Ricky and Stick Icky: Marijuana, Sport, and the Legibility/Illegibility of Black Masculinity Nikolas Dickerson University of Lincoln In this article, I examine the ways the popular press, and two sport documentaries construct narratives of Ricky Williams’ marijuana use, early retirement, and return to the National Football League. I argue that all of the texts in question, work to produce a dominant reading of Williams, as someone who is difficult to define, and it is because of inability to put Williams’s identity into a box, that his marijuana use, “strange” personality, and early retirement is used to shoe-horn him into tropes of the bad black athlete. Nonetheless, this paper draws on Mark Anthony Neal’s concept of illegible and legible black masculinity to argue that a re-scripting of these narratives can be used to imagine alternative forms of black masculinity the emphasizes empathy, sensitivity, emotional maturity, and a rejection of domination and material wealth. This analysis is situated within the changing landscape of marijuana legislation and the racial inequity in arrest rates for marijuana. In November of 2016, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada legalized recreational marijuana, while Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota passed legislation to allow for the medicinal use of marijuana. As of July 2017, 37 states and the District of Columbia having legislation that allows for the medici- nal or recreational use of marijuana. Coinciding with the increasing legalization of marijuana, at both the recreational and medical level, 61% of Americans are now in favor of marijuana legalization (Ingraham, 2016). The changing attitudes towards the legalization of the plant and legalization of marijuana in certain states suggests that prohibition of marijuana may be coming to an end. At the same time, U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is currently advocating to repeal and outlaw legal marijuana. Thus, despite the growing challenges to marijuana prohibition there is still a large effort to keep the plant illegal. These tensions highlight the contradictory and complex narratives marijuana is engulfed in. After all, in the United States, marijuana is legal for recrea- tional use, legal for medicinal use, and a source of comedy in stoner films such as Cheech and Chong: Up in Smoke, Half Baked, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Yet at the same time, it is also illegal at the federal level in all 50 states. The hazy landscape of marijuana reform creates a context where marijuana use is legal for some but illegal for others. This contradiction is clearly visible within racial disparities of arrest rates for marijuana. A 2013 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report documented, for example, that while marijuana use among blacks and whites is relatively the same, blacks are almost four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/ aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel3.pdf). In Colorado, where marijuana is legal for recreational and medicinal use, the arrest rates for whites between the ages of 10–17 has fallen by almost 10 percent from 2012–2014, while the arrest rate for Latino and Black teens has risen by 20 percent and 50 percent respectively (Markus, 2016). Thus, while the legalization of marijuana has opened space to conceptualize marijuana outside negative stereotypes, racial minorities are still suffering at a higher rate than white Americans when it comes to the enforcement of the prohibition of the plant. The inequities within the current enforcement of marijuana prohibition stem from drug policies that are designed to control groups that are situated as dangerous or a threat to general society (Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, & Andreas, 1996). Regarding mari- juana, the perceived need to safeguard society from marijuana users is embedded within discourses of race, gender, and nation. During the 1930s, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) used yellow journalism and propaganda films that drew on fears of the racial- ized body by depicting black and Mexican marijuana users as violent, criminal, and hyper-sexual to build support for marijuana prohibition (Provine, 2007). White middle-class women were also situated within these narratives to further highlight the danger of marijuana and the racialized other. Anti-marijuana propaganda characterized white women as innocent individuals who were susceptible to marijuana pushers, and once under the influence of the plant, these women could easily violate norms of sexual respectability by having sex with men of color (Boyd, 2008). More specifically, these potential acts of sexual deviance were mapped onto nationalistic and racialized discourses about the superiority of the white race, and white women birthing mixed race babies threatened these narratives (Boyd, 2008). The con- struction of these early anti-marijuana narratives relied on dehu- manizing representations of racial minorities and women. Black bodies were portrayed as either a threat to the social order or to the purity of the white race through sexual transgressions with white women. These narrow constructions of marijuana users would expand during the 1960s. White marijuana users were depicted as young individuals who were good people that engaged in a minor transgression by smoking marijuana in popular culture (Himmelstein, 1983). Such depictions coincided with the changing of a marijuana possession charge from a felony to a misdemeanor (Gerber, 2004). The shift in meanings of the marijuana user—as well as the changes in criminal policy—symbolizes the humanity Dickerson is with the Dept. of Sport and Exercise Science, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, United Kingdom. Address author correspondence to Nikolas Dickerson at ndickerson@lincoln.ac.uk. 386 Sociology of Sport Journal, 2018, 35, 386-393 https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2017-0033 © 2018 Human Kinetics, Inc. ARTICLE