those lush suburban oases like Huntington Valley, where the Olympic-size basins are surrounded by lawns and shade trees” (Saffron 2009).

  10. 10.

    Membership at PDR had been in decline for some time prior to disbanding, from a peak of 175 in the early 1990s to roughly 30 in 2007. Ellis reported in a 2008 article for the London Times: “The movie came out and still no one has come forward to offer us better facilities. Why, in this day and age, should we continue to work in these poor facilities? I guess somewhere the colour issue is still there” (Slot 2008). Ellis also mentions in a 2007 article for Ebony magazine that he had been passed over for coaching positions at the University of Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania, despite having sent scholarship swimmers to their respective programs (John-Hall 2007). More generally, it seems in retrospect that the most extensive and critical coverage of Jim Ellis and PDR Swimming is Phillip Hoose’s 1990 New York Times Magazine article, “A New Pool of Talent.” There was another round of short pieces about Ellis’s life and legacy in outlets like the local Philadelphia Inquirer around the domestic release of Pride (Klein 2007), but none had the depth, complexity, and sensitivity of the earlier feature story.

  11. 11.

    As part of the lead-up to the domestic release of Pride in March 2007, AOL’s Black Voices ran a tribute to “blacks in non-traditional sports.” Among the featured athletes were Correia, bobsledder Vonetta Flowers, and speed skater Shani Davis, all recent Olympic medalists. But the inclusion in this list of tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams and golf legend Tiger Woods serves to blur the line between traditional and non-traditional sports, revealing how it is that, at one time or another and to greater or lesser degree, it was—and is—considered “non-traditional” for blacks to pursue and participate in every sport (Douglass 2007).

  12. 12.

    The Make a Splash Initiative is easily the most extensive and capitalized effort of this sort, involving the national governing body for competitive swimming in the USA and a major multinational corporation regularly ranked in the Top 10 of the Fortune 500. Assuming that there are five million black children that do not swim (a conservative estimate), that this number will not increase in the future (which it likely will), and that at least half of the 100,000 children that Make a Splash claims to service each year went on to swimming proficiency (rather than taking a one-time lesson), it would still take more than a century for this national program to resolve the problem.

  13. 13.

    Michael Norment, a college superstar and one of the top breaststrokers in the world throughout the 1990s, is also the son of Temple University Professor of African American Studies Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (Whitten 1998). Along with Sabir Muhammad and Byron Davis, Norment was one of the “great black hopes” to break the Olympic color line in that decade.

  14. 14.

    Cheyney University is the oldest historically black college or university in the country. It was established in 1837 by the bequest of Richard Humphries, a Quaker philanthropist, who was prompted by an 1829 antiblack race riot in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia—one of more than a half dozen to occur there between 1820 and 1850—to create the African Institute, or Institute for Colored Youth, “to instruct the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic Arts, trades and Agriculture in order to prepare and fit and qualify them as instructors.” That is, vocational training as response to racist violence, discipline as antidote to punishment (Coppin 1913).

  15. 15.

    In addition to his well-known racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-communist positions, recently declassified documents suggest that Helms may also have been a contact for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offering the services of his station to the law enforcement agency in its counter-intelligence operations against the civil rights movement (Kane and Christensen 2010).

  16. 16.

    More properly phrased, Coach Logan might exclaim “Don’t YOU fight ‘em, Jimmy!” or “Don’t you FIGHT ‘em, Jimmy!” since the problem contained in the sentence is neither the verb (fight) nor the subject (Jimmy) in isolation but the particular combination of the two. Fighting against segregation is acceptable if it is initiated and led by a white man, on the black man’s behalf, and the black man is acceptable as long as he “works so hard to get here” and does not fight to get into the pool. This point dovetails nicely with the sage advice of that other paternalistic white man, Bink, the racist school principle and head coach of Main Line Academy Swim Team: “If you want respect in this game, then you’re gonna have to earn it! I know they taught you that at Cheyney State.” Coach Jim, now a college graduate and in charge of the PDR Swim Team counters this imperative with recourse to the reciprocal aspect of the social bond: “If you want respect, you give it.” Bink is adamant: “You earn it.” This is the final word and lesson. The triumph of the film hinges on Jim’s ability to earn the respect of this other and better white father, and he is to do so by instilling in his charges the proper desire for work. The desire for work, “the productive labor of modern subjects,” is the sine qua non of morality. In this scenario, confronting a derogation that associates blackness with amorality, “it is presupposed that authentic being derives from morality. That is, the nigger [‘a commodity-thing’] becomes the negro [‘a human identity’] through moral behavior, or good works, founded on morality as a governmental habit of thought (police as internalized control)” (Judy 1994, 230). More on this point below.

  17. 17.

    The whitewashing of Jim Ellis’s educational past, the insertion of white allies and mentors in the place where there were likely black companions and comrades is consistent with a key aspect of Gonera’s directorial vision: “‘In Africa, racism was legal for many years, so I grew up with it,’ Gonera says. ‘I married a white woman and I had to deal with racism on a very personal level—people throwing bricks through your house, things like that. So when I read the script, that element didn’t surprise me. But I was determined to be authentic and to show different sides of people. I didn’t want it to be that any white person is racist, because that’s not true’” (Archer 2007). It might seem curious that anxiety about the depiction of white personality as homogenous would arise in a film centered on the efforts of black community to dispute its status as stereotype through its internal differentiation. However, the attempt to “set the world straight,” as the tagline reads for Josh Waletzky’s 2009 documentary Parting the Waters, and the redemption-through-differentiation of whites should be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

  18. 18.

    As notable is Ellis’ coaching achievement, his success as a middle-school mathematics teacher is barely understood. We know that a good number of those who have participated in PDR Swimming have gone on to undergraduate training, but we can gain no real sense of the impact that Ellis has had for the academic and intellectual development of his students in the classroom. How mathematics might also be approached as a form of community activism is exemplified well by the Algebra Project, founded in 1982 by former civil rights leader Dr. Robert P. ‘Bob’ Moses (Moses and Cobb 2001).

  19. 19.

    Among the various attempts to speak to this dynamic in recent black Hollywood filmmaking, David Marriott’s (2000) reading of John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Wahneema Lubiano’s (1997) reading of Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) remain among the best published thus far. A locus classicus of critique on the myth of the black matriarch is Davis (1981). See also Spillers (2003).

  20. 20.

    This conflation is evident, for instance, in the scene of PDR’s first meet at the Main Line Academy. When they enter the pool, one hears a background comment from a man in the all-white audience: ‘Must be some kind of a protest march.’ On the blocks before the final event, the 50 yard freestyle, Jake, Main Line’s star swimmer, looks over at Andre, his counterpart, and says: ‘Just be glad they took off the cuffs so you can swim, brother.’ The two comments are understood to be seamless with the general atmosphere of hostility.

  21. 21.

    See Judy (1994) for a discussion of attempts in black cultural studies to distinguish between these two figures in the wake of gangster rap. Judy spends considerable time examining the work of musicologist Jon Michael Spencer (now called Yahya Jongintaba), whose “argument for the heterogeneity of the badman and bad nigger is [meant] to establish rap’s authenticity as an African American form by rescuing it from the ‘genocidal’ tendencies of the bad nigger” (Judy 1994, 220). For Spencer, the badman betrays a “strong sense of social propriety, [an] understanding that strict obedience to social codes is essential for collective survival. The badman is the self-consciously representative black, he is an instantiation of morality above the law” (220). He may, according to folklorist John Roberts, challenge “the unjustness of the law of the state,” but he does so “while preserving the moral law of the community” (221). The bad nigger, by contrast, “doesn’t obey the law and take moral responsibility for his actions” (227). Though a full discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this chapter, it can be said at least that the disassociation of the badman and the bad nigger is, for Judy, a decidedly postbellum project, having to do with the changed function of law in the assault on Radical Reconstruction and the formation of Jim Crow. He glosses Roberts’ claim as follows: In the postbellum period, “maintaining internal harmony and solidarity within one’s own community was a form of protection against the law of the state. In this understanding, the black community becomes the police in order to not give the police any reason or cause to violate it” (221). Saidiya Hartman (1997) has called this “the burdened individuality of freedom,” a juridical vehicle for maintaining the “tragic continuities in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness” (7). Judy is interested to understand how black collectivities manage circumstances in which, to bend the popular saying, the more things change, the worse they seem to get. What he finds is a measure of downward continuity from the jackboot of the state-authorized armed regulatory force to the striking fist and pointing finger of the teacher or coach in state employ. This is what Judy suggests in his identification of community with the police, that is, “police in the broader sense of governmentality” (Judy 1994, 226).

  22. 22.

    For more on Foster’s life and work, see McCorry (1978).

  23. 23.

    The popular literature on the topic is too vast to cite, but see for example: Hearst and Moscow (1988), McLellan and Avery (1977), and Weed and Swanton (1976). For critical scholarly accounts, see Graebner (2008), Castiglia (1996), and Browder (2000). For award-winning fictional renderings of the affair, see Choi (2003) and Sorrentino (2006).

  24. 24.

    Ellis was forced to conclude his work at PDR as a result of the loss of public funding and he has since 2010 served as the coach of the Salvation Army Kroc Aquatics (SAKA) swim team, quickly building it into the premier competitive swim program in Greater Philadelphia (Ebony 2017).

  25. 25.

    For extensive discussion of the grossly unequal post-Katrina social, political, and economic fortunes of the Gulf Coast region, and especially its poor and working-class black residents, see Haubert (2015), Huret and Sparks (2014) and Wailoo (2010).

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of African American Studies, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Jared Sexton

Authors
  1. Jared Sexton
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jared Sexton .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Sexton, J. (2017). History and Power: On Pride . In: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation