Expert answer:Writing Part 2
Solved by verified expert:You have already written a draft that explores some of what “They Say” about the topic of spectatorship and social cohesion. You have also written a draft of a descriptive essay in which you report on your first-hand observations of spectator behavior. And we’ve ALSO had extended conversations and readings on this topic.For your final draft, you will develop your own contribution to this conversation and present it in the form of an academic argument that does the following things:Begins with a compact, problem-statement introduction that establishes the context for your contribution to the conversation.Presents a thoughtful, specific claim statement that makes it clear what your contribution to the conversation is going to be.Presents clear, focused subclaims that relate to the claim in each body paragraph.Elaborates and develops the subclaims in persuasive detail.Presents sufficient evidence, drawn from our readings and your own observations, to support the subclaims in each body paragraph.Acknowledges and responds thoughtfully and respectfully to the objections that others might have, throughout the draft.Smoothly incorporates source materials (quotations, summaries, paraphrase) into the argument and correctly cites those materials following MLA style (in-text citations and a Works Cited list).Do I Need To Use Sources?Yes—you will be able to re-use the writing from your first rough draft (your synthesis of three sources) throughout this final draft. You may also go back to any of the sources we read this semester and mine them for more material. And you may, if you wish, seek out additional sources on this topic.Page Length: Aim for 6 pages (double-spaced); you may go over that length.I attached the draft i did below. and when you scroll to the bottom you can see the professor’s response about the draft.
tarver.pdf
wann.pdf
cohn.pdf
rough_draft_1_with_prof_response.docx
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College Football Is Here. But What Are We Really Cheering? – The…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/opinion/college-football-black…
https://nyti.ms/2vgqZLi
The Opinion Pages
College Football Is Here. But What Are
We Really Cheering?
Erin C. Tarver
THE STONE
AUG. 21, 2017
It may be a sweltering August day in the Deep South, but football fans across the
region are readying their R.V.s and face paint, making plans for the tailgate feast and
nervously reading injury reports on their team’s star players as they prepare for the
opening of the college football season. I grew up in south Louisiana, where the weeks
leading up to Louisiana State University’s home opener always felt like an extended
night before Christmas: a combination of giddy excitement, nostalgia and anxious
anticipation of a day that seemed it would never come. Football was life; the rest of
the year was just biding time.
Though I moved away from Louisiana long ago and developed an appreciation
for other pursuits, I still feel a rush of excitement at the approach of football. But
now I wonder how long I will be able to continue to watch.
Many football fans today know well enough to be concerned about the game.
Beyond what increasingly appear to be the inherent and horrifying physical effects of
long-term play on its athletes, there is the unavoidable fact of their exploitation:
College players go uncompensated by rule, while TV networks, coaches and apparel
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companies make money hand over fist on the players’ talent. Then there are the
cover-ups of cases of sexual assault by star players, the cheating scandals and the
enormous financial costs to institutions whose mission is ostensibly the provision of
higher education (most of them do not turn a profit on their football investment).
All of this is old news. But we fans keep watching, waving our foam fingers and
cheering like our lives depended on it. Why? What are we cheering? Who are we,
that we continue to feel such anxious attachment to college football even as we
acknowledge that the game, at least as it is currently played, is ethically suspect?
This attachment is less surprising when we consider that sports fans typically
use their fandom as a means of telling themselves who they are. Sports fandom has
become, to borrow a term from the philosopher Michel Foucault, a practice of
subjectivization — a phenomenon in which individuals subject themselves to a set of
behavioral regulations, and by doing so, acquire a sense of their own identities.
Just as a practicing Christian may create and obtain new forms of self-knowledge
through confession, prayer and the observance of Lent, a sports fan can come to
understand himself as a particular sort of person — a Southerner, for example, or a
“real man” — by adhering to certain rituals, like reading the sports page and
watching ESPN every day to gather more and more knowledge about his team, by
talking with other fans about that team in the right ways (and proving that he knows
more than them), by learning and participating in the songs, chants, dress, tailgate
rituals, game-day traditions and home décor choices of its fans.
The extraordinary reach of football into fans’ lives makes perfect sense when we
see it for what it is: the most popular mechanism in contemporary America for
cultivating a sense of self that is rooted in a community. In a world of uncertainty,
fragmentation and isolation, sports fandom offers us clear winners and losers,
connection to family and community — and at its best, the assurance that we are
really No. 1.
Yet this “we” of fandom ought to give us pause — perhaps just as much as the
scandals, the violence and the exploitation that surround the game.
Over the course of college football’s history, the “we” it celebrated has been
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more or less explicit. In its early days at Harvard, football was openly hailed (by
Teddy Roosevelt, among others) as a mechanism to cultivate masculine hardiness
and pugnacity in both athletes and spectators, precisely because it was violent. Many
who extolled these “virtuous” effects of football also, like Oliver Wendell Holmes,
explicitly embraced the eugenicist argument that the cultivation of such traits in
sport was essential for “breeding a race fit for hardship and command.”
Amateurism rules required by the N.C.A.A. and its predecessors were instituted
in college football in the midst of a debate about how to maintain the gentlemanly
character of such competitions. An 1897 New York Times editorial decried even the
practice of paid ticketing as “not quite nice” and ill-befitting “young gentlemen.” The
crisis that precipitated the formation of the N.C.A.A. was partly concern about the
danger of football, but also significantly (as Kate Buford put it in her biography of
Jim Thorpe) about the pressing question of whether young men “not of a decent
sort” should be allowed to compete. Well into the 20th century, fans and
sportswriters in the Deep South openly hailed the success of all-white teams like the
one at the University of Alabama as vindicating the Confederacy and as a symbolic
victory for white Southern-ness more broadly.
And like the Confederate monuments across the South whose construction
spiked under Jim Crow, Confederate imagery made its way most fully into Ole Miss
fandom, from the Confederate flag to the adoption of “Dixie” as the unofficial fight
song — in 1948, as the segregationist Dixiecrat party was ascendant. As if to make
their meaning perfectly clear, in 1982, as The New York Times reported, “about 100”
white Ole Miss fans walked out of James Meredith’s speech commemorating the
20th anniversary of his integration of the university and performed the “Hotty
Toddy” cheer (usually reserved for sporting events) outside. Like the “heritage”
lauded by white nationalists and the president, the “we” called upon by these images
is quite clearly nostalgic for an era of (even greater) white domination.
Today, the N.C.A.A. defends its amateurism rules as a means to “protect”
student-athletes rather than to exclude the wrong sort of people, and open defenses
of segregated teams are treated as embarrassing historical footnotes. Philosophers
and fans alike have thus suggested that today’s sports fandom — which brings
together diverse populations and encourages fans to cheer for athletes who don’t
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look like themselves — as evidence that we are moving toward colorblindness. If
white football fans can cheer for the success of majority-black teams in the once
officially segregated South, surely racial equality is not far behind?
Yet we should not be so sure that white fans’ willingness to support black
athletes on the gridiron entails a genuine acceptance of racial equality, nor their
inclusion of black people more broadly in the “we” that is supposed to be No. 1.
Indeed, white acceptance of black entertainers and white exploitation of the physical
labor of black persons long predates the civil rights movement and has been
perfectly compatible with anti-black racism.
Moreover, many contemporary white fans’ responses to players of color — when
those players express political views (like Colin Kaepernick), behave in ways that
make them uncomfortable (like Richard Sherman) or make mistakes (as Tyrann
Mathieu did when he lost his eligibility at Louisiana State University for testing
positive for marijuana) — are telling. Many are content to identify with black football
players for as long as they are useful on the field, to imaginatively project themselves
into the physical power and hypermasculinity that (fans imagine) they embody, and
to discard and denigrate them when they don’t play their parts as expected — to treat
them, as Malcolm X put it when describing his own experience as a popular student
and athlete in a predominantly white school, like mascots.
Mascots may occasion feelings of affection, but they aren’t part of the
community they serve. No one is inviting tigers into their home, no matter how
much they like the idea of their ferocity on the field. As Malcolm X explained in his
autobiography, no one would tolerate him dating the white girls in his class or
becoming a lawyer in his childhood community, regardless of how loudly they
cheered for him on the basketball court. Too often, many white fans’ treatment of
black athletes suggests that the most accurate first-person plural for their relation is
not “we” so much as “ours” — a relation of commodity rather than community.
There is little reason, in short, to be optimistic about the general transferability
of white fans’ positive feelings about (some) black athletes to the ordinary black folks
in their own communities. In fact, there may be reason to suspect the opposite —
namely, that some white fans’ expectations that young black men deliver on-field
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wins and the vicarious experience of greatness, dominance and success result in
greater backlash when the team, or the young men of color who populate it, fail to
provide them with good feelings. In other words, when they lose.
There is evidence for this disturbing effect in a study by the L.S.U. economists
Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, who analyzed more than a decade of juvenile court
records in south Louisiana to demonstrate that judges imposed harsher penalties on
black defendants in the weeks following upset losses by the L.S.U. football team.
Controlling for the type of offense and examining judicial behavior in each week that
followed an L.S.U. football loss in a game the team had been favored to win, Eren
and Mocan found that judges imposed “excess punishments of juvenile defendants
in Louisiana by a total of more than 1,332 days.”
The harshest of these effects occurred in weeks that the L.S.U. team was ranked
in the Top 10 and failed to win games it was favored to win. (Of the 207 judges Eren
and Mocan studied, 88 percent were white; the statistical effect of disproportionate
sentence length was traceable to those judges in the sample who received their
bachelor’s degrees from L.S.U.)
Remarkably, although this excess in punishment was inflicted specifically on
black juveniles, it was not reducible solely to racial animus, since comparably
disproportionate punishments were not present in weeks other than those following
an L.S.U. football upset. Rather, as Eren and Mocan put it, “the burden of the
emotional trauma generated by the upset loss seems to fall on black defendants.” In
other words, black children unlucky enough to appear in juvenile court in the week
following a bad football game are treated as scapegoats on whom adult sports fans
can work through their own negative feelings.
The racial integration of Southern collegiate athletics, which began in 1967 and
which was not completed until Ole Miss integrated in 1972, has certainly
transformed its explicit function. But given that the ritual of Saturday football now
involves the spectacular display of majority- black teams playing a dangerous,
violent game for the pleasure of a majority-white fan base — and with
overwhelmingly white coaching staffs, administrative structures and media
companies — the idea that racism has evaporated from it is dubious. Eren and
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Mocan’s findings show what happens when the racial tension just under college
football’s surface bubbles up and spills out onto the real lives of black children.
In his 1908 Harvard Illustrated essay “Football and Ideals,” the philosopher
Josiah Royce demanded of fans, “What does this enthusiasm make you do?”
Although Royce’s contemporaries extolled the values that football supposedly
taught, the way fans behaved once they left the stadium made him deeply suspicious
of such claims. “These players are setting you the example of loyalty. They risk their
bodies, they devote their toil, they suffer and endure — for their cause,” Royce wrote.
“But on the whole [football’s] prevailing influence will have been to enervate you, the
spectator, to make you less, not more loyal, for all your cheering. For you have
gloated over the sacrifice of others, and yourself have sacrificed, and intend to
sacrifice — nothing.”
The crowds and the teams they cheer no doubt look different today than in
1908. But fans today would do well to take a hard look at ourselves, asking not only
Royce’s question, but also a more fundamental one: What are we cheering, really?
We cheer ourselves, our teams, our communities, to be sure. But that hard look
should not avoid confronting the “we” that is actually glorified — and asking whether
under its team colors, it hides something much more sinister.
Erin C. Tarver is an assistant professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory
University and the author of “The I in Team.”
Now in print: A new book, “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader:
Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter
Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for
the Opinion Today newsletter.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
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Wann
Aggression in Sport
Daniel L. Wann
The Lancet (Dec 17, 2005)
Although there are many positive aspects to sport participation–as a player or spectator-athletic events are also often allied with aggressive behaviour. Defined as the intention to
physically, verbally, or psychologically harm someone who is motivated to avoid such
treatment, aggression can be either hostile or instrumental. Hostile aggression refers to
actions that are motivated by anger and that are intended solely to harm someone. Thus,
with this form of aggression, the perpetrator simply wants the victim to suffer–e.g, a
soccer player deliberately and illegally tripping an opponent with the sole purpose of
injuring that person. In instrumental aggression, however, harmful actions have a purpose
over and above that of wounding another player. Athletes might, for instance, attempt to
injure an opponent because they believe that doing so will increase their chances of
victory. In sport, research has focused mainly on the aggressive actions of three groups of
individuals: athletes, spectators, and parents at youth sporting events.
Research into player aggression has identified several factors that might promote
violence. Heat is an example; as temperatures rise, tempers flare. In baseball, this
association leads to more batters being hit by pitches on hot match days than on cold
days. A second situational determinant of player aggression is the point differential
between two teams, with the highest degrees of aggression arising when teams are
separated by a wide scoring margin. Furthermore, players on winning and losing teams
exhibit different patterns of aggression as a game progresses. Hence, the aggressive
behaviour of those on winning teams increases consistently throughout the contest,
whereas individuals on losing teams are especially aggressive at the beginning of a game,
and less so towards the midpoint of the competition. Presumably, athletes in the
unsuccessful teams conclude that their aggressive actions are not effective and,
consequently, switch to less aggressive strategies in an attempt to perform better. Finally,
possibly because of frustration, a team’s position in the overall league affects the degree
of individual player aggression. Indeed, teams that come first tend to exhibit lower
amounts of aggression than the frustrated teams who have to be content with second
place and those who come last and who find it hard to justify to themselves their overall
poor performance.
With respect to spectators, heat, modelling of player violence, and the consumption of
alcohol all affect the extent of aggressive behaviour. Results of research done over the
past 15 years indicate, however, that team identification–i.e., the extent to which a
spectator feels a psychological connection to a team and its players–is the greatest
predictor of fan aggression. For those fans who identify strongly, their team’s loss is felt
as their own. Consequently, all their reactions, including aggression, are intense. Three
types of aggression are affected by high degrees of team identification: hostile
aggression, instrumental aggression (e.g., willingness to injure apposing players and
coaches, or to yell obscenities at officials, etc, to intimidate their team’s opponent), and
fan rioting. It is noteworthy, however, that not all instances of instrumental aggression
among fervent fans are designed to assist the team. In some instances, the reward for the
Wann
aggressive behaviour is not team success but rather a restoration of psychological health.
Deep-seated and indifferent fans react differently to poor team performance. Fans low in
team identification tend to distance themselves from the team, thereby protecting their
mental health. Highly identified fans are, however, not able to dissociate from the team
because their role of team follower is too central to their identity. As a result, their
collective–i.e., group or social–self-esteem is lowered, resulting in an unpleasant
psychological state. These groups of fans will often resort to derogation of and aggression
towards others–namely, opposing players and fans, and officials–in an attempt to restore
their lost self-esteem. Team identification also plays a part in sport riots, which are the
result of fans expressing their affective response to the result of a competition–anger
after a loss or euphoria after a win.
Finally, parents of children involved in sport often behave aggressively in sporting
environments. Data show that more than 80% of parents have witnessed a violent action
from another spectator and that almost 80% have been the target of a violent or abusive
act. There are several possible explanations for the actions of these parents. Situational
factors–e.g., heat and alcohol consumption–no doubt play a part. Furthermore, parents
often get overly involved–i.e., hostile and abusive–when watching their children
compete because they are trying to secure an advantage for their child in the hope that
their daughter or son’s athletic prowess will ultimately result in a financial windfall in the
form of a college scholarship or professional contracts. This hypothesis is known as the
jackpot theory. However, again, researchers tout team identification as the most common
cause of the aggressive behaviour of parents. As such, those involved in the organisation
and running of youth sports should encourage an emphasis on fun and improvement of
skills rather than on the outcome of competitions.
Divided the Stands
Jonathan S. Cohn; Washington Monthly (Dec 1991)
1
1. The Morgan Stanley trader reclines on the sleek designer sofa, glancing occasionally
at the massive TV screen spread before him. This isn’t a half-bad way to spend an
evening, he thinks as he summons his waiter to the table and peruses the menu
impatiently. Filet mignon? No, thank you. Beluga caviar? Tha …
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