...your book, but why?

a response to the relevance question

Jacquie Verbal asked me a question the other day that I appreciate:

What is the relevance of Playing the Game, and why now?

And of course, I’ve lived with a response to this question all my life. But I’ve never stopped to articulate the answer. In some ways, I’ve resisted an answer because of all that I know this book is doing—there’s the story (the play of racial politics in sport), then the story (the relational science of race); then the story story - y’all gon get this subtext. But this book does have a heart (beat), a central pulse, something to say about the sacred that, in hindsight, I’ve been afraid to say publicly, because of the caricature I talk about in the preface; the imposter.

Who am I to make claims about the brilliance of Black athletes, how their intellect flies in the face of white supremacy’s colonizing cultural logic? — to expose it comedically. What qualifies me to make claims about the divinity that all Homo sapiens embody, by way of Black people, quite literally? — how we all come from Black women, and yet have been conditioned to act like Oedipus’ opposite. Why should anyone care what I have to say about the nature of “human” existence, how our morals gets coopted so easily (by racial narratives), but how our bodies possess a magic that really can make us free?

Of course I could always hear in my head, “Boy, go sit yo ass down somewhere. This is your first book! You done lost your damn mind if you think…” Yes, exactly. I have finally lost my mind. This book healed me by helping me exorcise the last vestiges of colonized thinking that had me convinced - and f***ed up - that I wasn’t qualified to tell a new religious story; to offer another take that takes into account the racial and theological questions the Black Church never let me ask; hell, to explore a new neural pathway of a more embodied religious understanding, because why not?

To answer your question, Jacquie, this book is relevant because it provides a new language for Black people - for everyone - that makes legible the brilliance we have always embodied; it helps us see it, to go back and get it from within; and how to train it. This language will come in handy as old worlds (of meaning) die and (political) systems shift.

At the heart of it, this book offers the seeds of a religious understanding reclaimed, an ancestral refresher course retold through the satirical embodiments of Black athletes and neuroscience. It is a spirituality that begins again in the body - between breath and belief - and emanates in ways that inspire the movements of so many who refuse to acknowledge it, but who want to. Playing the Game offers another way, for all of us.

I hope that answers your question. And I can’t wait for our conversation at next week’s Book Club!

Dr. Green (or just ‘G’)