Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer Should be Celebrated
by Mark Anthony Neal
Durham, NC -- Eight months ago, when former CBS radio jock Don Imus directed the now infamous phrase “nappy headed hos” at the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, the country was again pressed to confront the issue of race. Within this maelstrom of ignorance and misinformation, C. Vivian Stringer, the coach of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, emerged as one of the real voices of reason, displaying the integrity and wisdom that comes from 30-plus years of professional coaching . In the process, Stringer gave form and substance to the real lives that black women live.
On Thursday, Stringer and her women’s basketball team come to Durham to play against Duke. Coincidentally, this occurs on the same week that Don Imus returns to the airwaves on WABC-radio in New York City. In recent weeks. Stringer has complained about the connections that continue to be made between her student/athletes and Imus. The stain is one of the many difficulties black women like Stringer face in their efforts to be considered as competent as their peers.
Black women, as a group, remain at the margins of American consciousness, easily caricatured as “baby mamas,” strip club dancers, welfare queens, domestic workers and, well, “nappy headed hos.” Stringer is the antithesis of this caricature.
She began her head coaching career at historically-black Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, a year before Title IX took effect. When the NCAA held its first national tournament for women’s basketball in 1982, Stringer’s team advanced to the Final Four -- a rare accomplishment for a historically black college or university in any Division I collegiate sport. Stringer repeated the feat when she turned the dormant University of Iowa into a women’s basketball powerhouse, taking them to the Final Four in 1993.
Yet when Rutgers hired Stringer two years later, much was made about the fact that she would make more than the school’s white male football and basketball coaches. (By the way, two of Stringer’s Rutgers teams have reached the Final Four, including last season when the Scarlet Knights knocked off then top-ranked Duke along the way.)
As a scholar of black culture, I find Imus’s mean-spirited and misogynistic attack frustrating because it reflects the inability of our larger society to give serious consideration to the unique position that black women such as Stringer occupy in American society. They experience the brunt of two dynamics: racism and sexism -- what UCLA law professor Kimberle Crenshaw calls the “intersectionality” of black women’s experiences.
The specificity of “nappy-headed ho” speaks to this. Regardless of her level of educational attainment or the size of her bank account, a hairstyle can render a black woman socially disposable. Because hair texture is integral to a black woman’s identity, the term “nappy-headed” carries almost as much potency as the “n” word. And this is perhaps what stung many black women in the aftermath of Imus’s comments because both racism and sexism were at play. It was another reminder that black women, once again, are not thought to possess the traits -- physical, spiritual and intellectual -- that their white peers do.
Like Stringer, I too think it’s time to disassociate Imus from the story of the Rutgers women’s basketball team. We all should take the opportunity presented by Rutgers basketball to celebrate women’s athletics and all those young women for which sticks and stones may break their bones, but for whom spirits will never waver.
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Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University.
© 2007 Office of News & Communications/Duke University
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