ABSTRACT
The science of Boxing is now become so fashionable, that some of the first personages in the kingdom are known to patronize it. This chapter examines the social practices, social relations and implications of white-collar boxing. It considers its history, the economic possibilities that it offers, and how trainers and their clients understand and operate within this new pugilistic industry. The chapter argues that a specific racial and gender identity is constructed actively through the commercial exchange of the training session, and that blackness is a site of cultural capital that is valued and exchanged, and, simultaneously, engenders new forms of antiblack racism. When white upper-middle-class and upper-class professionals pay for the expertise of ‘authentic’ black trainers, they are imagining and consuming a notion of blackness defined by the body, narratives of suffering, histories of criminality, and experiences of racial inequality.
