JOE FRAZIER dies
http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/sports-boxing/20111108/BOX.Obit.Frazier/?cid=hero_media
Joe Frazier’s death is a powerful shift in conscious African and African-American’s definition of power, self, and historical relationship to White America, and the central European justification of dominance and place in history and the world today. His life was a challenge to the social mores of the day. Joe Frazier’s powers, and his manhood shed light upon the blight of the souls of men on both sides of the color lines in 20th century America. Unfortunately, it is a part of and lost on this generation dulled by their toys, self-absorption, and short memory drives. The depth of Joe Frazer is a forgotten story that lives in the air. New US citizens are largely detached from the soul of the inner dynamics that created the culture they have sacrificed to get here.
Heavyweight boxing events throughout most of the 20th century centered around life and death, elevated athleticism at the highest levels, and were themed by political divisions, ideologies, and social commentary authored the banter between opposing camps. Boxing matches between the giants were the battlegrounds for white men and Black men to declare dominance over the spirit of the other man and his race. The boxing ring was the only place a Black man could literally slap the shit out of a White man, get paid, and not suffer the pain of being fired, jailed, raped before hanging, imprisonment, or a cruel death. From the great Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali the boxing ring was a raging, fierce, bloody battleground between the most vile sense of manhood a Black man ever had to endure, and suffer under, and the Black champions whose very prowess mocked the smug supremacy white men held above Africans in Africa, and within the United States of America. Money was exchanged for blood letting, and the needle in the proverbial haystack of deep hatreds, and fears was unpredictable in its nature, and neither side was ever sure who would be stung by the pin head of defeat, but both sides were willing to bet against the other, and literally stake their word, and their lives upon their predictions.
In the South Black men were not guaranteed safe employment, nor were their families safe, or their lives insured against the self-righteous rage of white men before, after or during a battle in the rings. All of the battles split between the white race and black race and the battles between Frazier and Ali were composed of the same dynamic elements. I lived through this and the ring of the bells resonates, to this day, in my ears. Prior to the full citizenship accorded Black Americans when we were allowed to vote the depth of the terror spawned by White men upon the dignity, the lives, and the rectums of Black men was unfathomable. When the Brown Bomber, Frazier, Bobby Foster, and others battled in the ring race was a factor, and someone Black could conceivable die on a Southern road somewhere in the South because of these matches. Regular Black men were marked with daring during those epic battles by their children, their wives, and their communities because in Jim Crow America Black manhood was a despised and feared energy force white governments needed to be reduced to property value throughout the 20th century, and men who braved those elements with dignity and/or fierceness were deeply admired by their women. That was often reward enough for being a man, a Black man, a colored man, a Negro man incapable of being or seeing himself as a nigger.
Those boxing matches in those days were more important to the fabric of society, the dignity of Black Americans, and the pride and assumptions of racial superiority held within the dominant class of American citizenry. Those battles defined manhood; the physicality of it, the nature of it, the danger, the beauty, and the strength of it in an arena required skill, impeccability, and a sense of history that embraced a complex culture’s contradictions.
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| Joe Fraziers downs Muhammad Ali 15th round of title bout March 8, 1971 |
Great men come from and become the archetypes of their day that inform the less endowed, the unimaginative, the creative, the daring, the beautiful, and the ugly that forms the relationships between fathers and children, husbands and wives, men and communities, and men at war, and men at peace building the life structures of towns, nations, families and friendships. Fundamentally the male paradigms need to fight, to protect, and oversee the outcome of their loved ones. It is impossible for a man not to engage in combat internally or externally. War has different forms and fronts, and not every battle is physical. Men like Muhammad Ali fought against the source of the flames raging against Black manhood one opponent at a time from the press corps to the ring and beyond into the international arena which was considered by Black Americans the den, the domain of white men. This cultural attitude was behind the resentment held against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam.
I bring these things to the forefront because Joe Frazier was not a singular force in the American story. He was connected to the forces driving the culture during the 20th century shaping the ethics, the values, and standards of Black America, conservatism, Christianity in the face of change, and most importantly, I think, exposing the vast contradictions of Black America for the world to see, gawk at, and marvel with the numerous questions our dichotomies inspired. Great men’s lives ask the questions we refuse to ask ourselves in the public forums of their times, or in the private sun rooms of our souls. In this story Joe Frazier spoke in the ring as a man among men and suffered from the cruelness of his own people who split into factions across America pissing on his head, and calling him an Uncle Tom while holding Muhammad Ali the champion of Black America. In many respects we killed him making him the 20th century’s resident Black Sambo, and then forgetting what we did to his sense of manhood in the wake of his death we dishonor what his life contributed to Black thought, and white America.
©Gregory E. Woods
Keeper of Stories
2011
http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=3064971
