More Than Just An Athlete: Tiger Woods (Part 6)

When Woods announced his intention to drop his amateur status and turn professional he became a media sensation. TV and print media dedicated page after page to Woods’ life, his potential impact on the sport and whether he could live up to the hype of a 37 million dollar contract from Nike. His race was also the topic of much conversation and analysis. As a child with a black father and an Asian mother, Woods appeared to be a multicultural angel sent from heaven to open minds and bring multiculturalism and racial understanding to a sport previously reserved for America’s white upper-class. As Henry Yu notes, “A multicolored Tiger in hues of black and yellow would forever change the complexion of golf, attracting American inner-city children to the game in the same way Michael Jordan had done for basketball.”[1]

Yet the calculus employed by many journalists to describe Woods’ ethnic breakdown was highly revealing and harkened back to earlier conceptions of how the US has unnervingly tried to classify people on the basis of race. In math-like fashion, the Los Angeles Times computed Woods’ “rich ethnic background,” by combining “a quarter Native American, a quarter Chinese and half African-American,” father with a “half Thai, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter white mother.” Such racial calculus rings alarmingly similar to previous court ruling such as Plessey v. Ferguson whereby such rulings looked to classify citizens by compartmentalizing their racial breakdowns. Thinking in the 19th and early 20th centuries led people that through blood and heritage one could break another’s identity into precise fractions. This line of thinking led to the “one drop rule,” which stated that a single drop of black blood classified a person as black and that no amount of white blood could overpower the black blood.[2] Thus, even though Woods is technically more Asian than black, modern society has decided that he is African-American. This somewhat misleading classification had roots in many areas, ranging from pure racial ignorance to black leaders that wanted to define Woods as black in order to profit from what would soon turn into a large amount of social clout and capital.

Thus the confusion over Woods’ true racial complexion reveals that old notions of race still have streams running through our society. Bewilderment also evolved from labor migration from the 19th century and how the concept of culture began to eclipse classical concepts of racial classification.[3] In many ways we still hold onto the classificatory method of racial categorization. But this has been somewhat overcome by the rise of sociology which has placed greater importance on culture in describing differences in human behavior. Blatant and somewhat stereotypical examples of sociological classification would be descriptions such as, “He is humble and subservient because he is Asian,” or “She is loud and obnoxious because of her American roots.” But Woods, with his jumbled and hard-to-define race and culture, throws racial and cultural classification into a helter-skelter whirlwind that works to show how such classifications, despite their universal usage, have come to signify less and less about a person. For instance, the notion that Tiger spends a quarter of the week acting “black” another quarter “white” and the other half “Asian” is simply preposterous. What Woods enforces is that racial and cultural classifications are fictional and meaningless. But just because this may be so does not mean that such classifications will simply vanish.[4]

[1] Henry Yu, “Tiger Woods at the Center of History: Looking Back at the Twentieth Century through the Lenses of Race, Sports, and Mass Consumption,” in John Bloom and Michael Willard eds., Sports Matters: Race, Recreation and Culture, (New York: New York University Press: 2002) 325.
[2] Virginia Dominguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986) 26
[3] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000) 94.
[4] Yu, 329.