Somehow I have ended up being a golf mom. If you know me, golf is NOT something I would ever associate with on my own. But, when my middle son was 10 he had the opportunity to be sponsored to join a golf club… and he fell in love with it. Then my youngest son did, too.
To me, golf had always represented an exclusive, privileged pastime. Historian Amber Njoh (2008) explains that the “need to distinguish the colonized from the colonizers commanded importance in both British and French colonial Africa.” Segregation was key to accomplishing this. In African colonies, Njoh explains, Europeans lived in segregated communities (‘enclaves’) where golf courses were prominent features of their upper class white culture.
However, in his book Game of Privilege, golf historian Lane Demas (2017) traces the involvement of African Americans in shaping the sport in the US from the 19th century on. In 1925, for example, the United Golfers Association (UGA) was founded and ran an all-Black national golf tour that paralleled the all-white PGA. In 1961, the PGA removed its white-only clause and, according to Demas, efforts to desegregate golf courses occurred alongside civil rights efforts to desegregate American schools. Some even went to jail fighting for access to golf.
Black engagement with golf peaked in the 1970s. Demas explains that with the decline of caddying (a vital pathway into the game) and ‘white flight’/red-lining (golf courses moved further away from predominantly Black neighbourhoods), it was clear that golf would not become the great multicultural sport that enthusiasts had hoped for. But the key point of Demas’ book for me is that golf does not belong to the privileged. It’s a subtle shift in how I understand it, but an important one.
What does this have to do with my art?
I use painting to ‘think through’ social justice issues, to flip the paradigm and centre the stories that challenge the dominant ones. Expressive painting, where I am not bound to any rules, gives me the freedom to express myself as I think through these things.
Cheers!
Beth