Navigating black masculinity at the LSE
Image credits: photo provided by author
By Oliver Geddes
Being black at LSE
As a Black man who has lived in Europe since birth, race has always been a key feature of my existence, whether I wanted it to be or not. Consequently, finding a sense of belonging among a society that historically did not want me to belong has been a challenging and often confusing experience. Amidst this struggle for my identity, I found sanctuary in team sports, particularly basketball. The idea that I was part of a larger group, moving towards one common goal, was an escape from the daily pressure of being Black in a Eurocentric society.
Yet, while finding ‘community’ and commonality among other young Black men has been liberating, it has also created ‘conditions of ambivalence’. These conditions are a series of seemingly incessant contradictory feelings and experiences – optimism undermined by pessimism, freedom refuted by restraint. I found these conditions to be present in the way we reconcile oppression with our masculinity; in the way we are impeded by our oppression even in spaces where we are supposed to feel safe; in the way we escape our oppression through community and yet seek to reject monolithic identity. Generally, the racialised experiences of Black men in predominantly non-Black spaces seem plagued by contradictions and unpredictability.
When I started university at LSE, an institution where Black students are a visible minority, I felt a replication of the experiences I had endured during my lifetime. I was in a space where I was unsure of my identity, of how to exist in a place where I saw very little representation. I found sanctuary through team sports – basketball. It allowed me to access a community where I didn’t always feel the intensity of something as insignificant as my skin colour. I was a part of a larger whole, a common objective. I became close to my Black teammates, greatly due to our shared experience of being very visible minorities in predominantly white spaces. My ethnography focuses on Black men’s navigation of these spaces, using basketball as a vessel to facilitate this understanding.
Initially, I wanted to research a wider question on the ‘Black’ experience at LSE. I quickly modified my question upon realising several limitations I was faced with. Most importantly, Black experiences are not monolithic, so I felt it wasn’t justified for me to speak on experiences that were not reconcilable with my own. Finding sanctuary through team sports is one Black experience but it is by no means a universal one. I also realised that there was a gendered element to my curiosity – I couldn’t ignore that there was something innately masculine about how I found an escape from my racialised experience through a physical activity, so this formed something I wanted to explore further with my interlocutors.
The basketball court is a place I have known my whole life. I’m always struck with the same sensation when I walk into a basketball gym, the stuffiness of the air and the faint smell of sweat never fails to produce a remote sense of dizziness as I acclimate to the court. Similarly, the competitiveness of game day always produces a palpable intensity, and thus feelings of unease, even angst.
My research allowed me to explore the diasporic importance of basketball to Black men, and how it helps us to form a ‘collective identity’, particularly against the backdrop of an institution where navigating our identity feels like a constant struggle. Interactions with my peers allowed me to understand the diversity of Black men’s experiences in white spaces. Our experiences are individual, and the institutional denial of their uniqueness only perpetuates harm to our community. Overarchingly, I sought to explore the conditions of ambivalence that underpin these findings.
Understanding the Black Male Experience – “Being on the court is like an escape… in the classroom I feel isolated”:
Almost routinely, every Friday, the first person I would see at practice was Sam. He is a fellow Black teammate and my closest friend on the team. This Friday was no different, he came and sat next to me on the bench as we got ready to play. After exchanging pleasantries, I introduced my research topic to him and explained what I was going to be doing over the next ten weeks. He seemed intrigued and enthusiastic to be assisting me. He looked over at me, smiling invitingly, and said “alright cool, what do you wanna ask me?”.
My first point of inquiry was why young Black male athletes at my university gravitated towards basketball, as proportionally, the men’s basketball society had more Black student athletes than any other sports team.
I asked Sam, “why do you think us Black guys love basketball so much?”.
He pondered for a moment before responding, “Well, I think basketball holds a special place in our heart. It’s a sport we can watch at the highest level and see guys that look like us. When we’re in a place like this I think that’s something that we need”.
As Sam said, culturally, basketball is significant to Black men. The National Basketball Association (NBA), the most competitive basketball organisation in the world, is constituted by 71.8% Black players (Statista 2022), while Black Americans constitute just 14% of the U.S population (Pew Research Centre 2023). While my research is focused on young Black British men and not Black American men, the diasporic significance of this phenomenon is far from lost on us. We too live in a society where we are very visible minorities and where systemic racism plays a dominant role in our lives. Seeing Black men succeed is a diasporic victory, regardless of where within the diaspora this success takes place.
Image credits: LSESU men’s basketball instagram page (@lsembb)
What I wanted to explore further though, was the last bit of what Sam said - “in a place like this”, the idea that being in a space where we are minorities generates a desire to find a sense of belonging, a community where we feel we aren’t part of a wider community. What was driving this desire? Simply put, why did we need to come together as Black men and play basketball? Why was merely being a fan of the sport, an individual spectator, not enough? I got a very insightful answer during an interview with another one of my fellow Black teammates, Daniel.
I asked him, “how do you compare your experience playing basketball with your wider experience as a Black man at LSE?”.
He thought for a while. Finally, he responded, “you know, being on the court is like an escape from all the bullshit. In the classroom I feel isolated, on the court I can just forget about all of it”. He paused briefly before continuing, “I remember one time, I was doing a module for my course, and not once did my class teacher, who was white, get my name right. She confused me for the one other Black guy in the class every single time.”
Daniel recounting his experiences of racism at our university reminded me of similar experiences I’ve had. Microaggressions ranging from getting my name confused with another Black student, to a throwaway comment about my hair, to even one I experienced during a basketball training session. This was during the fourth practice into my research, when my project had become common knowledge within the team. A non-Black player from the second team who I wasn’t particularly familiar with came up to me and asked, “do you think non-Black people should be able to say the ‘n’ word? I only ask because when I was growing up everyone used to say it, what do you think?”. It was an obvious attempt to get a reaction out of me. I looked at him in disbelief, got up, and went about the rest of the training session as normal.
What fascinated me though, was that as the training session progressed, being surrounded by my Black teammates created an element of comfort and by the end of the session, I had all but forgotten that the microaggression had even occurred. This experience effectively confirmed what Daniel had told me, playing basketball alongside my teammates was an escape from the microaggressions we experience daily, reminding us incessantly that they are a species of wider institutional racism.
What I have come to realise about our experience as Black men at LSE is that it is somewhat of a rite of passage, with particular emphasis on the ‘liminal’ phase of rites of passage as Van Gennep (1909) puts it. Experiencing racism places us in a strange middle place where we are unsure of where we belong, and how we are supposed to belong. In essence, we have surpassed the first stage of the tripartite structure of rites of passage as we have been separated from schooling as we knew it in the first 18 years of our lives, and placed in a higher learning institution, yet we are stuck in a liminal space, incapable of progressing to the incorporation phase of rite of passage. We are stuck because as minorities in a space that has historically excluded us, we are unable to fully feel like we can aggregate as an intrinsic part of the student community. Our experiences with racism evidence this, producing a sub-conscious feeling that we’re not supposed to be here and thus we are in a perpetual state of transition, unable to integrate.
I align this with Victor Turner’s (1969) discussions about liminality: we are “betwixt and between” as well as “structurally invisible” because we feel as though the structures of the institutions where we study were not designed to include us. The primary difference between our experience and Van Gennep’s and Turner’s theories is that we are unable to advance to the final stage of this perverted rite of passage, unable to be liberated from the liminal position that racism places us in. However, as my experience interacting with my interlocutors has demonstrated to me, we cope with this position through escapism. Playing basketball, attempting to recreate the feelings of triumph that we feel when we witness the seemingly disproportionate success of Black athletes, gives us a sense of belonging – Appiah (2009) refers to this phenomenon as creating “collective identity” – specifically in the context of being minorities at our university, where our identity is systematically confused.
Another question that I couldn’t ignore was the relationship between the escapism we sought through basketball and our masculinity. During my seventh training session into my research, I had a conversation with some of my Black teammates which helped me answer this.
Sam started the conversation, saying: “it’s weird how we’ve never really talked about our experiences with racism like this. I mean we joke about it but before this we’ve never really spoken about it seriously.”
Daniel laughed and responded, “well yeah, we just have to get on with it, what’s complaining gonna do, you know no one would listen to us.” Sam laughed and nodded in agreement.
I found this to be a typically masculine, reductionist approach to the issues we face as Black men. Talking about our problems goes against our traditional conceptions of masculinity, so if we put our heads down, and “get on with it” as Daniel said, it’s almost as if the problem doesn’t exist. This is why seeking escapism through basketball makes sense, it’s easy to reconcile with patriarchal ideas of masculinity, ideas that purport that we shouldn’t talk about our experiences with racism, instead we should repress the emotions they produce and “get on with it”. In part I blame the fact that we are victims of systemic racism, but I also blame the fact that as men we reproduce toxic ideas of masculinity. I don’t find it to be a coincidence that historically, participation in sport was seen as a process of “masculinising” and a “toughener” for young men (Kidd 2013). I’ve thus been able to acknowledge that there is a problematic element to the way in which my fellow Black teammates and I deal with racism at university. While basketball has provided us with a community and a cathartic way to relieve the daily pressures of our racialised experience, it also reduces our racialised experience and reproduces ideas about masculinity that we should begin to forget.
The violence of the patriarchy is different to that of racism, yet it is undoubtedly connected and comparably oppressive. The notion that as Black men, we fight our oppression by almost reaffirming a different type of oppression, speaks to the sentiment that underpins the entirety of my project – our experience as Black men in non-Black spaces is confused by an exhausting paradox.
Understanding Internal Distinctions – “We’re not a monolith”
Something my research demonstrated was the diversity of my Black teammates’ experiences. Our experiences were not only racialised and gendered but also defined by class division and ethnicity. This became apparent to me from the beginning of my project. Two training sessions into my research, my Black teammates and I were having a general conversation about our backgrounds.
Michael made an interesting contribution – “I went to private school, so coming to LSE wasn’t that different. I feel like I was already quite accustomed to code-switching and knowing my position in a place like this.”
Sam contrasted this account with his own experience – “I think my time here’s been different. I went to a school that was majority Black and Brown, when I started uni it was a whole new world for me”.
Sam and Michael continued to contrast their experiences based on their ethnic origins. While both Nigerian, they come from different tribes. Sam is Igbo while Michael is Yoruba.
Michael jokingly said to Sam, “you Igbos are all money hungry, I bet you felt right at home here, I had to adjust to that”.
Sam laughed and replied, “you make a fair point”.
This interaction got me thinking about my own experience and how it was distinct, because I’m Zimbabwean and similar to Michael, I have been privately educated in predominantly white schools. Thus, my perspective of the world has been uniquely shaped by not solely my race but also my socio-economic background as well as the cultural knowledge dispersed to me by my parents.
I added to the conversation with this suggestion: “I think it’s important to understand that while we’re all very visible minorities at this university, meaning we share that common struggle, our experiences are still going to be unique based on factors other than our race”.
Michael agreed, responding, “yeah… we’re not a monolith. It’s annoying that we’re viewed as though we are”.
A key takeaway from this observation was that even though my research focused on a specific part of the Black student population at LSE, our experiences were still so different. While as Black men, we had found a community in our basketball team, we are not monolithic. Michael alluded to the idea that we’re viewed as though we are, and he’s completely right. LSE’s recently published statistics on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion show Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students constitute over 60% of the student population (LSE 2020). However, there are no individual statistics for Black students. This is an institutional representation of exactly what Michael is referring to, and he calls it annoying because if institutionally, we are viewed as one singular group, how can we expect to be treated as individuals. I believe that certain microaggressions are a species of this institutional hazard – being confused for another Black student in my class is reflective of the fact that on an institutional level, my very existence within the institution is not individualised, rather it is grouped into one overarching monolithic demographic. As Michael and Sam described, they have very individual experiences as Black men at LSE, as do I, and the institutional denial of those experiences perpetuates negative trickle-down effects. I believe Michael and Sam’s depiction of their experiences are calls for institutional recognition of them.
Contradictions: invidividuality and collective identity
I want my inquiry into the experiences of Black men at an institution where we are minorities to reveal what exactly those experiences are, and how such experiences trap us in a liminal space we find difficult to navigate. I hope that my research paints a clearer picture of what we go through in a space where we don’t always feel like we belong and how we have tried to deal with this by finding a community in our basketball team. I also want to reveal the complexities that lie beneath how we’ve found this community, specifically the way in which we reconcile the desire for community with problematic notions of masculinity that we still hold, and how this demonstrates an apparent contradiction in how we as Black men fight oppression.
I want my research to demonstrate that the community myself and my interlocutors have found in our basketball team should not overshadow the fact that we still have individual and personal experiences and that we want these individual experiences to be recognised on an institutional level, perhaps this would be the beginning of ameliorating our negative experiences with racism. I once again want to note that these calls are an indicator of our conditions of ambivalence – we seek to find individuality in a space constructed for collective identity, an exhausting effort in the wider struggle that is battling the contradictions that afflict our experience as Black men.
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