Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta

Conclusion

CONCLUSION When twenty-one-year-old Tiger Woods became the youngest Masters Tournament champion in history in Augusta, Georgia, in 1997, breaking the scoring record that had been in place for thirty-two years, golfing veteran Fuzzy Zoeller set off a firestorm of controversy when he made the following comments in a CNN interview: “That little boy [Woods] is driving well and he’s putting well. He’s doing everything it takes to win. So, you know what you guys [former champions] do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year. Got it?” Zoeller snapped his fingers, walked away, and turned back. “Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve.”1 These racially charged comments couched amid several backhanded compliments seem aimed more at cheapening and trivializing rather than commending Woods’s golfing techniques. They anticipate in jest the menu that Woods, implicitly because of his racial background, will serve at the Champions Dinner the next year at the Augusta National Golf Club, where he as the neophyte champion will have the time-honored prerogative of selecting the menu. The comments suggest that by serving exotic soul food dishes, he will bring irreverence to an event that is ordinarily formal. By this logic, Zoeller imposes an essentialist and stereotypically “black” identi fication onto Woods, who prefers to acknowledge and respect his multiracial Chinese, African American, Native American, Dutch, and Thai heritage . Zoeller invokes such foods as collard greens and fried chicken, which were traditionally linked to the slave heritage of black southerners in the United States. These foods, alongside watermelon, were saliently imaged in racist caricatures of blackness. Zoeller evokes racist representational strategies that were popular in the Jim Crow era and relates minstrel imagery to Woods. His words construct an image of Woods in blackface, in effect, symbolically making him over as “black.” The “they” says it all. Added to this, Zoeller boldly refers to Woods as a “boy,” a word whose abusive uses in southern history to infantilize and emasculate black men makes these comments all the more demeaning. The racial differences between Zoeller, who is white, and Woods, who prefers to use the term “Cablinasian” as a neologism to describe his range of ethnic backgrounds, make all the difference and, in this case, cannot be ignored. Woods served cheeseburgers, 229 chicken sandwiches, french fries, and milkshakes at the exclusive Champions Dinner in 1998. Given that the tournament itself was held in Georgia, southern history looms even larger in this scenario. Like race, geography poignantly matters. This scenario demonstrates, once again, how easily the conventional racial logic of the South can reduce racial identities in the region to binary “black” and “white” categories while collapsing all signs of difference, including visible signs on the body that are ethnic or cultural. These condescending remarks reveal anxiety about a minority man’s inroads into a sport conventionally dominated by white men. They were widely publicized, led to widespread outcry, and resulted in Zoeller’s loss of endorsements with such enterprises as Kmart. In the aftermath, some critics felt that the incident was blown out of proportion, reflected Zoeller’s character as a jokester in the golfing world, and viewed the outcry as a byproduct of what they perceived to be an obsession with political correctness. To his credit, Zoeller quickly apologized, remarking that “My comments were not intended to be racially derogatory, and I apologize for the fact that they were misconstrued in that fashion.”2 Whether he meant them in jest or not, the fact that he made them in the first place underscores one of the key points of Black Masculinity and the U.S. South. That is to say, this moment illustrates the persisting uses in the contemporary era of ideologies stemming from the U.S. South to constitute scripts of black male bodies as pathological and deviant. Furthermore, Zoeller’s comments illustrate ways in which southern-based ideologies of black masculinity become nationalized and circulate in relation to a range of identities (Woods is a native Californian), very much in the vein of the ubiquitous Uncle Tom. Such comments speak well to the need to move beyond stereotypes, whether they are ostensibly pernicious or steeped in romance and nostalgia, in imagining black masculinity in relation to the U.S. South. This study has aimed to illustrate how much we can enrich methods...