Intersectionality
In a pair of recent essays, both Rian Watt
(in “Life at the Margins”) and Craig Calcaterra (in “The Intersectionalist Manifesto”) challenge the idea that baseball writing ought to, as it’s often
said, stick to sports. Watt’s specific interest, which initiated the
discussion, was to ask what kind of baseball writing comes after Sabermetrics.
He notes that among readers and writers there is a sense that
sabermetrically-inclined analysis has reached a point of saturation, in which
much of the recent writing has been dedicated to tinkering with a well-established paradigm. Watt
proceeds to argue that discontent within the baseball writing community signals
that a paradigm shift is underway. “The best baseball
writing,” Watt notes,
this year has been about more than baseball. It’s been about politics, and race, and gender, and sexuality, and money, and power, and how they all come together in this game we love. It’s placed the game in its social context, and used it as a lens to talk about ideas that are bigger than the nuts and bolts of a box score.
He then refers to
this approach as intersectional writing, which, as Calcaterra notes, captures
the sense in which baseball intersects with broader social dynamics such as
race, gender, and economics. Much of the pushback against intersectional
writing is premised on the claim that sports journalism ought to stick to sports
(a claim which is itself questionable, as will become clearer below). An
additional dimension of the pushback to which Calcaterra responds is the
mistaken idea that intersectional writing is merely a fancy name for licensing
a writer to introduce his or her particular “social justice” concerns into
analyses of the game, or that it is cultural writing with baseball as a focus.
The response offered by Watt and Calcaterra is, in Watt’s words, that “all baseball writing is culture
writing,” namely, that all baseball writing is immersed in broader
cultural dynamics and norms that may or may not be explicitly analyzed by the
writer.
I’d like to offer a few belated comments on these essays. It’s true that, while
I watch baseball and read about baseball, that I don’t usually write about it. What I
find interesting, in this case, is the use of the term intersectionality, and how it found its way outside of the academic
contexts in which we usually talk about it, to become the name for a new
paradigm of baseball writing. In what follows, I will argue that
intersectionality means something more than cultural or socio-political
baseball writing. I think that if intersectionality names a new paradigm of baseball writing, that
it should explicitly confront both the norms
that orient how the game is played and the norms that guide the conceptual choices that writers make. That sounds abstract, but
I think the recent debate over the so-called unwritten rules of baseball
will illustrate what I mean.
However, I’d like to take a brief
detour through the article that introduced intersectionality as a concept:
Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics.”* I think this detour is warranted because Crenshaw makes
a crucial point about how an uncritical approach to social norms produces
biases in the way we think about discrimination, social activism, and social
change (among other things). Crenshaw argues that the dominant approaches to
problems of discrimination “treat race and gender as mutually exclusive
categories of experience and analysis.” To treat discrimination as the result
of either gender or race distorts and marginalizes the experiences of those who are
adversely affected by both gender and racial discrimination.
For our purposes, we should note
that the uncritical adoption of these “single-axis” frameworks introduces
theoretical and practical norms that undermine the social agency of
marginalized groups. Crenshaw’s interest is in how these single-axis theories
marginalize black women. She argues that black women are marginalized because
feminist theory is largely shaped by the experiences and struggles of white
women.** In a similar fashion, antiracist struggles are largely shaped by
African-American men. This places African-American women in a double-bind: there
are ways in which their consciousness as women conflicts with their
consciousness as members of the African-American community, and there are ways
in which their consciousness and experiences as African-Americans conflict
with their experiences as women. This is, undoubtedly, a very schematic
summary. But it is enough to introduce Crenshaw’s critique of the normative
failures of single-axis frameworks:
These problems of exclusion cannot be resolved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure…the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism…. (140)
Thus for Crenshaw,
intersectionality is a direct attack on the presumed norms that guide
single-axis frameworks.
The
Unwritten Rules
The response to the
recent comments by Bryce Harper and Goose Gossage about the unwritten rules of
baseball will illuminate what I mean by reconsidering the social norms that
guide our thinking about baseball. Though I will not recount those comments
here, I will point to a recent post concerning the racist undertones of policing
the so-called “unwritten rules” of the game. Sam Adler-Bell writes:
These flare ups of concern about the erosion of baseball values—translation: that baseball players occasionally act like they’re having fun—almost always center on non-white players’ perceived violations of baseball etiquette. Gossage’s comments are plainly racist.
If what I am saying
about intersectionality is correct, then criticizing the so-called unwritten
rules requires doing more than merely condemning the comments themselves. It involves,
as Adler-Bell notes, reconceptualizing how those comments are understood. Here
are the ways that we could consider the context of players enforcing the
unwritten rules.
1) Stick to sports: The unwritten rules are part of the game.
On this
view, the fact that (white) American players evoke the unwritten rules to
police the behavior of Latin American players is accidental. The proponent of
this view looks for an exception and finds that in 2012 Cole Hamels
deliberately hit Bryce Harper with a pitch so that Harper would get a better
idea of his place—so it’s not all Latin Americans who are on the wrong side of
the unwritten rules.
Obviously, this
approach is incompatible with an intersectional approach. There is a fine line
distinguishing the next two possible ways to interpret the norms of the unwritten
rules.
2) The unwritten rules as applied by Player X are socially unacceptable.
It is possible to
begin by looking at the unwritten rules through the lens of broader social
dynamics. Then, given that many of the off-field complaints involve (white)
American players policing the behaviors of Latin American players (most
recently, it’s Gossage criticizing José Bautista’s— admittedly awesome and jubilant, I say—playoff bat-flip), we can
conclude that policing the unwritten rules displays racist undertones, or at
least, some degree of white privilege. The problem, however, is that proof that
race is a factor often turns on whether or not a particular player (our Player X) who has
decided to police the game has racist motivations or not. Once it becomes about the player's intent or attitudes, we've lost sight of the system of social norms.
3) The unwritten rules allow (white) American players*** to set the norms
of the game.
The standpoint of
the second view starts with a particular practice (the unwritten rules) and
then introduces broader social dynamics into the equation. However, the
unwritten rules are not rituals that have existed since time immemorial. As
Adler-Bell writes,
Enforcing traditional codes of conduct is the primary way that whiteness continues to exert its authority over the game. When baseball old-timers talk about the “right way” to play the game, they mean the “white way.” And in this, I see less a genuine loyalty to the game’s existing norms, than an attachment to the privilege of defining what those norms are. (My emphasis)
Thus when white
(American) players claim that they are policing who plays the game the right
way, they are claiming the privilege of defining the norms of baseball.
Moreover, we could suggest that the reason (white) American players continue to
enforce the unwritten rules (that is, define the norms for how the game is
played) is that they derive a competitive advantage—as a group—from the
unwritten rules. This point, of course, has been noted by historians of
baseball’s integration, but it is still relevant today. If even Bautista, in
his essay in The Players' Tribune,
appears obligated to note that his famous bat flip doesn’t represent disrespect
for the unwritten rules of the game—“It wasn’t out of
contempt for the pitcher. It wasn’t because I don’t respect the unwritten rules
of the game. I was caught up in the emotion of the moment”—what of
the lesser-known Latin American player who is on the bubble of a major league
(or even minor league) roster? Could we conceive of these players, for example, modifying their
behaviors to avoid incurring the physical violence of Law and
Order Ball (what Dave Zirin suggested on Twitter we call “Ball and Order”) by
standing off the plate to avoid potential injuries—thus putting themselves at a
disadvantage as batters.
The
Politics of Unwritten Rules
By focusing on how
norms arise in baseball, and by focusing on who claims the privilege of setting
those norms, we undermine the idea that it is possible to just merely stick to
the game. What the intersectional approach demonstrates is that social norms are themselves
social forces. To phrase this in different terms, we could call the
second approach reformist: it aims to reform the game by halting a bad
practice or correcting what player attitudes we consider acceptable. That is an admirable goal in itself, and I’m not condemning that.
However, the intersectional approach aims to show how different practices
within the game reveal the privilege that (white) American players have on and
off the field, and perhaps—I raise this as a possibility because this is a question we should seek to answer—the competitive advantage they gain by having this
privilege. Perhaps this is precisely what Calcaterra’s critics believe is
“social justice” advocacy. So be it. The entire point is to make the normative
structure visible so that we can interpret it, rather than treating social and
political dynamics as if they are magically rebuffed by the chalk on the field.
When we say that the Goose Gossages, the Jonathan Papelbons, and the Bud Norrises of
baseball play “Ball and Order,” it’s a reminder that the unwritten rules of the
game are themselves never neutral.
Footnotes
* This article
appears in The University of Chicago
Legal Forum (1989), 139–167.
**Crenshaw, p. 154:
“When feminist theory attempts to describe women’s experiences through
analyzing patriarchy, sexuality, or separate spheres ideology, it often
overlooks the role of race. Feminists thus ignore how their own race functions
to mitigate some aspects of sexism and, moreover, how it often privileges them
over and contributes to the domination of other women.”
*** Or, to
paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, players who believe they are white.
