URI Professor Who Accused Tom Brady Of Only Bringing White Friends To Kentucky Derby Only Has 1 Black Guy On His Entire Facebook Friends List
A lot of people were buzzing about the hit piece done by a URI professor on Tom Brady, which Campus Reform uncovered yesterday, tying the GOAT to white supremacy. I wasn’t even going to acknowledge it since it’s just baseless trolling that doesn’t deserve our attention, but enough people sent the story or tagged me in it that I had to respond. Feel free to skim past the italicized text from Campus Reform and read my analysis that follows.
Campus Reform: University of Rhode Island (URI) professor published a book chapter in September focused entirely on New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his supposed relationship to white supremacy. URI English professor Kyle Kusz also dabbles in gender and race theory, as evidenced in a chapter, a full copy of which was obtained by Campus Reform, that the professor authored in a recently published book titled The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Sport.
Titled “Making American White Men Great Again: Tom Brady, Donald Trump, and the Allure of White Male Omnipotence in Post-Obama America,” the chapter attempts to provide evidence to back up Kusz’s suggestion that, like President Donald Trump, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has gained popularity due to the “latest wave of white rage and white supremacy” that he says developed since the Obama presidency alongside a “disturbing racial reaction among white conservatives in response to the idea that a black man would be [president].”
The professor’s work analyzes Brady in two ways: his representation in the media and his “relationship with Trump,” seeking to determine what these factors can “tell us about the specific ways that white masculinity is being re-coded and re-centered in post-Obama American culture.”
Kusz zeroes in on “the complex racial, gender, and class meanings that have been articulated with Brady’s body and his performances of white masculinity in the context of a backlash against the Obama presidency” and of “Trumpism,” which he claims is also rooted in both race and gender.
In addition to Brady’s representation as the epitome of “omnipotent, white masculinity” in his various media appearances, advertisements, and movie cameos, Kusz also focuses on Brady’s public image as it relates to what he calls “American myths of meritocracy and individualism,” which he says are “commonly used in sporting adverts.”
Among other media appearances, he specifically cites Brady’s appearance in a 2015 Under Armour commercial, which he claims “would not seem out of place in Leni Reifenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film, ‘Triumph des willens,’” because of its military references and red and black colors.
“I decided to research Trump and Brady’s public performances of their white masculinities and how they connect with broader debates about race and gender politics after a student in one of my classes brought the UnderArmour commercial to my attention and it piqued my interest,” the professor said.
Kusz also took issue in the chapter with a Beautyrest mattress commercial in which the camera angle is pointed upward at Brady so that the “viewer is compelled to see him as superior,” as well as Brady’s partnership with “upscale companies” like UGG and Aston Martin.
“In each of these sites, Brady is figured as an unconflicted and unapologetic embodiment of upper-class white exceptionality and manly omnipotence.”
Kusz also points to the “myths” of meritocracy present in “The Brady 6,” a documentary about the quarterback and his rise to stardom.
“By subtly coding Brady as a version of the 97 lb weakling in ‘The Brady 6,’ his subsequent transformation into Brady—the five-time Super Bowl champion and ‘G.O.A.T’—enables him to be easily read as an athletic variation of the self-made man,” Kusz writes, adding that “the self-made man is [a] seductive and potent ideological figure of American liberalism long used to mask the systemic privileges afforded to, and enjoyed by, white men, especially those with economic means.”
The professor also asserts that Patriots fans who backed Brady during the infamous “Deflategate” scandal were angry with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for “breaking the unspoken bonds of white brotherhood to leverage the NFL’s institutional authority” against Brady. The “Free Brady” T-shirts sold by barstoolsports.com at the time combined humor with “reverse racism” and “political dissidence,” according to Kusz.
In addition to the media’s representation of Brady being “figured through conventional codes of upper-class elitism that are often exclusively associated with, and embodied by, white men,” Kusz also takes issue with the company Brady chooses to keep, mainly focusing on the quarterback’s relationship with Trump, but also pointing out the fact that Brady often takes “boys only” trips with “white majority groups” to the Kentucky Derby.
Kusz claims that since Brady “plays in a sport where 67% of the players are African-American,” the fact that most of the individuals whom he brings with him to the Kentucky Derby are white “tell[s] a more particular story about the racial company he chooses to keep.”
“It is a vision of Brady as a wealthy, white man who unapologetically enjoys, and has even made a habit out of, spending time with other wealthy white men who treasure time ‘with the boys’ over all others,” adding that the choice of the Kentucky Derby “suggests his performance of white masculinity shares much in common with President Trump’s” in that the Derby is a “class-exclusive leisure activity” where most of the attendees are white.
Kusz also focuses on the quarterback’s refusal to denounce his friendship with Trump, which began when Brady judged a Miss USA beauty pageant, or as Kusz puts it, “an activity centered on judging women as sexual objects.” The setting in which they first met, in conjunction with the fact that the two men often golf together, “presumably” spending time together in locker rooms, “begs questions about Brady’s own appetite and tolerance for boorish, misogynistic talk and behavior,” according to Kusz.
Brady’s regimented diet and exercise routines are also supposedly a function of how his “white masculinity is repeatedly constructed,” according to Kusz.
“In short, Brady is positioned as the master of his own fate. His white masculinity is represented as deserving of public veneration not only for his success and self-discipline, but because he enjoys it all without apology or any trace of shame or guilt. In other words, part of Brady’s pub- lic appeal rests in his ability to signify a guilt-free, omnipotent white male who unabashedly embraces the idyllic life that his wealth and white manliness provide.”
Kusz concludes his chapter by reiterating how “cultural representations” of Brady as being “unashamed about privilege” and being “superior and worthy of deference,” as well as his “preferring the pleasures of white fraternal bonds” serve to “buttress American white supremacy” and appeal largely to the “alt-right.”
Question – what does Kyle Cuck hate more about himself? The fact that he’s white, or the fact that he’s a man (technically)?
I’m not even going to exert much energy into this one, since Kyle Kusz didn’t put much thought into writing it. I don’t know what’s lazier – this God awful take, or the fact that professors only have to write one chapter in a book now. I Am Turtleboy had 20 chapters and I did it all by myself while running a business, raising a family, and killing it on the elliptical 5 days a week at Planet Fitness.
All you need to know, is that he said Brady started becoming popular after Trump came to power. You could check out after that sentence. This guy’s obviously never watched a football game in his life, likely because he thinks that masculinity is a bad thing, and he’d rather spend his Sundays at the farmer’s market with his wife or sipping soy tea while reading the Huffington Post in a nice wicker chair. If he did, he’d know that Tom Brady had already won five Super Bowls by the time Trump became President, and won three of them before Obama became President. This story is nothing more than a man who went into this with an opinion already developed (white men are bad) and found a way to incorporate Tom Brady and his otherwise useless erudite vocabulary, in order to make himself sound smart. These are the ramblings of a sad man who’s been insulated in the world of academia and has no idea what people are like outside of it. Then he rambled on about the virtues of socialism, I think. At least that’s what I assume he was getting at with the whole, “Tom Brady didn’t really earn his way to where he is now. He got there because he’s tall and white.” Because everyone knows that slow white guys have an advantage in the NFL.
As soon as you saw this part:
would not seem out of place in Leni Reifenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film
It was clear that this was not a human being worthy of being taken seriously.
But the crazy part is that people actually pay money to go to URI and this guy is the one teaching them. This is why we have so many people complaining about their student loan debts. Because people like Kyle Kusz are supposed to be preparing them for the real world, but by the time they graduate all these kids know how to do is let the world know how ashamed they are of being white (if they’re white), or let the world know they’re victims (if they’re not white).
This was my favorite part though, and I’ll show you why.
Kusz claims that since Brady “plays in a sport where 67% of the players are African-American,” the fact that most of the individuals whom he brings with him to the Kentucky Derby are white “tell[s] a more particular story about the racial company he chooses to keep.”
Kyle Kusz is not on Twitter, which means he’s too cowardly to face the heat. (A real man isn’t on Twitter because he’s blacklisted for life.) However, he is on Facebook, but he only has 41 Facebook friends. Guess how many of them are black?
1 out of 43. Not that we’re playing “who’s got more black friends” here, but since Kyle brought up Brady’s entourage at the Kentucky Derby, his crew looked like the UN compared to Kyle’s friends and family.
Shoutout to Oscar Buchanan – Kyle Kusz’s much angrier and unlovable version of Matthew Slater.
I’d probably be that miserable too if Kyle Kusz was my friend.
I also clicked on Sue Kusz, since she’s the only one with his last name, and the very first post was this one.
I don’t know if they’re related, but this woman’s one of those diehard Trump people, so it looks like we may have a case of sheltered white boy rebelling against his ultra conservative parents who tried way, way, way to overcompensate for his white privilege.
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