Guest Editor’s Introduction
Blackness and Play•TreaAndrea M. RusswormP

lay is as personal as it is contextual, social, political, and culturallylocated. I like to begin sessions of Radical Play (a public humanities program that
I designed to engage Black and Latinx youth around their love of video games)by asking participants to share some of their memories of and associations tothe word “play.” I will inaugurate the American Journal of Play’s first special
issue on Blackness and play by doing the same, by presenting some of my freeflowing associations and memories as a way of situating where and how I enter
this important but often critically deemphasized area of study.
I played my first video games on an Atari 2600 with my young, trash-talking
aunt Franchell. Seven years my senior, Franchell spent an eternity’s worth of extra
lives beating me in Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and virtually any game weplayed. When learning how to play my first card game, Spades, at the age of six,I also learned that the faint of heart (i.e., me) are not constitutionally suited forbeing Spades partners with indomitable Black women players like Franchell andmy mother Tracy. One does not sit idly across the kitchen table from Spades
legends without being thoroughly vetted through lower tier demonstrations ofskillful play (a family truth and Spades rule set that persists to this day).
In outdoor play, I played hard with the boys as the only girl my age in
my apartment complex. When we reenacted scenes from Star Wars, I always
insisted on playing as the Black Han Solo because my oversized pink and whitebike with the wide banana seat made the best Millennium Falcon. During thattime, I began to collect a small colony of Cabbage Patch Kids—all Black likeme except Justin, who had poorly stitched feet and who was clearly a cheaper
replica that my single mother purchased in the Garment District in Los Angeles
at the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze. Once I was old enough to makeextra money babysitting, I collected more Cabbage Patch Kids (along with all129

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P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021of their furniture and accessories), and I began to amass a large display case fullof He-Man and G.I. Joe action figures. I played volubly with my collections, andone of my favorite games was playing school with my silent but captive audienceof Kids and action figures. In this role-playing imaginary, I would always teachthem how to spell and write their names because, when I was born, a whitenurse dared to joke that I would be lucky if I knew how to spell “TreaAndrea
Marie Russworm” before I graduated from high school. (Dear Nurse Karen: Restassured, I knew how to spell my name at the age of three, and my mother madesure I was reading before I started kindergarten. For your listening pleasure, I
recommend Nas’s classic “Hate Me Now.”)
My predilection for collecting as playing has persisted into adulthood.
However, instead of collecting dolls and action figures, now I transgress racial,
gender, and class boundaries by playing in the mostly white, mostly male, andmostly wealthy hobby of wristwatch collecting, where I avidly research and hunt
for rare wearable mechanical art. (By the way, at the time of this writing, Ralph
Ellison’s 1968 Omega Speedmaster is up for sale at Phillips’s New York auction
gallery. It is set to sell for $20,000, an embarrassingly low price when comparedto actor Paul Newman’s watch that sold for $17.8 million. The monetary discrepancy between the two collectors’ items says a great deal about how much
this particular scene of play values Black ingenuity.)
Always the only Black and queer woman on location (besides my spectatingwife), these days I also play in the weird and competitive world of dog sports
where I have trained our two extremely high-energy Airedale Terriers to excel
in timed contests—primal play—by sniffing out rats that have been hidden andencased in tubes and bales of hay. As Nicki Minaj raps in DJ Khaled’s song“Nobody,” the pups and I are “addicted to winning and [we] can’t be benched.”
We are well on our way to achieving the coveted title of Master Rat Hunters. And
then too, as a professor who writes about and teaches classes on video games, I
play at work every day.
But why begin this special issue in an academic journal with all of these
deeply personal accounts of my random acts of play? I have offered a brief version of my own play history here because the multidisciplinary field of playstudies (which has been predicated on notions of liberal humanism) assumes aprivileged and protected subjective whiteness as the default agent of play. One
way to begin to retrench the field’s default assumptions in this regard is finallyto listen to and center the experiences of Black, Indigenous, People of Color(BIPOC). The urgency of this need for specifically centering Black identity inGuest Editor’s Introduction

play studies is perhaps underscored by the fact that the first issue dedicated toBlack identity and play in the journal’s history is also a double issue that includes
five interviews, an extended conversation, and seven articles. The contributionsin this special issue stand in stark contrast to a play studies canon that has neverbeen even marginally self-reflexive about its racial and cultural exclusions (Piaget
1962; Huizinga 1955; Caillois 1961; Winnicott 1971). Contemporary theories
and scholarship about play and games have been plagued by similar practices
of exclusion when it comes to race (Sutton-Smith 1997; Salen and Zimmerman
2004; Juul 2005; Bogost 2016; Sicart 2014). Then, too, as I have written elsewhere, there are ways in which mainstream play practices have been intentionally misogynistic, homophobic, and overtly committed to reanimating white
supremacy (Russworm 2018a).
Despite the evident gross limitations in this field’s history, expansive andever-changing understandings of play have been central to intraracial and global
understandings of Black life. For example, in “The Problem of Amusement”(originally published in 1897) W. E. B. Du Bois argued that play and amusement should never be dismissed as frivolity, as vice, as morally corruptive (DuBois 2011). On the contrary, as Du Bois envisioned, amusement and play wereabsolutely fundamental to Black progress, health, and wellness; intentionally
excluding play in Black communal spaces and in the wider context of American
life was not only a problem of increasing concern at the dawn of the twentiethcentury, such practices were patently detrimental to Black individual and collective survival. Du Bois adamantly defended any activity that contributed tononwork-related pleasure, including dancing, playing cards, going to the theater,
drinking, smoking, singing, kissing, playing football, and excelling at billiards.
The “problem” Du Bois perceptively sought to address was the way in whichplay had been relegated to or monitored by social institutions like schools andthe Black church. Du Bois also directly criticized structural and systemic preclusions of Black play by noting that Black Americans continued to face “exclusionfrom the public amusements of most great cities” (134). As Du Bois concludedin this important but lesser known essay, restricting play compromises “thenatural joyousness and pleasure-seeking” that are critical for Black people tolive a life in balance (136).
Black play framed by Du Bois as amusement, pleasure, and joy—the very
components of what he deemed “a people’s recreation”—has been dynamicallyadvanced by scholars who have been writing about Blackness and diffuse notionsof play across a variety of fields. Simply put: play studies is late to the party when131

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it comes to centering Black identity. Specifically, scholarly studies of Black earlychildhood development (Weinberger and Starkley 1994), studies of Black humorand satire (Haggins 2007), histories of Black players in organized sports (Wigginsand Miller 2003; Sheppard 2020), and explorations of Black media production,reception, and fandom (Warner 2015) are imminently relevant but remain unengaged in studies of play. Similarly, even the work of scholars who directly write
about Blackness, play, and games remain in the margins of citational practice(Everett 2009; Gray 2014; Murray 2017; Russworm and Blackmon 2020; Brock
2020; Trammell 2020).
Just as Du Bois was concerned about the ways in which Black play might
be policed and prohibited, several of the articles in this issue grapple with theways in which play has been used to subjugate Blackness. In this regard, we need
not look far to discern how both the theorization and practice of play has beenmarked by what Franz Fanon (1967) would have described as the “fact of Blackness” or what Saidiya Hartman (2008) has called the “the afterlife of slavery.”That is, since Black identity continues to function as a “pejorative social inscription” that seems to justify “alienation and exclusion” (Russworm 2019), playing
while Black can be life threatening. Evidence of the inequities that inform thesocial and structural barriers to Black play include the instances in the UnitedStates when police have killed Black children who were playing (Tamir Rice, agetwelve); the time when a Black cosplayer was murdered while carrying a decorative sword (Darrien Hunt, age twenty-two); the viral videos of Black pool parties, birthday parties, and cookouts interrupted by gatekeeping bystanders; thepractices of a school-to-prison pipeline where Black children are more likely tohave their recess breaks replaced by in-school detention; the many times overwhen Black adults are forcibly and violently excluded from fan conventions
and other adult play spaces; and the effects of the COVID-19 global pandemic,
which rages on as I write and continues to exacerbate inequities and complicate
any notions of play as safe and carefree.
While such barriers and contexts are importantly explicated throughout
this special issue, so too are the contravening accounts of Black people playing
creatively and disruptively in spite of systemic oppression. The contributors
importantly and urgently reframe Blackness and play in light of all the surprisingly hopeful, ingenious, and joyful accounts that also define the intersection ofBlack identity and play. From linguistic play, jumping double Dutch, playing thedozens, and hosting dance parties to Spades tournaments, memes on Twitter,and modding video games, the forms, methods, and tools that comprise BlackGuest Editor’s Introduction

play are infinite. The more complete account of the state of Blackness at play isexpansive and generative in ways that stretch beyond imagination.
The ways in which this special issue frames a constant tension between
perils of Blackness at play, on the one hand, and pleasures of Blackness atplay, on the other, warrant a concluding explanation of the use of the word
“Blackness” here. Throughout this introduction I have mostly used Blackness
and Black identity synonymously, but “Blackness” is more fluid than a single
racial, national, or cultural categorization. The term has most recently been
framed in Black studies and scholarship on media aesthetics as a global designation of the Black Diaspora, “a liberatory formation” that is deliberately
intended to subvert “white supremacist systems that seek to restrict the movement of Black bodies, silence Black voices, and quell Black thought” (Wade2017, 36). Hence, the use of the term Blackness in these pages also implies
that there is no essential Black subjectivity—thus unnerving and expanding
our conceptions of the social construction of race. Reframed in this special
issue, then, Blackness at play is “an immense and defiant joy” (Perry 2020, n.p.)that portends to decenter the (white) elephant on the play studies’ playground.

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