It seems like at least once a week I balk at the rhetorical and so-called “politically correct — yet acidic” and “shade-like” mantra that reminds athletes that they are students first. My response is that they can and must do both and why do we constantly need to remind them that they are students first. These constant reminders imply that someone always seems to forget and throws some shade that someone’s “priorities are not quite in order.”
However, one does not have to give up one’s identity in order to accommodate the other. How folks, including athletes, negotiate different context is highly dependent upon which identity is likely used in a particular situation and sometimes both identities are at work depending on the context and the task. And, don’t all identities intersect at some point?
For example, I live in an academic space as professor, administrator, mother, and parent. I operate and negotiate between those “performance identities” and sometimes all three are at odds [my children roll up to my office to ask for money—I am mother, not the Executive Associate Dean]. However, I am still always operating in one or multiples of those performance spaces. How I respond in multiple positions has something to do with my racial identity, gender, sexuality, and quite frankly who I am at home, etc. Young folks, like an intercollegiate athlete, operate in multiple spaces, too.
Interestingly, athletes are always asked to pay attention to one identity as opposed to another. Yet other students who are gifted in multiple domains are not questioned. For example, think about other gifted students, musical instrument players, singers, dancers, and thespians; are they routinely asked to “remember” their identity as students first? Their talents are not preceded with “student”—i.e., student ballerina, student opera singer, student musical instrument player.
Have we ever stopped to ask ourselves why there is a push to choose one identity in athletics as opposed to choosing an identity in another performance area—like, dance, music and the like? I don’t think the answer is so simple nor is it warm and fuzzy. In fact, I would suggest that we think about who is located where. Who makes it “rain” and what do the rainmakers look like? In other words, whose interests are converging?
There is an undergirding of complexities that surrounds how we construct, understand and know “athletics and an athlete” that goes unquestioned. We begin the construction of athletics early, and it is laced with how we have been socialized to think about and “know” gender, race, socioeconomic status and how we understand educability and construct “giftedness.”
This construction of athletics and athletes is tied to how we “believe that we know and understand giftedness”—and how we constrict those meanings about “certain folks” and performances. How have we constructed performance, art and culture? We seem to pay lots of attention—and restrict those who participate in revenue-generating sports. Hmmm, wonder why?
