essay on race in sports

Racism in sport: why it comes to the surface when teams lose

Assistant Professor in Cultural History, Utrecht University

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Rachel Anne Gillett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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In the penalty shoot-out that saw Italy defeat England in the UEFA Euro 2020 final, the skill of the goalkeepers was overshadowed by the perceived failure of the English players who missed their shots. Three young players – Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka – were subjected to torrents of anti-black racist abuse .

One of the worst things about this racism was how predictable it was. Racism has long been found in European sports , and is intensified when players of colour are put in the spotlight during major international competitions. A tweet in response to the harassment captures this phenomenon: “When you score, you’re English. When you miss, you’re an immigrant.”

It wasn’t only English players who experienced such treatment during the tournament. French player Kylian Mbappé faced online abuse when Swiss goalie Yann Somer successfully defended his penalty in the second-round clash that sent les bleus home. Racist abuse resurfaces constantly.

The massive increase in the visibility and popularity of sports over the past century, thanks to television, radio and the internet, has intensified the way that fans relate to players as local and national representatives. Athletes become the face of a nation, and many of us pin patriotic hopes, fears and frustrations on them. See this oft-cited quote from historian Eric Hobsbawm about the power of football to capture national feelings: “The … imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.”

When visibly diverse teams win world cups, it is seen as an anti-racist triumph. It is one reason South Africa’s win in the 1995 rugby world cup was so symbolic, coming so soon after the collapse of apartheid. The French men’s football team inspired waves of pride in French multiculturalism after their 1998 and 2018 wins. This was symbolised in the slogan Black-Blanc-Beur (Black-White-North African) – a riff on bleu-blanc-rouge (blue, white and red) the colours of the French flag.

But the idea of achieving racial harmony through diverse sports teams has sparked controversy . Historian Laurent Dubois detailed how the national joy of winning a tournament glosses over difficult histories of racism and exclusion in his book on France’s “soccer empire” .

Also, the celebrations last only as long as the win. Research has shown that when visibly diverse teams lose, existing exclusionary and racist nationalist undercurrents rise to the surface, manifesting as denial that players of colour belong to the nation. If the team is not “us”, then “we” didn’t lose. It wasn’t the nation, or “my” people that failed, it was this interloper.

This can take different forms in nations where white people aren’t the majority, but the underlying vitriol is the same. For example, Muslim Indian sports stars have been subjected to such abuse in their own countries, as have Japanese players with black heritage .

Racism and reality

Such abuse is a particularly ugly mix of grief, fandom, patriotism, rage and scapegoating. In the case of the English players, it denies the reality of their birth, citizenship and cultural upbringing in England – and the history that has made the country, and Europe more widely, a profoundly mixed and ethnically diverse space.

When fans engage in racist abuse, they are targeting players because they are seen as “not belonging”. Perhaps rejecting them feels safer than rejecting people who share an imaginary “genuine” white national identity, and strengthens a sense of superiority. Doing this requires both forgetting and reinvention, and suggests deep insecurity about one’s own identity.

Lilian Thuram’s assessment of the racism he received from so-called “fans” was more generous. As Dubois wrote ,

He has repeatedly said and written that the problem is simply that they are caught up in a way of thinking, and that they haven’t had the opportunity to escape that.

Sociologists, historians, art critics, anti-racist activists and media scholars would agree with Thuram about the scale of the problem. There is a long, deep and pervasive tradition of designating players of colour in Europe as “other” than the norm and as being more “physical” or less “strategic”.

It is no coincidence that only 3.9% of coaches in Europe’s 14 biggest leagues have an ethnic minority background. Researcher Irene Blum and anti-racism activist John Oliveira noted that this replicates age-old historic patterns of black labourers and white owners supported by scientific racism, slavery and colonialism.

Could we, then, move beyond the abusive denial of history into a more mature and joyous fandom and national pride? A mural of Marcus Rashford – defaced by racists then transformed by fans and supporters into a moving site of honour and respect – bears witness to this potential.

It remains to be seen whether – and how – government will take action. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has suggested that fans spreading racism online could be banned from matches. His critics have accused him of hypocrisy , saying Johnson helped stoke such responses by refusing to condemn booing over players taking the knee.

Perhaps this latest ugliness will achieve a transformation from scientific reports and policy documents to action and structural change. That would take commitment from (social) media, funders, coaches, players, training academies, and also from fans. It might take penalties to achieve, but it is a noble goal.

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Race and sports.

Race and sports have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination in sport, but these were largely descriptive. Two exceptions to this were C. L. R. James’s critical reading of the role of cricket in shaping West Indian political identity in the anti colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and Harry Edwards’s important account of the radicalization of the black athlete in the context of America’s Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and black nationalist politics of the 1970s.

Sport and Race as Social Phenomena

Racial science and empire, sport, race, and the struggle for freedom, stereotypes and the return of racial science in sport, sport and race today.

In the 1970s and 1980s sport sociologists began to investigate continuing racial discrimination in sport with a liberal focus on issues of equity and opportunity, normally using quantitative methods to measure the degree of meritocracy in sports. More recently, scholars have used cultural studies approaches to examine questions of representation and ideology in sport media texts, and ethnographic methods to understand racial identity construction in sport and its intersections with class, nation, gender, and sexuality.

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‘‘Sport’’ and ‘‘race’’ are sociologically problematic because, at first sight, both appear to be aspects of human life that are immediately knowable and products of a natural physicality that precedes socialization. ‘‘Race,’’ the division of humanity into biologically discrete groups based on phenotypical markers, is commonly believed to be the result of an inherent, fixed, and natural distinction between actually existing groups. But sociologists and biologists alike have demonstrated that the supposed ‘‘natural’’ division of humanity is unrelated to underlying genotypical distinctions. Instead, racial distinctions are based on arbitrarily chosen physical features, such as skin color and hair texture, that are used to demarcate people into groups. Thus, ‘‘race’’ is a complex system of representation learned through socialization, and then acted upon as if these distinctions were ‘‘real.’’ In short, ‘‘race’’ appears to be a biological fact of absolute physical difference when it is actually a socially constructed and culturally reproduced set of ideas and beliefs.

Similarly, ‘‘sport’’ appears to be a purely physical activity that is separate from the wider divisions and structures of society. Although we might immediately recognize the social conditions of education, cultural capital, and aesthetic discernment that frame the production and consumption of other cultural forms, sport is commonly seen as an activity that is ‘‘simply’’ physical and open to all regardless of class, gender, race, or sexuality. Barriers in sports, it is believed, exist only in connection with the physical abilities and motivation of individuals. This view of sport as ‘‘free’’ from structural constraints means that sport’s role in maintaining and reproducing power relations is underestimated.

Sociologists of sport have sought to explain how the sports we choose to play, the ways that we play them, the meanings we give to and take from them, and the material and social rewards associated with participation and success are intimately related to the structure and organization of societies. Given this, it requires great sociological imagination to go beyond such everyday understandings to reveal how both race and sport, far from being universal, naturally occurring phenomena, are actually the result of temporally bound and historically specific human action. In short, the interrelationship between race and sport is a deeply sociological articulation with profound political consequences for how we generally understand racial difference and who has access to sport itself.

There is an interesting historical parallel between the emergence of the scientific foundation for ideas of racial difference and the formation of organized, codified, competitive sport. Racial science – the scientific belief in the inherent superiority of white Europeans – developed into a coherent set of ideas during the nineteenth century. In Britain this was the period when sports such as rugby football, cricket, and soccer were institutionalized, as emerging governing bodies formalized rules and assumed authority over how these sports should be played.

The nineteenth century was also the high point for European imperialism, when the idea of race emerged to justify conquest and exploitation. Countries such as Britain sought to maintain their power over their colonies in Africa, South and East Asia, and the Caribbean by a twin process of undermining and destroying local cultures while attempting to ‘‘civilize’’ native peoples by the imposition of British customs and ways of life. In this context of imperialist expansion, buttressed by notions of inherent white European supremacy, sport came to be seen as a way of educating and socializing colonized peoples into more civilized forms of modernity. Cricket served this purpose in the English speaking Caribbean, South Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and in the white settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia. The notion of ‘‘cricket, the classics, and Christianity’’ was seen by British Victorian elites as a way to bring order and civilization to the British Empire – at once a form of control over the masses and a way to inculcate them into the values and norms of an imperial notion of Britishness.

Elsewhere, soccer was ‘‘exported’’ by Europeans to Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. In this context, indigenous games and pastimes, suppressed since the first European expeditions overseas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, faded away or were gradually replaced with new sporting imports. For example, the game of ulama de cadera, or hip ulama – ulama meaning ‘‘ball game’’ – was once popular throughout Mesoamerica, but began to die away after the Spanish outlawed what they perceived to be a pagan game with inappropriate rituals, such as decapitation for the losers. The game itself, which is similar to volleyball but requiring the use of the hip rather than the hand, dates to around 1500 BC. Although it still survives in parts of Mexico, it is no longer central to Mexican culture, except as a focus for anthropologists, archeologists, and tourists. Soccer is now the national sport of Mexico, as it is throughout most of Central and South America, and most Mexicans have no idea of what ulama, one of the world’s oldest sports, actually involved.

At the start of the twentieth century notions of white European supremacy were simply assumed to be an objective, unquestionable fact. While Africans were often seen to be ‘‘animal like’’ in their nature, it was still assumed that whites were intellectually and physically superior to all other ‘‘races of man.’’ The newly emerging international sports arenas were one public space where this obvious superiority was seen to be confirmed. Given the importance of sport in reproducing dominant forms of hegemonic masculinity, it is not surprising that boxing, and heavyweight boxing in particular, came to be regarded as one of the prime avenues for demonstrating the attributes of white male strength, power, and courage. The symbolic significance of black and white athletes competing against each other in public as equals, and the fear of black success in the sporting arena, was such that sporting encounters began to take on wider political significance.

In this context Jack Johnson’s successes in the boxing arena heralded a pattern of racial contestation that was to structure relations on the world’s sporting fields for over a century. In 1908 Johnson became the first black World Heavyweight Champion. Given the racial politics of the Jim Crow era, Johnson’s victory caused widespread consternation within wider white society and jubilation among blacks. The search then went out for a ‘‘great White hope’’ to reclaim the mantle of masculine supremacy from the black Texan. In order to prevent such threats to the symbolic racial order, the so called ‘‘color line’’ was redrawn when Johnson eventually lost his title which once again pre vented black boxers from competing against whites. The later achievements in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s of African American athletes such as the boxer Joe Louis, the athlete Jesse Owens, the baseball player Jackie Robinson, and the tennis player Althea Gibson, were subsequently seen by black people throughout the African diaspora as victories in the struggle for freedom from racial oppression.

Sport as a form of political resistance can be seen in the example of cricket in the Caribbean. While the imposition of European sporting forms led to both the extinction of indigenous games and an attempt at colonial governance over local populations, these very same conditions led to sports becoming a site for cultural contestation and ideological struggle. Campaigns for equality within the game of cricket thus paralleled wider struggles for freedom and emancipation from colonial rule. Thus, the campaign to allow a black player to captain the West Indies national cricket team – previously only white West Indians were deemed intelligent enough to assume such leadership roles – was achieved in 1960 when the captaincy was finally given to Frank Worrell. Increasingly, from the 1950s onwards, former colonized countries gained their independence, giving further impetus to the symbolic significance of international sporting competitions, especially against their former colonial masters.

The politics of protest through sport continued into the 1960s and 1970s as sport became an important vehicle through which racial oppression and injustice could be highlighted. The ‘‘black gloved’’ protest at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by Tommie Smith and John Carlos similarly drew attention to the human rights abuses that were taking place in America and elsewhere. Their simple but powerful protest also portrayed the ideological role of black athletes who were now able to compete in international arenas for western countries; when athletes succeeded on the field they were hailed as heroes at the same time that black people were denied full rights as citizens. The radical black athletes of the 1960s, best personified perhaps in the figure of Muhammad Ali, revealed the previously ignored racial politics of sport. This enabled a generation of black athletes to speak out, as previous generations dared not do, against discrimination in sports and society at large.

Nowhere was racial oppression more explicit than in the apartheid regime of South Africa, where a minority white population held complete power and control over the country’s majority black African population. The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement led to a sporting boycott of the regime. This called attention to the suffering of South Africa’s black population and it assisted the anti apartheid movement by exerting political pressure on the South African government. By further isolating South Africa from normal international relations, the boycott contributed to apartheid’s eventual collapse in the early 1990s. Thus, sport – in Caribbean cricket squares, American sporting arenas, and South African rugby pitches, among other sites – has been central to the wider story of black diasporic struggles for freedom throughout the twentieth century.

A persistent legacy of nineteenth century racial science is the ideology of absolute racial difference and its alleged effects on human behavior. While notions of a direct biological link between race, intelligence, and the propensity to commit criminal acts has been effectively critiqued, the belief that a person’s ‘‘race’’ is linked to abilities on the sports field remains strong. For example, using limited and often contradictory evidence, it continues to be asserted that ‘‘West African blacks’’ are genetically predisposed to power and speed events such as sprinting and jumping, while ‘‘East African blacks’’ are meant to have special properties that allow them to dominate endurance events like long distance running.

Stereotypes attributing to black people natural advantages compared to whites when it comes to running and jumping have affected structural and strategic dimensions of sports. Sociological research since the 1970s has shown how ‘‘stacking’’ – the disproportionate placing of black athletes into certain positions assumed to be more suited to their ‘‘natural’’ abilities – has occurred in many sports from American football to rugby league and rugby union. Linked to stacking is the concept of ‘‘centrality,’’ which suggests that certain positions are more important to a team’s chances of winning as these require players to make cognitive decisions, as opposed to merely reflexive or instinctive physical reactions to opponents’ movements. These ‘‘central’’ positions are thus seen to be more suited to white players who have a greater ability to ‘‘read the game,’’ thus relegating black players to positions believed to require pure physical ability and little if any cognitive ability. In American football, for instance, this supported a stacking pattern in which there was a disproportionate number of white quarterbacks and black wide receivers. This pattern reproduced a racial ideology focused on innate biological differences and led people to overlook socially produced conditions in which coaches and school teachers selected and encouraged players from different racial backgrounds to play in certain positions. Even when stacking patterns have become less apparent, the race logic used in the sports media recategorizes players by, for example, suggesting that ‘‘new’’ black quarterbacks are somehow more ‘‘athletic’’ than their white counterparts, and play in a more ‘‘physical’’ way.

Black success in certain elite sports is often ‘‘explained’’ by these alleged natural differences, further reifying the idea of race. This undermines black athletic excellence by implicitly linking it with an inherent genetic disposition shared by the entire ‘‘black race’’ and ignoring the dedication, hard work, and ability of individual athletes who happened to be racialized as black. Such stereotypes persist in the face of evidence to the contrary. For example, the record breaking times of British long distance runner Paula Radcliffe or the ‘‘super human’’ achievements of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong are often seen by scientists and journalists in terms of dedication and their almost fanatical commitment to training to compete at the highest level. Rarely is white achievement in sport explained by biological or genetic racial attributes. This preserves the myth of black athletic superiority as well as ideological notions of ‘‘natural’’ racial difference. This illustrates the power of hegemonic racial ideology in framing how people interpret success or failure in the world’s sporting arenas and how the discredited legacy of racial science continues to inform sports science discourse today.

Success in sport has been one way for subordinated racial and ethnic minority groups to register protests and fight discrimination in the wider battles for recognition and inclusion. In the 2000 Sydney Olympics, for example, Cathy Freeman became the first Australian Aborigine to win an Olympic gold medal, and was widely seen as a symbol of Australia’s attempts to come to terms with its racist treatment of Aboriginal peoples. A century after Jack Johnson’s arrival on the international boxing scene, black athletes now compete successfully in sports such as tennis and golf that were previously the preserve of whites only. The achievements of sportsmen and women of color have only recently been recognized as part of the wider struggle for racial justice and equality.

A danger is that the perceived level playing field of sport can serve an ideological function by leading people to assume that western societies in particular have achieved a meritocracy that transcends the structural correlates of a racialized social order. Similarly, rather than using their position to speak out on issues of racial injustice and social inequality, contemporary millionaire black celebrity athletes often align themselves with commercial programs bringing them monetary rewards. However, research continues to show that, despite diversity on many playing fields, the power positions in the structure of sport organizations are controlled by white men who coach, manage, and own teams. Similarly, the abuse of athletes of color by spectators and occasionally by fellow players and managers continues to be a feature of domestic and international competitions in sports such as soccer. The myth of race is sustained by the apparent ‘‘obviousness’’ of racial difference in sports performance, while the continuance of racism is often disavowed.

The centrality of sport as a cultural practice in many nations and the pervasiveness of ideas about racial difference mean that the complex articulation of ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘sport’’ will persist well into the twenty first century. Critical research on the ways that sports serve as sites for ‘‘race related’’ identity formation for all racialized minorities as well as majority white populations is needed in order to develop more nuanced and effective anti racist strategies. Research into non English speaking contexts is also required to explain the many forms of racism that exist alongside the local and national context of particular sporting cultures.

References:

• Bass, A. (2002) Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• Beckles, H. & Stoddard, B. (Eds.) (1995) Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. Manchester University Press, Manchester.
• Bloom, J. & Willard, M. (Eds.) (2002) Sport Matters: Race, Recreation and Culture. New York University Press, New York.
• Booth, D. (1998) The Race Game: Sport and Politics in South Africa. Frank Cass, London.
• Carrington, B. & McDonald, I. (Eds.) (2001) ‘‘Race,’’ Sport and British Society. Routledge, London.
• Edwards, H. (1969) The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Free Press, New York.
• Guttmann, A. (1996) Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. Columbia University Press, Columbia.
• Hartmann, D. (2003) Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Hoberman, J. (1997) Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Mairner Books, Boston.
• Ismond, P. (2003) Black and Asian Athletes in British Sport and Society: A Sporting Chance? Palgrave, Basingstoke.
• James, C. L. R. (1994 [1963]) Beyond a Boundary. Serpent’s Tail, London.
• Mangan, J. A. & Ritchie, A. (Eds.) (2005) Ethnicity, Sport, Identity: Struggles for Status. Routledge, London.
• Marqusee, M. (2005) Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. Verso, London.
• Melling, P. & Collins, T. (Eds.) (2004) The Glory of Their Times: Crossing the Colour Line in Rugby League. Vertical Editions, Skipton.
• Miller, P. & Wiggins, D. (Eds.) (2004) Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth Century America. Routledge, London.
• Shropshire, K. (1996) In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. New York University Press, New York.
• Vasili, P. (2000) Colouring Over the White Line: The History of Black Footballers in Britain. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh.
• Williams, J. (2001) Cricket and Race. Berg, Oxford.

Back to  Sociology of Sport .

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11.7: Sports, Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity

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ANTHROPOLOGY MEETS POPULAR CULTURE

Throughout this chapter, I have stated that the concept of race is a socially constructed idea and explained why biologically distinct human races do not exist. Still, many in the United States cling to a belief in the existence of biological racial groups (regardless of their racial and ethnic backgrounds). Historically, the nature of popular sports in the United States has been offered as “proof” of biological differences between races in terms of natural athletic skills and abilities. In this regard, the world of sports has served as an important social institution in which notions of biological racial differences become reified—mistakenly assumed as objective, real, and factual. Specifically, many Americans have noted the large numbers of African Americans in Olympic sprinting, the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and interpreted their disproportionate number as perceived “evidence” or “proof” that “blacks” have unique genes, muscles, bone structures, and/or other biological qualities that make them superior athletes relative to people from other racial backgrounds—that they are “naturally gifted” runners and jumpers and thus predominate in sports.

This topic sparked intense media attention in 2012 during the lead-up to that year’s Olympics in London. Michael Johnson, a retired African American track star who won gold medals at the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Summer Olympic Games, declared that “black” Americans and West Indians (of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Barbadian, and other Caribbean descent) dominated international sprinting competitions because they possessed a “superior athletic gene” that resulted from slavery: “All my life, I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations . . . slavery has benefited descendants like me. I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.” [33] Others have previously expressed similar ideas, such as writer John Entine, who suggested in his book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It (2000), that the brutal nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and harsh conditions of slavery in the Americas produced slaves who could move faster and who had stronger, more durable bodies than the general population and that those supposedly hardier bodies persisted in today’s African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, giving them important athletic advantages over others. In a similar vein, former CBS sportscaster Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder claimed, on the eve of Super Bowl XXII in 1988, that African Americans comprised the majority of NFL players because they were “bred that way” during slavery as a form of selective breeding between bigger and stronger slaves much like had been done with racehorses. Snyder was fired from CBS shortly after amid a tidal wave of controversy and furor. Racial stereotypes regarding perceptions of innate differences in athletic ability were a major theme in the 1992 comedy film White Men Can’t Jump , which starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as an inter-racial pair of basketball street hustlers.

Despite such beliefs, even among people who otherwise do not harbor racist sentiments, the notion of innate “black” athletic supremacy is obviously misguided, fallacious, and self-contradictory when we examine the demographic composition of the full range of sports in the United States rather than focusing solely on a few extremely popular sports that pay high salaries and have long served as inspiration for upward mobility and fame in a society in which educational and employment opportunities for lower-income and impoverished minority groups (often concentrated in inner-city communities) have rarely been equivalent to those of middle-class and affluent “whites” living in small towns and suburban communities. Take the myth that “blacks” have an innately superior jumping ability. The idea that “white men can’t jump” stems from the relatively small number of white American players in the NBA and has been reified by the fact that only one “white” player (Brent Barry of the Los Angeles Clippers in 1996) has ever won the NBA’s annual slam-dunk contest. However, the stereotype would be completely inverted if we look at the demographic composition and results of high jump competitions. The high jump is arguably a better gauge of leaping ability than a slam-dunk contest since it requires raising the entire body over a horizontal bar and prohibits extension of the arms overhead, thus diminishing any potential advantage from height. For decades, both the men’s and the women’s international high jump competitions have been dominated by white athletes from the United States and Europe. Yet no one attributes their success to “white racial genes.” American society does not have a generational history of viewing people who are socially identified as “white” in terms of body type and physical prowess as it does with African Americans.

The same dynamic is at play if we compare basketball with volleyball. Both sports require similar sets of skills, namely, jumping, speed, agility, endurance, and outstanding hand-eye coordination. Nevertheless, beach volleyball has tended to be dominated by “white” athletes from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe while indoor volleyball is more “racially balanced” (if we assume that biological human races actually exist) since the powerhouse indoor volleyball nations are the United States, China, Japan, Brazil, Cuba, and Russia.

Thus, a variety of factors, including cultural affinities and preferences, social access and opportunities, existence of a societal infrastructure that supports youth participation and development in particular sports, and the degree of prestige assigned to various sports by nations, cultures, and ethnic communities, all play significant roles in influencing the concentration of social and/or ethnic groups in particular sports. It is not a matter of individual or group skills or talents; important socio-economic dimensions shape who participates in a sport and who excels. Think about a sport in which you have participated or have followed closely. What social dynamics do you associate with that sport in terms of the gender, race/ethnicity, and social class of the athletes who predominate in it?

For additional insight into the important role that social dynamics play in shaping the racial/ethnic, social class, and cultural dimensions of athletes, let us briefly consider three sports: basketball, boxing, and football. While basketball is a national sport played throughout the United States, it also has long been associated with urban/inner-city environments, and many professional American basketball players have come from working class and lower-income backgrounds. This trend dates to the 1930s, when Jewish players and teams dominated professional basketball in the United States. That dominance was commonly explained by the media in terms of the alleged “scheming,” “flashiness,” and “artful dodging” nature of the “Jewish culture.” In other words, Jews were believed to have a fundamental talent for hoops that explained their over-representation in the sport. In reality, most Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century lived in working class, urban neighborhoods such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago where basketball was a popular sport in the local social fabric of working-class communities. [34]

By 1992, approximately 90 percent of NBA players were African American, and the league’s demographics once again fueled rumors that a racial/ethnic group was “naturally gifted” in basketball. However, within ten short years, foreign-born players largely from Eastern European nations such as Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey accounted for nearly 20 percent of the starting line-ups of NBA teams. The first player selected in the 2002 NBA draft was seven-foot six-inch center Yao Ming, a native of Shanghai, China, and by the early 2000s, the United States had lost some of its traditional dominance of international basketball as several nations began to catch up because of the tremendous globalization of basketball’s popularity.

Like basketball, boxing has been an urban sport popular among working-class ethnic groups. During the early twentieth century, both amateur and professional boxing in the United States were dominated by European immigrant groups, particularly the Irish, Italians, and Jewish Americans. As with basketball, which inspired the “hoop dreams” of inner-city youths to escape poverty by reaching the professional ranks, boxing provided sons of lower-income European immigrants with dreams of upward mobility, fame, and fortune. In fact, it was one of the few American sports that thrived during the Great Depression, attracting a wave of impoverished young people who saw pugilism as a ticket to financial security. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, intra-European ethnic rivalries (Irish vs. Italian, Italian vs. Jewish) were common in U.S. boxing; fighters were seen as quasi-ambassadors of their respective neighborhoods and ethnic communities.

The demographic composition of boxers began to change in the latter half of the twentieth century when formerly stigmatized and racialized Eastern European immigrant groups began to be perceived simply as “white” and mainstream. They attained middle-class status and relocated to the newly established suburbs, and boxing underwent a profound racial and ethnic transition. New urban minority groups—African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans who moved into inner-city neighborhoods vacated by Europeans began to dominate boxing.

Finally, consider football, which has surpassed baseball as the most popular spectator sport in the United States and is popular with all social classes, races/ethnicities, and regions. Collegiate and professional football rosters are also undergoing a demographic change; a growing number of current National College Athletic Association and NFL players were born outside the mainland United States. Since the 1980s, many athletes from American Samoa, a U.S. territory in the South Pacific, have joined U.S. football teams. A boy in American Samoa is an astounding 56 times more likely to make the NFL than a boy born and raised on the U.S. mainland! [35] American Samoa’s rapid transformation into a gridiron powerhouse is the result of several inter-related factors that dramatically increased the appeal of the sport across the tiny island, including the cultural influence of American missionaries who introduced football. Expanding migration of Samoans to Hawaii and California in recent decades has also fostered their interest in football, which has trickled back to the South Pacific, and the NFL is working to expand the popularity of football in American Samoa. [36] Similarly, Major League Baseball has been promoting baseball in the Dominican Republic, Korea, and Japan in recent years.

Issues of race, racism, and ethnic relations remain among the most contentious social and political topics in the United States and throughout the world. Anthropology offers valuable information to the public regarding these issues, as anthropological knowledge encourages individuals to “think outside the box” about race and ethnicity. This “thinking outside the box” includes understanding that racial and ethnic categories are socially constructed rather than natural, biological divisions of humankind and realizing that the current racial and ethnic categories that exist in the United States today do not necessarily reflect categories used in other countries. Physical anthropologists, who study human evolution, epidemiology, and genetics, are uniquely qualified to explain why distinct biological human races do not exist. Nevertheless, race and ethnicity – as social constructs – continue to be used as criteria for prejudice, discrimination, exclusion, and stereotypes well into the twenty-first century. Cultural anthropologists play a crucial role in informing the public how the concept of race originated, how racial categories have shifted over time, how race and ethnicity are constructed differently within various nations across the world, and how the current racial and ethnic categories utilized in the United States were arbitrarily labeled and defined by the federal government under OMB Directive 15 in 1977. Understanding the complex nature of clines and continuous biological human variation, along with an awareness of the distinct ways in which race and ethnicity have been constructed in different nations, enables us to recognize racial and ethnic labels not as self-evident biological divisions of humans, but instead as socially created categories that vary cross-culturally.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Entine, John. Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. New York: Public Affairs Publishing, 2000.

• Rene Lynch, “Michael Johnson Says Slave Descendants Make Better Athletes” Los Angeles Times , July 5, 2012. ↵
• The 2010 documentary The First Basket by David Vyorst describes the experiences of Jewish basketball players in the mid-twentieth century U.S. ↵
• Scott Pelley, America Samoa: Football Island. CBS News , September 17, 2010 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-samoa-football-island-17-09-2010/ ↵
• Ibid. ↵

Adapted From

"Race and Ethnicity" by Justin D. García, Millersville University of Pennsylvania. In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology , 2nd Edition, Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, 2020, under CC BY-NC 4.0 .

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The Performance and Reception of Race-Based Athletic Activism: Toward a Critical, Dramaturgical Theory of Sport

Douglas hartmann.

1 Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

Alex Manning

2 Department of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, USA

3 Department of Sociology, SUNY Brockport, Brockport, USA

The emergence of an unprecedented wave of race-based athletic activism in the last decade presents the opportunity to formulate a more critical, cultural theory of the significance and socio-political function of sport in contemporary life. We begin by centering athlete agency and highlighting the distinctive performative, communicative, and symbolic opportunities that sport affords. However, athletic activism and social messaging are also structured—and their impacts shaped—by a range of contextual factors and institutional forces as well as sport’s own unique cultural status and ideological claims. We catalog these constraints to capture the larger cultural field of sport as a site of racial commentary and contestation. Situating this multifaceted field of protest and response in its larger social, cultural, and media contexts leads us to argue that sport presents a vehicle not only for the performance of protest (as existing theory might have it), but for the representation and dramatization of social contestation, struggle, and change more generally. The lessons and broader implications of this synthesis are discussed in the conclusion.

Introduction

Of all the many extraordinary aspects of the struggle against racism and white supremacy that has come to be known as the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement in the United States, few are as prominent—if underappreciated and still misunderstood—as the acts of protest, organized dissent, and insistent solidarity undertaken by athletes and their allies.

The remarkable rise of race-based sports activism has been headline news since at least 2016 when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to “take a knee” during the playing of the national anthem at NFL pre-game ceremonies. But the roots of resistance in and around sport—what sociologist Harry Edwards ( 2016 ) has called the “fourth wave”—go back at least to emergence of the BLM movement itself earlier in the decade (Coombs and Casillo 2017 ). Subsequent years ushered in previously unheard of gestures of defiance and solidarity from superstar athletes like Lebron James, Meghan Rapinoe, and Serena Williams, athletic leaders and coaches, countless demonstrations at high school and youth sporting events across the nation (Zirin 2021 ), and a threatened boycott by college football players at the University of Missouri that helped bring down a college President (Trachtenberg 2018 )—and this isn’t even to mention the international arena (Kilcline 2017 ). In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020, race-based athletic mobilization reached previously unimaginable heights with never-before-seen player strikes (Williams 2022 ), forays into electoral politics such as the 2020 Senate election in Georgia (Delevoye 2021 ), and anti-racist initiatives from sports leagues themselves (Blair and Wright 2022 ). 1

There are, of course, reasons to be cautious about the embrace of race-based activism by the athletic establishment, as well as to be careful about overstating the accomplishments of protest or underestimating the impact of reactionary backlash. But there should be no doubt that the athletic activism of our era is broader and more sustained than any sport-based movement since the anti-apartheid movement against South African sport in the 1960s and 1970s (Booth 1998 ) or the African American Olympic protest movement that resulted in the iconic clenched-fist victory stand demonstration of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico City Games in 1968 (Bass 2004 ; Hartmann 2003a ).

The emergence of this movement provides a unique opportunity to rethink the power and operation of sport as a cultural-political force in contemporary social life. Indeed, this paper is based upon the notion that an analysis of this overt effort to leverage sport in service of larger agendas of social change and racial justice—and of reactions and responses to this activism—can help us to see both where and how sport is most impactful as a social, cultural, and political force as well as what limitations and constraints it comes up against. Our core claim is that a close, cultural analysis of contemporary race-based athletic activism shows that the socio-cultural force of sport lies not in its ability to bring about concrete, institutional change but rather in its capacity to symbolically represent and bring widespread public attention to social issues that are otherwise contentious or difficult to publicly acknowledge and engage.

Our analysis begins from the claim that sport is a prominent public platform of and for the performance of protest made possible by the unique features of the sporting world and media coverage of it. We center the agency of athletes in this context. However, we also believe it is important to realize that sport protest and social messaging is also structured and constrained by a range of contingent factors, including both public reception and institutional responses, as well as underlying ideals and beliefs about sport’s appropriate role in society. We catalog these factors and sketch the ways in which they shape the meaning and impact of protest performances, and are themselves key forces in a larger social drama of resistance and response enacted in the athletic arena. Ultimately we argue that it is the dynamic of struggle—rather than just the performance of protest—that is dramatized for public audiences in and through sport. This analysis is developed out of existing and emerging research, including some of our own, on activism and politics surrounding sport, race/racism, and social change in the BLM era. We place these materials in dialog with sport scholarship on the cultural politics of sport, cultural sociology on the civic sphere as a contested performative space, and race-critical sociology.

Existing Literature, Analytic Goals, and Theoretical Foundations

A rich literature on the race-based athletic activism of the past decade has emerged, much of it produced by a diverse new generation of sport scholars and public intellectuals (cf. Cooper 2021 ; Bryant 2018 ). There is now a great deal of research on how athletes participate in activism and the social conditions that constrain and enable their actions (Ferguson and Davis 2019 ; Houghteling, and Dantzler 2019 ; Niven 2021 ; Sanderson, Frederic, and Stokes 2016; Cunningham, et al., 2019 ; Cooper et al. 2019a , b ). In the contemporary era, for example, sport-based activism has been driven by athlete’s connections to larger Black Lives Matter movements, as seen in their direct participation in protests across the US and world. Central among the wide-ranging contributions of this work is the explication of the power of sport as a platform for resistance and political expression, especially from a Black perspective (Cunningham and Gill 2016 ; Trimbur 2019 ; see also Towler et al. 2020 ), and situating this protest as part of the larger, progressive legacy of sport as a site of resistance and change (Donnelly and Gruneau 2019 ; Nauright and Wiggins, eds. 2017 ).

The analysis that follows draws heavily from this scholarship as well as emerging work on various reactions and responses to athletic activism including public opinion, mass media coverage, institutional responses, and Right-wing backlash. Our own original research and analysis on both athletic activism and responses to that activism are also incorporated. It is important to emphasize, however that this project is not intended as a comprehensive empirical treatment; rather, we offer a new theoretical orientation and synthesis. One of our goals, for example, is to explain how expressions of protest emanate from the unique properties of athletic participation and media coverage of sport. Another is to situate this activism and the messages of resistance, dissent, and solidarity that are conveyed through sport in the broader social, institutional, and cultural contexts within which they are processed and made impactful (or not). More generally, we hope to provide a framework for capturing the broad meaning, significance, and impact of racial contestation in and around sport as well as for conducting future research of sport in society.

Our retheorization begins from a well-developed body of sport scholarship on the “cultural politics” of sport. At the core of this work are two insights: first, the recognition that sport is reflective of and, thus, representative of all manner of social issues, identities, and ideologies; and second, that the cultural prominence of sport and media attention devoted to it make sport’s social qualities—in this case those related to racial images, ideologies, and meanings—distinctly powerful as a symbolic and communicative form, impactful far beyond the bounds of the sporting world itself.

The cultural politics of sport are typically deployed, often via Foucaultian or Marxian frames, to demonstrate sport’s often unseen role in the reproduction of the social status quo, dominant categories of identity and belonging, and the legitimation of power and privilege. In contrast, the case of race-based athletic activism allows us to explore the possibilities for strategic resistance and change that are also present in thinking of sport as a dramaturgical, communicative form. Here, we are guided by an understanding of sport as a “contested racial terrain,” in the Gramscian tradition championed by Stuart Hall ( 1994 ) and CLR James ( 2013 ). This critical cultural orientation helps us bring out the twin facts that (a) ideas about and representations of race, racism, and racial change in sport are not singular or fixed but conflicted and multifaceted, and (b) that these complicated, conflicted representations and assemblages are, themselves, recognized, actively discussed, and struggled over by athletes, reporters, fans, and leaders of the athletic establishment for all to see (see also, Carrington 2010 ; Hartmann 2000 ).

Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology of the civil sphere ( 2006 ; 2011 ) is another primary theoretical touchstone for this project. The civil sphere is, for Alexander, a realm of performative display and communication of various social and political interests, ideologies, and formations in a democratic context. Particularly useful for our sport case is Alexander’s understanding of the civil sphere as fraught with contestation and conflict (on race, see also Ostertag and Diaz 2017 ) as well as his (2004) pragmatist framing of political expression as a dialectic of strategic action in and through the ritualized structure of politics.

Alexander’s cultural conception of a contested civil sphere fits well with a dramaturgical understanding of sport as deployed in Trygve Broch and Eivind Skille’s work on athletics and political legitimacy ( 2019 ). We draw and build on Broch’s ( 2020 ) skillful application of, and advocacy for a cultural sociology of sports—a meaning centered theoretical framework that takes seriously how culture-structures shape the social and material worlds of sports. In analyzing how the meaning of handball shapes gendered life in Norway, Broch shows that sport is not just ritual, but performance; and that actors and audiences join in the dramaturgy of putting culture into action. Crucially, Broch demonstrates that the enchantment and solidarity which emerges from mundane and public sporting performances, dramas, and narratives cannot be assumed to just reproduce inequality, but can also be a source of legitimation for projects of democracy and gender equality.

In adapting Alexander and Broch’s theories to the case of race-based athletic activism, we offer three extensions. First, we identify the cultural codes and ritualistic conventions that mark sport as a unique and uniquely powerful institutional context for activism and protest. In addition to centering athlete agency, we reengage certain classical dramaturgical scholarship. We also highlight the deep ideological structure of sport itself with respect to politics and colorblind, meritocratic ideals about race. Our second contribution has to do with context and contingencies. Our basic insight here is that the social and institutional dynamics surrounding the performance and reception of protest in sport are even more complicated and externally constrained than Alexander’s basic civil sphere binaries allow, decisively shaping both the meaning and consequence of activist interventions. Finally, and perhaps most ambitiously, we harken back to Gramscian theories to argue that what is dramatized in and through the sporting arena is not the performance of protest per se, but a larger dynamic of protest and counter-protest, of reaction, reform and repair, of social struggle itself.

The paper proceeds as follows. The first part will explicate the ways in which athletes make use of the public platform of sport for the performance of protest and cultural-political resistance. In the next section, we identify and catalog the array of contingencies, constraints, and contexts that structure this activism, with an eye toward assessing how it is received and the extent to which it has been impactful in a highly polarized political climate. In the third and final section, we provide a sketch of the overarching dramaturgical synthesis that results—what might be considered, to deploy another of Alexander’s formulations, an argument for a “strong” theory of the cultural power and specificity of sport as a social-political force. We conclude with a discussion of the broader lessons for sport scholarship and theories of culture and politics.

Athlete Agency

One of the most important insights from recent research on athletic activism is that athletes are the central and indispensable agents of a performance and presentation of social issues in and through sport. It is the statements and actions of athletes—not the messaging of league officials, sports media, or other actors in the athletic arena—that drive sport to be a platform for social engagement (see Kaufman and Wolff 2010 ). In this section, we center athlete agency to demonstrate how counter-hegemonic or subaltern narratives about the social world and sport itself are constructed and conveyed. Informed by Jeffrey Alexander’s explication of the cultural pragmatics of political performance in the civil sphere ( 2004 ), we pay particular attention to how the strategic action of protest and political dissent is structured in and through the resources, norms, customs, and conventions of the sporting arena—what Alexander might describe as the ritualistic qualities, codes, or capacities of sport.

Bodily Displays and Demonstrations Bodies are central to all social performance in sport. Bodily interaction during play, presentation of body types through dress, the regulated location of bodies on the field, bodies exerting celebrated physical actions, and audience’s evaluation of bodies are all part of sporting dramas and a key source of symbolic meaning making. With this in mind, one of the most prominent ways that athletes use sport to call attention to wider racial injustice and demonstrate solidarity with racial justice movements is through symbolic gestures on fields of play. In these moments, athletes use their bodies to implement a disruptive social performance, thus, contesting the expected sacred sporting codes and social meanings embedded in the cultural structure of sport. As a result, athletes shift the stage of sport away from pure escapist entertainment by inserting visions of Black subjectivity, critiques of nationalism, and calls for substantive social inclusion into sporting dramas.

For example, on November 30th, 2014, three months after Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Brown, five Black players from the St. Louis Rams used the ritual of pre-game starting lineup announcements to express frustration with a grand jury’s decision to not indict Wilson. On national television and in a stadium with 55,000 people in attendance, Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt collectively emerged from the tunnel and onto the field doing the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, a saying and gesture that had become a common rallying cry among protestors in Ferguson and around the country. Instead of running, they walked. Instead of jumping and waving their arms to increase fan noise, they stood still and held their arms up steadily. Under spotlights, machine-induced fog, and hype-up music, these five athletes used their bodies to upend the expected performances associated with a pre-game ritual in the NFL (Sports Illustrated Wire 2014 ).

Similar disruptive actions have occurred at other levels of competitive sport across the past decade. For example, one day prior to the pre-game performance of solidarity by the Ferguson Five, Ariyana Smith, a Black woman and basketball player/student at Knox College, made the “Hands-Up Don’t Shoot” gesture during the pre-game national anthem. She was motivated by frustration with Knox College and its athletic department’s lack of recognition of the BLM Movement just twenty minutes away from Ferguson, MO. After the anthem finished, she walked over to the American flag, kneeled, and collapsed to the ground, and lay there for four and a half minutes to represent Mike Brown being left on the street for 4.5 hours after being killed. Having centered her body for political expression, Smith offered a Black power salute and walked out of the gym (Minor 2014 ).

Such demonstrations should, extending from Alexander, be situated within the broader cultural conventions and performative structure of American sporting rituals. In a routine pre-game social performance, athletes do dynamic stretching and warm-up drills while wearing team and league-sponsored athletic gear. They are expected to convey hyper-focus on a sporting task, preparation for competitive sporting conflict, and commitment to their respective teams. During the pre-game portion of televised sporting events there are frequent cut-ins to show athletes during this time of preparation. With this visibility, the minutes before an official game begins are a prime moment of opportunity for athletes to use the stage of sport to express alternative social messages.

Pre-game demonstrations and gestures, enacted at these crucial, dramatic moments, break with expected meaning, messages, and performances. These displays force fans and other audiences and organizational leaders to engage with the experiences of Black victims, racial justice movements, policing, and the personhood/political voice of Black athletes. Following these actions sports and general news media outlets at the national, local, and international levels, such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN, CBS News, Al Jazeera, CNN, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, USA Today, and Quad Cities News ABC (Illinois), further amplify these messages by summarizing the purpose of these protests and documenting how organizations such as the NFL and Knox College responded.

Clothing Sports apparel, often taken for granted as a physical object used to symbolically reinforce team identification or brand advertising, is also a crucial object available to alteration and the expression of counter-hegemonic cultural styles (Hebdige 1979 ). Distinctive within broader fields of fashion and anti-fashion (Polhemus 2011, a (see Polhemus 2011 ), athlete. an official sports uniform represents a certain form of conformity athletes are required to wear uniforms as markers of their usual role or roles in the athletic arena and their broader symbolic meaning and function. Yet, athlete activists can modify the standard sports uniform for the purpose of social protest and inserting criticisms of the racial status quo into the public eye. In short, they use clothing as a tool to disrupt audience expectations, center racial injustice and call attention to anti-Black state violence during the pre-game warm-ups.

In 2015, Black NFL and NBA players used pre-game warm-ups to bring attention to the case of Eric Garner, a Black man who was killed by a NYPD police officer via chokehold during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe”, were made known to the world after video footage of the event went viral. On December 4th, 2014, the NYPD officer was not indicted, and a wave of protests followed across the United States. Black athletes such as Derrick Rose, Kobe Bryant, Davin Joseph, Reggie Bush, Johnson Bademosi, and entire NBA teams wore “I Can’t Breath” t-shirts over their official sporting jerseys (Adande 2014 ).

WNBA players have been at the forefront of using clothing to communicate their feelings and ideas about anti-black police violence. Prior to the beginning of the 2020 season, which took place in a “bubble” in Florida due to Covid-19, the WNBA players amplified the BLM movement and Black women who were victims of police violence. In pre-game, all players wore black warm-up shirts with “Black Lives Matter” written on the front and “Say Her Name” on the back (Close and Riles 2020 ). During the game, players wore jerseys with the name of Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was killed by plainclothes Louisville police officers during a no-knock warrant, printed on the back. 2 In late August 2020, following video of Kenosha police shooting Jacob Blake in the back, the entire Washington Mystics team—players, coaches, staff—stood at center court arm-in-arm and each wearing a plain white t-shirts with letters that collectively spelled out “JACOB BLAKE.” On the back of each shirt seven holes were cut out and outlined in red ink to represent each time Blake was shot (Harvey 2020 ). For an entire WNBA season, WNBA players changed the expected pre-game ritual through performances of dissent. Through these performances, that relied on uniform modification, they refused to separate basketball from the lived experiences of Black women and systemic racism.

Anthems and Other Rituals The national anthem is a pre-game ritual that has become routine throughout American sport, especially post 9/11. Dominant codes of nationalism, honor, sacrifice, courage, and pride are performed and celebrated. In line with Victor Turner’s classic work on ritual ( 1974 ), the sequences of actions and symbols that surround the national anthem at sporting events serve as a mechanism to maintain a particular social solidarity (see also: Macaloon 1984 ; McDonald 2020 ; Turner 1995 ). Athletes are expected to be stoic, still, and convey deference to the sacred nationalistic ritual by interacting with symbols such as the U.S. flag and national anthem in a way that reinforces dominant values and formational myths about the meaning of America. Yet, these components of the pre-game ritual also serve as multi-vocal symbols that are “capable of more than one interpretation, hence becoming a possible cause of conflict as different groups attempt to have their particular definition adopted as the standard” (Miller 2017 ). Thus, the national anthem represents another prime pre-game space and performative opportunity for athletes to challenge established understandings of equality, racial injustice, and nation. The kneeling of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick during the 2016 NFL season is perhaps the most famous and influential such gesture.

Initially, Kaepernick sat while the national anthem played prior to a pre-season game in protest of police officers receiving no legal punishment after physically killing or injuring Black people such as Freddie Gray, Mario Woods, and Alton Sterling (Zirin 2021 ). 3 Kaepernick explained that he did not feel pride in a nation that oppresses Black people and other people of color. After consulting with military veteran and former NFL player Nate Boyer, Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem as a way to demonstrate respect for military service members while still protesting against racism in America. Kaepernick continued to kneel throughout the 2016 season. 4 By kneeling during this seemingly sacred moment, Kaepernic turned a symbolic celebration into a site of political contestation, shifting attention from nationalism and sporting fun to systemic racial oppression and police brutality.

The political, cultural, and media fervor that Kaepernick’s actions caused reveals the power of an athlete’s social performance during an otherwise routine athletic ritual. Athletes in professional, collegiate, and youth sports knelt in protest of racism across American sporting fields over the coming years (Zirin 2021 ). Some went even further. In July 2020, the Seattle Storm and New York Liberty of the WNBA walked off the court while the anthem played as an act of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement (Thuy Vo 2020 ). In June 2020, many players from the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) kneeled during the national anthem (West 2020 ). NBA players also collectively took the knee during the national anthem as the NBA returned to play in the “bubble” (Brito 2020 ). Suffice to say, the playing of the national anthem provides a multi-vocal moment and rite that American athletes can tap into, reinterpret, and use as a way to express dissent and demonstrate solidarity with larger social justice movements.

Athlete Voices in Traditional Media Settings Pre-game interactions and ritualized ceremonies are not the only stage where athletes can resist racial oppression. Post-game and pre-game press conferences and interviews with local and national sports media also provide platforms where athletes disrupt assumed cultural codes and send powerful social messages. And in this context the emphasis shifts from bodies to voices. In one of the earliest such examples, in July 2016, Maya Moore, Rebekkah Brunson, Lindsey Whalen, and Seimone Augustus held a pre-game press conference to explain why they were wearing shirts that said, “Change Starts With Us”, “Justice and Accountability”, “Black Lives Matter” and the names of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, along with the Dallas Police Department emblem. Moore and Brunson, in particular, directly called for the end of racial profiling, senseless violence, and to shared their own frustrations with the realities of racism in the US as Black women (Shoichet and Martin 2016 ).

While the Lynx used the in-arena press conference to speak directly about local and national incidents of police brutality, other athletes asserted their agency and political voice through actions of refusal. In late July 2016, WNBA players from the New York Liberty and the Indiana Fever refused to answer any questions pertaining to basketball from media members before or after the game (Bieler 2016 ). They made this decision after the WNBA initially fined players for wearing black t-shirts that conveyed concerns about police violence instead of wearing team/brand-sponsored apparel. Tamika Catchings, a Black woman, made clear that players would not be confined to just speaking about basketball. In 2020, NBA players implemented a similar strategy with media as their season in the bubble began. Instead of answering questions about basketball, star and role players from multiple teams, such as Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown, Jerami Grant, Tobias Harris, Alex Caruso, and C.J. McCollum, responded with statements that all included the phrase “Justice for Breonna Taylor.” Each player summarized the case, shared their conversations with and support for the Taylor family, and/or demanded that the attorney general arrest the police officers responsible for Taylor’s death (Feldman 2020 ).

In each of these cases, athletes individually and collectively enacted unexpected social performances that countered normative expectations and conventions of sports press conferences or post-game media scrambles. Such media interactions generally have a standard flow where media members ask players to share their reflections about certain plays, individual performances, the game as a whole, and muse about broader sporting narratives about the season. Athletes, in turn, are expected to answer these questions through cliches or deep introspection, along the way affirming cultural ideals of work-ethic, courage, teamwork, sporting execution, tactical strategy, desire to overcome sporting obstacles, gratitude for the opportunity to play the game, and/or praise for the opponent. These interaction rituals are economically important for leagues, players, and TV networks as pre- and post-game variations are actually written into media rights deals and collective bargaining agreements to provide content for sports journalists and other sports entertainment outlets. Yet, through a creative strategy of selective refusal, athletes inserted their political voice and forced all ranges of sports media to publish information about systemic racism, police brutality, no-knock warrants, and the role of the Attorney General–topics sports outlets normally do not engage with.

Athletes have exerted their agency in other media venues as well. Players on the Boston Celtics wrote a piece, published in the Boston Globe, criticizing the governor of Massachusetts for failing to regulate facial recognition technology in a police reform bill (Boston Celtics Players 2020 ). The players stated that they aim to raise public awareness about policing and systemic racism and advocate for changes in law enforcement that improve public safety. Other professional and collegiate athletes have used The Players’ Tribune —a digital media outlet where athletes write first-person essays about topics of their choosing—to write about race in the United States. Just within the NBA, players have written articles that reject colorblindness, criticize white privilege, highlight the realities of structural racism and interpersonal prejudice in the USA, and call for social change (Manning et al. 2021 ). NFL and WNBA players have written about the racist and oppressive foundations of America, shared experiences navigating white spaces as a Black person, called for a Juneteenth federal holiday, the need for white people to confront racism, frustrations with people in positions of power responding to racial injustice and social movements with silence, and their own experiences as victims of racial profiling. 5

Social Media and Podcasts In addition to strategically using formal digital news platforms, players have actively used social media and their own podcast platforms to offer their socio-political voices (Sanderson et al. 2016 ; Schmittel et al. 2015 ). NCAA athletes now regularly use social media to call attention to racism on and off-campus and demand commitment to social change. Nigel Hayes, a former Wisconsin basketball player regularly published thoughts on systemic racism, the criminal justice system, and American history to his 69,000 followers, and Kylin Hill, a running back for Mississippi State, advocated for the state to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag, tweeting “Either change the flag or I won’t be representing this state anymore.” 6 Kansas State University student athletes made a public statement on Twitter calling attention to how Black students on campus have been impacted by the wave of police killing Black people and acts of interpersonal racism on campus. 7 University of Texas Football players collectively published a statement pushing the University to not only condemn racism but also to change the names of buildings and its alma mater, “Eyes of Texas”, given their racist underpinnings (Giambalvo 2020 ).

During the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, athletes and former athletes also inserted themselves into podcasts, a medium that has afforded more accessible opportunities for audiences to hear athletes discuss racial inequality. 8 Through these op-eds, social media posts, and podcasts, current and recently retired athletes offered new, creative, and multifaceted expressions of dissent and social consciousness with direct and immediate audiences, expressions of dissent and authentic self-consciousness that play off of and push again both dominant media conventions as well as cultural expectations about athletes and athletics.

Summary Athletes are indispensable in the construction of narrative, myth making, solidarity, and enchantment that is embedded into sport. The narratives and codes that surround their performances are generally structured by stable discursive cultural codes that define the sacred and profane aspects of meaningful sport, which affords audiences to narrow focus on a particular flow of event (Broch 2020 ). In rituals both on the field and within media settings, athletes can perform deference to the nation, reverence to the sport, a hyper-focus on conquering a sporting quest, and in turn enforce a boundary between sport and profane socio-political realities that many audiences expect and celebrate. However, as Broch also notes, sport creates interpretive spaces for people to bend, break, and reshape meaning through culture.

Athlete activists, as we have seen here, enact performances that contest and dramatize struggle over what is coded as sacred, enchanting, and profane. They exert their agency to protest in relation to the temporal, cultural, and interactional ritual patterns of sport. When athletes are not performing athletic feats on the field during official game play, they strategically utilize other ritual moments within the sporting arena that surround in-game action to exert their socio-political agency. Athletes use and reinterpret symbols that are building blocks of the pre-game or post-game sports ritual and, thus, challenge the social interests, ideals, and solidarities that such sacred rituals are assumed to produce. This is done by kneeling, raising a fist, putting one’s hands up, wearing a t-shirt about the realities of anti-black racist violence during warm-ups and while on the bench, or re-directing post-game press conferences away from questions about sporting action and toward the realities of racism. For some audiences, these actions are read as profane and a dramatic pollution of the sacred sporting space; other audiences may be enchanted by the iconic athlete dramatically invoking a tradition of athletic activism grounded in a sacred moral desire for sport to be a model and ally for a racially egalitarian society. Regardless of audience reception, these agentic social performances are evidence of athletes skillfully playing with symbols and maneuvering cultural scripts within sport to put other forms of culture and counternarratives into the dramatic scene of sport.

Context and Contingencies

There is a tendency among liberal and progressive-minded sport scholars to romanticize sport-based protest—to take the agentic actions of athletic activists at face value and assume that the mere expression of dissent is, in and of itself, impactful. This is problematic for several reasons. One is because, as with any social movement, it can be difficult to translate this activity and these messages into institutional reform or broader structural transformation (Staggenborg 2016 ). A second problem is that such activism is as likely to provoke backlash and opposition as it is to garner new sympathy among the general public, policy makers, political leaders, opinion leaders, and others not already inclined to be supportive of athlete activists and their positions (Cf. Braunstein 2022 ). In other words, audiences react to protest in tremendously varied, often unexpected ways.

These concerns map onto the general sociological truism, elaborated by theorists such as Giddens and Bourdieu, that agency is always constrained or “structured.” This truism certainly applies to political action in and through sport. For researchers, the meanings that are received and the various complicated, contingent ways in which different audiences and institutional actors translate these ideas into action (or not) requires data and analysis well beyond the expression of dissent itself. To a certain extent, this insight is already built into the discussion of athlete agency above in our focus on how the actions fits in and works off of existing features of the sports world—bodies, ritualistic practices both on and off the field, the role of media and social media. In Alexander’s ( 2006 ) cultural pragmatist terms, this is the dynamic between strategy and ritual, action in and through structure. Yet we believe the ways in which and the extent to which athletic activism is structured—socially and institutionally as well as ideologically—are far broader and sport specific than we have captured so far.

In the following section we identify aspects of reception and response to athletic activism that are crucial to constructing a sophisticated cultural analysis of contemporary race-based activism: (1) media coverage and framing; (2) audience reception—including both general public opinion and broader commentary; (3) backlash and counter-protests; (4) establishment leaders; and, (5) the deep ideological structure of sport itself. Taken as a whole, these constitute a provisional framework for theorizing the full field of action and response that constitutes the dramas of racial struggle enacted in and through the athletic arena for public consumption.

Media Coverage and Framing We have already highlighted the vital role that media play in helping athletes bring messages about race to broader social prominence. Literatures in sociology and communication studies have established sport’s media prominence as key to sport’s outsized social influence, especially in terms of delivering and amplifying social issues to otherwise uninterested or unaware audiences (Antunovic 2022 ). Framing is another crucial aspect of how media coverage of sport and social issues operates. In this vein, sport scholars have begun to document the ways in which race-based activism has been framed by various sport media, often attending to stereotypes and biases that creep into coverage or structural issues that may be missing or marginalized (Marsten 2021 ; Boycoff and Carrington  2020 ).

Communication researchers are also tracking the emergence of new media conventions, norms, and practices. One recent change is that mainstream sports journalism is increasingly attentive and committed to reporting on race-based activism (and social issues generally). In contrast to earlier generations who saw social topics as taboo, a new generation of sports writers have emerged who take it as their role to report on social issues in and around sport (Broussard 2020 ; Schmidt 2018 ). On the other hand, scholars have also documented the emergence of more conservative voices in the sporting/media landscape (Falcous, Hawson, and Neuman 2019 ). It is important to analyze the extent and effects of these recent changes, and whether negative framing of and/or explicit opposition to sport-based racial activism and media coverage is driven by negative reactions to all race-based organizing in the BLM era, or by traditional norms and beliefs about politics as simply not appropriate in the realm of sports—the “shut up and dribble” sentiment infamously voiced by Fox News host Laura Ingraham in response to LeBron James criticizing President Trump (see Manning et al. 2021 ). In any case, media coverage and framing are powerful drivers of the broader impact of all forms of athletic activism.

Audience Reception How various public audiences perceive and respond to athletic activism is another factor that shapes the meaning and potential impacts of athletic activism. Sports researchers have taken a number of different approaches to assessing public perceptions. Traditional public opinion polling with new survey items have proven extremely helpful in both tracking trends (Allision, Knoester, and Ridpath 2021 ; Johnson et al 2020 ; Smith and Tryce 2019 ) and in assessing the social determinants of attitudes (Frederick et al. 2019 ). Interviewing has also been used to delve deeper into expectations, understandings, and views that help account for these patterned social responses (Chaplin and Montez de Oca 2019 ). Response patterns are being tracked and analyzed in several other creative ways as well—for example, via social media reactions (Marsh 2021; Montez de Oca and Suh 2020 ), television ratings (Brown and Sheridan 2020 ), and economic impacts (Niven 2019 ; Watanabe, Yan, and Soebbring 2019 ).

The results of these early studies are enlightening. One basic finding is that race-based athletic protest engenders as much public opposition as it does support; indeed, bifurcated, polarized opinions are perhaps the most prominent and basic pattern (Mueller 2021 ; Fredericks, et al. 2019 ). Not surprisingly, race is a key dividing line in attitudes about athletic activism, and pre-existing political beliefs and commitments also play a major role in shaping support or opposition  (Niven 2021 ; Mueller 2021 ; Intravia, Piquero and Piquero 2018 ). However, there is also more variability than we might expect. For instance, more white respondents support protest than in previous eras, and Black Americans are far from united in their appraisals. Public opinion scholars have also documented that traditional beliefs about patriotism, competition, and the military remain fairly strong across wide swaths of the population (Knoester and Davis 2022 ), and that sports media outlets have become somewhat politicized (Peterson and Munoz 2022 ).

Taken together, these analyses suggest that public opinion about race-based sport protest is driven NOT by attitudes about sport so much as by social background, values and other contextual factors. That is, athletic activism does not change minds so much as it reflects or even reinforces pre-existing beliefs and commitments. On this point, even though researchers have found that conservatives tend to evaluate traditional sports media negatively for their coverage of athletic activism, these “newly politicized attitudes” did not reduce the actual viewing of sport or use of sports media (ibid).

On the other hand, some researchers have detected a more general ambivalence toward sport-based protest. In interviews, Chaplin and Montez de Oca ( 2019 ) found some college students want to avoid talking about sport-based protest; similarly, Mueller ( 2021 ) has used experimental techniques to reveal reluctance to support protestors among some Black respondents. What is at the root of much of this ambivalence is ideas about sport as a place free of activism, protest, and unrest. Of course, attitudinal change is not the only measure of success; what is also clear is that athletic activism can bring social issues like race and racism to broader public visibility and frame attention, what political scientists have called “agenda seeding” (Wasow 2020 ).

Backlash and Opposition One set of actors in the dramas of athletic protest and response that has so far been overlooked by scholars are the conservative political leaders and media elites who have aggressively positioned themselves against race-based athletic protest. The actions of Donald Trump while on the campaign trail and during his presidency are illustrative.

Trump carved this path while running for office through directly engaging with the aforementioned actions of Colin Kaepernick by suggesting that he “should find a country that works better for him” rather than protesting (quoted in Martin & McHendry 2016 ). As president, Trump upped his criticism of NFL athletes, as well as the league and owners for allowing the protest to continue, going as far as calling for fans to boycott and “leave the stadium” if a single player kneeled. 9 In doing so, he framed the actions of protesting athletes as being “disrespectful to our flag and country,” while also engaging in repeated Twitter feuds with other Black athletes (Graham 2017 ; Remnick 2017 ; Serwer 2017 ). This included an argument with Steph Curry over whether the NBA championship Golden State Warriors were choosing not to attend the White House for the traditional celebration or whether Trump had already rescinded the offer, and a back-and-forth with LeBron James referring to Trump as “a bum” in the most retweeted post of 2017. Trump’s attacks were so familiar that a joke about athletes failing to stand for the national anthem even made it into one of his State of the Union addresses (Lockhart 2018 ). 10

In these exchanges, Trump moved away from the “strategic breach of patriotism,” as theorized by Montez de Oca & Suh ( 2020 ), and questions of who was breaching the sanctity of sport, to direct and personal insults. Nevertheless, Trump’s attacks on athlete activists and the athletic establishment were clearly part of a conservative white nationalism that centered sport for its promotion and public outreach (Andrews 2019 ; Kusz 2019 ; see also: Seigel 2019 ). Trump’s overtly partisan use of sport stands in sharp contrast to the more subtle and unifying use of sport by previous Presidents (Green and Hartmann 2014 ). And in this mix, the condemnations of athletic activists not only functioned as symbolic shorthand for all manner of racial resentments, the social media exchanges they provoked were—because of the celebrity and prominence of the athletes themselves—key vehicles for inserting the “Make America Great Again” vision in broader public discourse (see also: Hartmann forthcoming).

It should be emphasized that Trump, while the most dominant conservative voice in the contested racial terrain of sport, was not a lone actor. Indeed, the success of his communicative strategies and symbolic shorthand was in part due to how they aligned with other MAGA movement activists and the positive coverage by conservative outlets and their conservative cooption of sports-based rhetoric. The most conservative media outlets such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller aggressively characterize sport, in particularly basketball, as a liberal bastion (see, again, Falcous et al. 2019 ) while prominent figures on popular Fox News programs have received attention for their characterizations of athletes as entitled and not deserving of a political voice (e.g., the aforementioned request for LeBron James to “shut up and dribble”). All of this backlash, opposition, and counter-protest should be seen as part of the larger field of racial contestation and struggle enacted in and through the realm of sport.

Establishment Responses Calls for social change in and through sport often run up against both the long-standing complicity of the sporting establishment with capitalism, power, and racial privilege—what Bruce Kidd ( 2013 ), in the Olympic context, has described as the tension between the “movement” and the “sport-media complex”—as well as the forces of institutional compromise and cooptation that Omi and Winant ( 2014 ) have termed “racial rearticulation.” There is also a history of sports organizations policing protest quite strictly (Rounds 2020 ). At the same time, recent non-scientific polling (cited in Sparvero and Chalip 2022 ) suggests that 46 percent of industry leaders believe their organizations should take a larger role in anti-racism initiatives, though 58 percent also said their fans didn’t want their games and events beset with social messaging. Sport scholars themselves have criticized the ways that athletic leaders have addressed athletic activism under the guise of “woke capitalism” or institutional cooptation (Montez de Oca, Mason, and Ahn 2020 ; Boycoff and Carrington, 2020 ). More of this work—sometimes conceptualized as corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sport—is needed, not only to document the institutional impacts of protest but because these reactions and reforms serve to further disseminate and amplify ideas about race, racism, and social change in the culture at large.

There is also research to be done on the effects that Right Wing, ethno-nationalist engagements with sport have on the various institutions of the athletic establishment, and how these organizations responded. The NFL—its owners, its players and the player’s union, and the league itself—would be one example. Consider Commissioner Roger Goodell’s immediate response to Trump’s initial attacks on the league: “Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities.” It is no coincidence that the league subsequently embarked on a widely publicized anti-racism initiative (Rugg 2020 ). Such rhetorical defenses and institutional reforms—which have been undertaken by sports leagues and associations ranging from the NFL and WNBA to the NCAA and even at more local levels—are what Alexander ( 2004 ) would call the “repair work” being done by those in the sporting establishment to solidify or re-establish traditional norms and reputations about sport and its role in socio-political processes.

Non-sport actors have also engaged in such repair. Within two days of inauguration, President Biden responded to the passing of baseball great Hank Aaron with a short tribute that equated Aaron’s resolve on the field to his resolve in life. Sport, for Biden, served as a reminder of a better place that all Americans could seek to emulate, “[i]t was that each time Henry Aaron rounded the bases, he wasn’t just chasing a record, he was helping us chase a better version of ourselves.” Later in the year, the Milwaukee Bucks re-started the tradition of the NBA champion visiting the White House. During the visit, Biden praised the Bucks for taking “a stand for justice and peace in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and you've gotten people engaged.” 11

The Deep Cultural Structure of Sport A final factor that significantly structures the meaning and effectiveness of race-based athletic activism involves the cultural norms about and surrounding sport—its idealized status in the public imaginary and ideological conceptions about itself. While a full explication of what might be called the “deep cultural structure” of sport is beyond the scope of this section, we will highlight several key aspects.

Perhaps the trickiest but most basic dimension of the cultural structure of sport in the contested terrain of race involve sport’s complicated relationship to politics—or, more precisely, the combination of deeply rooted ideals about sport, cultural beliefs about politics, and long-standing taboos about the need to keep these two unique socio-institutional fields separate and distinct (Green and Hartmann 2014 ). As a version of the binary that Alexander says defines civil sphere discourse and practice, these cultural norms tend to idealize sport as a pure and safe, if not sacred socio-cultural sphere that transcends the conflicts and complexities of regular life and, thus, needs to be kept separate from politics which are assumed to be inherently bound up with power, conflict, and struggle. Protest in this schema, race-based and otherwise, is rendered inappropriate as transgressing the space through introducing an extreme and divisive version of politics.

Yet, sport also simultaneously holds itself to a higher set of aspirations or beliefs, a self-satisfied ideology about being an arena of meritocracy, fairness, advancement for the disempowered and all of the better things in life (Serazio 2019 ). This is especially clear with respect to racial issues where sport in the United States has long claimed—with some justification—to be a leader in progress, social mobility, and justice for ethnic and racial minorities, Black Americans most of all. With respect to these ideals, if activism can make a claim to being above the usual political fray, then supporters should see these causes as not only tolerable but as an extension of sport’s larger progressive aspirations. Here, what counts as acceptable racial commentary or calls for change are those that are seen as consensus-oriented and unifying, reflecting fairly traditional Western liberal beliefs about the democratic process as being non-conflictual. Serazio and Thorson ( 2018 ), for example, frame opposition to athletic protest as an expression of both a desire for race-neutral, colorblind politics and a more general apolitical vision of sport. In other words, the same juxtaposition of utopian politics and sport ideals that has for so long constituted sport as an arena of racial mobility and integration is key to debates about racial justice and change in and through sport today.

These deep cultural structures are what enables advocacy in certain arenas and on certain topics, but also constitutes the outer limits of sport-based activism and change (see Henderson 2009 with respect to the earlier civil rights movement). The fact that these traditional, liberal-democratic ideals are not widely commented upon, but taken for granted and assumed, deeply embedded in culture and commonsense makes social dynamics in the sporting arena all the more powerful and brings us to Geertz’s classic notion of deep play.

Synthesis: The Dramatization of Struggle

In the previous section, we cataloged the institutional actors and socio-cultural forces within, against, and through which athletic activism (and sport-based socio-political expression more generally) is processed and which, in turn, shapes and determines its meaning, broader significance, and impacts. The thrust was to see race-based activism as a part of a larger field of strategic action and response (Nepstad and Kenney 2018 ) that is proper whole of “the movement,” meanings, and impacts under study. We are reminded here of Raymond Williams’s classic ( 1980 ) reframing of culture and social struggle as part of larger field of action including dominant, emergent, and residual forces—and his insistence that these performances, actors, and meanings all be seen as in dialectical motion and interaction with each other.

Such framing calls for a more thorough sociological treatment than we can offer here. But what we want to focus attention on is the symbolic significance of this larger dynamic of athletic protest, reception and response, and change (or the lack thereof). Our argument, is that what is represented, displayed, and dramatized in the public sphere through sport is not just activism and protest, but an entire dynamic of resistance and counter-protest, of reaction and response. What is brought to public attention is not only the existence of racial resistance and critique, but an awareness of the broader societal and cultural struggles playing out, over, and around this topic.

The theoretical foundations for this argument can be found in the culturally oriented, race-critical sociology of thinkers such as Stuart Hall and CLR James. What is distinctive about this Gramscian-inspired body of work is not so much its understanding of the symbolic and dramaturgical importance of popular practices and mass media forces; nor is it just the critical orientation to sport and the standard politics of race and racism in a deeply racialized world. Those insights are both well-developed in the standard cultural politics of sport literature. Rather, what is crucial and unique is their understanding of the deep conflicts, inequalities, and social struggles that mark and define social life itself.

In contrast to the somewhat functionalist, reproduction-focused versions of power and social order that are emphasized in standard performative theories of culture and politics, this more critical orientation leads us to pay attention to the representation of the fundamentally unstable and conflictual nature of social life. In Gramscian terms, it is not order that is put on display (and usually legitimated), but contestation, with all the dynamics of engagement and response and struggles over legitimacy and for hegemony itself that are entailed. “When I entered the domain of politics, I did not have much to learn,” CLR James recalled in his magisterial autobiography Beyond a Boundary ( 1963 ) ; this was because he had learned about the social conflicts that constituted the politics of protest and power, deeply and organically in the realm of cricket (Hartmann 2003b ).

As previously noted, Alexander makes a good deal of the sacred/profane, insider/outsider binaries that define civil sphere political discourse. Ostertag and Diaz’s ( 2017 ) useful extension on the dynamics of racialized exclusion implicated in civil sphere discourse and practice meshes well with the race-critical orientation required to understand race-based athletic activism. We think such insights are particularly pronounced when we conceptualize the cultural capacity of an institutional domain as going beyond the political expression or the performance of protest to encompass the whole field of social struggle unfolding therein. Moreover, we think sport is uniquely structured to accentuate those dramas.

The cultural sociologist Joe Gusfield’s commentary on the unique dramaturgical characteristics of sport is illustrative. In a little-known piece Gusfield ( 1987 ) argued that what is distinctive about sport as a platform for social drama is the “agonistic quality of athletic contests and sporting forms”—more specifically, their emphasis on conflict and competition between two mutually opposed and engaged parties, only one of which can triumph. Following this insight, we suggest that the sporting arena is uniquely structured so as to display in stark form the racial conflicts and calls for change presented by athletic activists.

Clifford Geertz’s notion of deep play takes us even further into the ways in which audiences react and respond to the dramas played out in athletic arenas. At the core of Geertz’s analysis is the claim that deep play cultural forms are passionately engaged even while simultaneously minimized as trivial and not meaningful. The power of the cockfight in Bali, Geertz’s famous case, derived from and, thus, took its significance from the ways in which it was tied up with local kinship and village ties which everyone engaged with and reified even as the deeper cultural significance of the event was only vaguely apprehended and understood. 12 Or, more directly, sport can be the subject of heavy investment (whether time, energy, emotion, or money) and still be viewed as a place not worthy of serious thought and conscious and critical engagement (including the words of the fields most visible actors, the athletes).

Taken together, then, what is revealed and dramatized in and through sport are the dynamics of social resistance, counter-resistance, and the contestation of power itself. The racial-political dramas initiated by athlete activists do not necessarily change anyone’s minds; however, they do focus attention to issues and social dynamics public audiences might otherwise minimize or miss altogether. Further, they endow this attention with deeper emotional meaning and significance than in more standard political contexts or forms—all effects that are amplified and expanded by the media coverage and cultural prominence of sport itself. Protest is performed; it is received, responded to, and struggled against; and this larger dynamics of racial resistance, struggle, and change are displayed for the world to see, learn from, and reflect upon. This dramaturgical function is the core cultural power and function of sport. 13

As with all social movements research, there are perennial questions in the study of sport-based activism about impact, outcome, and accomplishments (Davis-Delano and Crossett 2008 ). In the context of current, race-based athletic activism many of these have centered around the mobilizations that appear to be most “successful” in terms of institutional reforms or socio-political transformations—the Missouri football players boycott (Yan, Pegru, and Watanabe 2018 ; Brooks 2016 ; Trachtenberg 2018 ), for example, or the more recent role of the WNBA in the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia (Delevoye 2021 ).

Such assessments are important in terms of helping to document the independent, material effects of sport-based protest for bringing about concrete, institutional change; however, they can also be somewhat misleading. For one thing, such investigations have typically had difficulty isolating any actual independent, irreducible sporting effect(s). This may be because sport-based protest does not necessarily do a lot on its own in the first place—it doesn’t appear to change people’s minds, nor bring about a great deal of clear, measurable change in sport or in society through sport. Stacey Abrams and her democratic organizers were working on the 2021 Senate race in Georgia well before WNBA players got involved in the Warnock campaign; similarly, protests against racism at the University of Missouri, led by the Black student union, were already at a fever pitch when the football team entered the fray. None of this is unusual or surprising. Social change is always hard, and concrete, societal change through sport in other societal domains typically requires other, non-sport actors, activists, organizations, and resources. As discussed, such change also often runs up against both the institutional complicity of the sporting establishment with capitalism, power, and racial privilege as well as the realities of white backlash, apathy and cooptation, and racial rearticulation.

What is perhaps most problematic with such assessments is that they typically neglect the power and social significance of sport as a dramaturgical form. This shortcoming is the essence of the corrective this paper offers. Building from established theories of the cultural politics of sport, we have tried to illustrate and explicate sport’s distinctive ability to dramatize and display, for large public audiences, racial activism and resistance, how it is structured, and the dynamics of reception and response to it. Through the platform of sport, athlete activists (and others in the sporting establishment) can call attention to controversial topics, issues, and claims, get them on the public agenda, in the discourse, and in people’s minds.

It is indeed athletes, the players themselves, who are the starting point for and at the center of these dramas. They are the performers who launch the dramas. Any doubt about the central, agentic role of athletes themselves can be addressed by considering the case of Maya Moore: During her playing days, the WNBA star was an amazingly effective leader in the fight against police brutality and the mass imprisonment of Black men including helping to reveal the wrongful conviction of her now-husband Jonathan Irons; however, once she stopped playing basketball to participate in the wrongful conviction case of her now-husband Jonathan Irons, the mainstream media was no longer enthralled. She and her message fell off the stage and out of public attention (McCleren and Fisher 2021 ).

However, it is not just athletic dissent that is expressed and publicly performed in and through sport; indeed, it is the entire social dynamic of resistance and reception, counter-resistance, institutional reaction, and reform that are made visible and, thus, symbolically significant. Sport puts these social struggles in a concrete, tangible form which can be engaged, and powerfully experienced by attentive audiences, even if only vaguely understood. Just as Geertz said about the Balinese cockfight or King Lear, these are artistic cultural forms which gather together themes, organize our sensations, and put some cultural order on an otherwise messy world. They don’t, as Geertz insisted, change anything; but they do bring a very real and significant level of attention and also emotional attachment to issues that might otherwise be missed.

Sport’s impacts, in short, are symbolic, expressive, communicative—creating awareness (or consciousness raising or issue salience), framing topics, and bringing out deep, if often polarized or polarizing reactions and responses to it. In many respects this argument—whose roots also include recent work on political legitimation in and through sport—can be understood as a variation on Jeffrey Alexander’s civil sphere argumentation applied to the case of protest and sport. We have also tried to identify the defining social characteristics, institutional conventions, cultural codes, and ideological underpinnings that are available to athletic activists and that define how Americans think about and engage the sporting form itself. In emphasizing social context and contingencies we have also tried to insist that the meaning and significance of athletic protest and activism are both more complicated and less determined than is usually realized. Furthermore, specific communities, institutional structures, and organizational gatekeepers are as much a part of the field of protest, politics, and performance of race as anything or anyone else, both our primary object of study and the social “thing” that is put on display and dramatized for broad public audiences.

All of the factors and forces we have outlined are needed for making sense of the recent race-based activism in and around sport as well as understanding the broader power and more general significance of sport as an irreducible, relatively autonomous, and uniquely dramaturgical and communicative cultural form. Even in the most famous and consequential protest events such as the 2015 Missouri football boycott, we suspect the largest impact was not in terms of reforms at the University itself, but in terms of how aware of racial unrest other college presidents and political leaders became, and the lessons they drew from it. More broadly, we believe this dramaturgical framework is applicable to a whole range of social issues and activist agendas we can only mention here —gender equity, Title IX and the fight for equal pay in women’s soccer; human rights, labor  issues and social inequality; climate change and environmentalism; mental health; sexual harassment, coercion, and assault; and, most recently and controversially, the struggle over transgender athletes. Future studies in all of these cases will want to pay attention to the emergence of more conservative athletic activists and messages and the struggles they bring with them, as well as whether the norms and conventions dictating the relationships among sport. politics, and protest are changing as a result. But the bottom line and core insight is to see sport as a site of social struggles whose meanings and significance extend well beyond the boundaries of sport itself.

It is easy to see social issues in the realm of sport as mere microcosms or reflections of broader societal phenomena, or dismiss them as grandstanding or moral panics. But for us, sport provides a crucial point of engagement, where large numbers of Americans, both in sport and outside of sport, learn about, experience, and process these issues. And the fact that the political significance of popular cultural forms like sport is so often minimized or dismissed by both participants and analysts as meaningless play or mere entertainment only makes them all the more potent.

Biographies

is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016)—recently featured on HBO’s “Level Playing Field” documentary series—and Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago, 2003). Hartmann is an editor of the “Critical Issues in Sport and Society” series at Rutgers University Press, a former editor of Contexts, and co-publisher of the sociology website TheSocietyPages.org.

explores the dynamic collisions among race/racism, families, youth, sport, and culture. Dr. Manning is currently developing a book titled “Beyond Orange Slices: The Contested Terrain of Youth Soccer Culture in the United States.” In this project, he uses ethnography and interviewing to interrogate how race, class, gender, and cultural norms of parenting and youth development are experienced and embedded in the field of youth sport. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the Du Bois Review, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Sociology Compass, Sociological Inquiry, and the European Journal of Sport and Society.

is an Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Brockport. Green researches storytelling, intimacy, and the body with a particular emphasis on how groups construct meaning through shared physical practice. Green is also the producer and host of the Give Theory a Chance and Give Methods a Chance podcasts.

1 See also: Given, K. (2020) “Athletes Take a Leading Role in Black Lives Matter Protests” WBUR. June 6; Mazzeo, M. (2020) “Justin Anderson opens up about peacefully protesting with Jaylen Brown, Malcolm Brogdon” Yahoo! Sports. June 3; Schultz, K. (2020) Natasha Cloud celebrates Mystics’ call for justice for Jacob Blake. Outsports. August 27.

2 Gibbs, L. (2020) “The WNBA will #SayHerName. This is why.” Power Power Plays. July 25. https://www.powerplays.news/p/the-wnba-will-sayhername-this-is?s=r (Accessed December 18, 2021).

3 See also: Walker, R. (2018) One year later, Steve Wyche reflects on breaking the Colin Kaepernick story. Andscape. August 28. https://andscape.com/features/one-year-later-steve-wyche-colin-kaepernick-story/

1, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/sports/football/colin-kaepernick-kneels-national-anthem-protest.html (Accessed December 8, 2021); Wyche, S. (2016) “Colin Kaepernick explains why he sat during national anthem” NFL.com. August 27. https://www.nfl.com/news/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem-0ap3000000691077 (Accessed December 2, 2022).

Thomas, J. (2020) “Just Being ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Good Enough” The Players’ Tribune. June 17. https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joe-thomas-systemic-racism-nfl (Accessed December 12, 2022); Cloud, N. (2020) “Your Silence is a Knee on My Neck” The Players’ Tribune. https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/natasha-cloud-your-silence-is-a-knee-on-my-neck-george-floyd ; Jackson, K. (2020) “It’s Time to Get Uncomfortable” The Players’ Tribune. July 10. https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/kareem-jackson-denver-broncos-racial-injustice .

6 Maraniss, A. (2016) “Wisconsin’s Nigel Hayes on racism, Malcolm X and his new leg tattoo.” Andscape. October 10. https://andscape.com/features/wisconsins-nigel-hayes-on-racism-malcolm-x-and-his-new-leg-tattoo/ ; Hill, K. (2020) “Tweet Message” June 22. https://twitter.com/H_Kylin/status/1275128689638936581 .

7 K-State Student Athletes (2020). “Tweet Message” June 28. https://twitter.com/kstate_athletes/status/1277402142555455488 (Accessed December 15, 2021)

8 Eagles, B. (2020) “Tweet Message” June 12. https://twitter.com/_BrennanEagles_/status/1271518098248667139

9 Graham, B. (2017) “Donald Trump blasts NFL anthem protesters: 'Get that son of a bitch off the field.'”  The Guardian. September 23 : https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/22/donald-trump-nfl-national-anthem-protests .

10 It should be noted that Trump’s criticisms and attacks, prompting outrage against him as well: he was booed during appearances at several sporting events, including the World Series which included chants of “Lock Him Up” (AP 2019; Lutz 2019 ; Romero 2019 ; for related response, see: Nakamura 2020 ).

11 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/01/22/statement-of-president-joe-biden-on-the-passing-of-henry-louis-hank-aaron/ ; https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/32585734/president-joe-biden-welcomes-nba-champion-milwaukee-bucks-praises-team-off-court-achievements

12 Back in the 1980s post-structuralist, deconstructionist days of anthropology, Clifford Geertz was criticized for not taking the self-consciousness of the villagers seriously (see Crapanzano 1986 ). It is indeed important to think through the implications of the agency and subjectivity of those we are studying, particularly in colonial and other marginalized contexts. Nevertheless, we also think Geertz was offering a larger analytic notion that is important: how cultural forms exert their impacts without full, explicit, self-consciousness awareness of their multifaceted dimensions and impacts.

13 For more on the performative and dramaturgical qualities of sport, albeit in the Olympic context, see MacAloon 1984 .

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Douglas Hartmann, Email: ude.nmu@120mtrah .

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Kyle Green, Email: ude.tropkcorb@neergk .

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30 Race and Sport

Red Star Sandiego

• Published: 10 May 2017
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This chapter explores the relationship between race and sport from the late nineteenth century to the present. It tracks processes of racial exclusion, colonial control, and antiracist contestation, as well as the more diffuse context of an ostensibly postracial neoliberal sporting landscape. Included are discussions of crucial figures such as Jack Johnson, Jackie Robison, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. Campaigns such as the sporting boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the Olympic protest by black American athletes are discussed, as is the Algerian revolution, racism in European football (soccer), and the contradictions of nominally amateur collegiate sports in the contemporary United States. Reference is likewise made to the relationship between race and class and gender inequities and struggles.

Sport and race belong equally to the world of modern global capitalism that developed during the nineteenth century. To be sure, patterns of play trace back to ancient times. So, too, do patterns of classifying others on the basis of observable and supposedly immutable characteristics. Despite these antecedents, contemporary notions of sport, tracing distinctions between amateur and professional, adhering to commonly understood rules, and engaging questions of spectatorship, are quintessentially modern. Equally recent in origin are the two general and competing understandings of race, the biological and the social. Yet as observers as distinct as Ron Takaki, Amy Kaplan, Elliot Gorn, and Gail Bederman make clear, the late nineteenth century stands apart. 1 For with its conjoined processes of industrial expansion, overseas imperialism, scientific racism, and ideologies of manliness and vigor, the years on either side of the Gilded Age illustrate the extent to which one must speak of race and sport at the same time.

At times, racemaking and the modernization of sport proceeded along parallel, if disconnected, tracks. During the 1840s and 1850s, editorials urged Victorian citizens to take outdoor exercise. New regulations governing sporting contests came into being, and magazines—crucial to building the audiences that would financially underpin professional sport—circulated in ever-greater numbers. These, too, were crucial years for the global history of race, as emancipation and free labor brought about such new, ostensibly “scientific” conceptions of biological differences and as the Indian Removal, war with Mexico, and the transpacific “coolie” trade brought about a polyethnic republic through which, as Melville famously wrote, “the blood of the whole world” flowed. Thus one can see a temporal link between the Yale–Harvard Regatta (1852), commonly understood as America’s first collegiate sporting event, and the appearance, between 1853 and 1855, of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines.

This chapter takes up the shifting relationship between race and sport from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. The discussion divides roughly into three periods. The first, lasting up until the Second World War, is characterized principally by racial exclusion. The second runs from the 1940s through the 1970s. Confrontation is the crucial byword for this period. The final segment concerns our so-called post-racial era. In each case, the world of sport offers a crucial terrain for understanding unfolding patterns of racial formation and race relations. 2

Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Dubois argued “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” 3 His comment illustrates the value of viewing European and American colonialism alongside domestic patterns of racial exclusion. Although Ben Finney cautions against repeating melancholy generalizations about the decline of “traditional” sports under the colonial onslaught, native Hawaiians had by 1900 almost entirely ceased practicing the traditional sports of ulu maika (disk-rolling), kukini (foot-racing), and holua (landsledding). He’e nalu , which would in time be resurrected as modern-day surfing, had also reached a nadir. 4 Across the Pacific, Monroe Wooley noted that “how best to manage the Philippines is one of our gravest national problems,” before proposing baseball as a civilizing remedy. In Cuba, baseball took hold with such fervor that many denied it as a colonial import at all. In the British Empire, cricket would serve as a crucial carrier of Victorian values, while football would spread through military and commercial circuits into Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. 5

If overseas colonial sport seemed concerned principally with a kind of highly supervised cultural instruction, domestic sport in the late-nineteenth-century United States grew increasingly fixated with the removal of nonwhite participants. In 1875, federal law backed by Union Army bayonets explicitly forbade racial segregation in public accommodations. Twenty-one years later, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” clause. By 1900, uneven patterns of racial exclusion had taken hold. Professional baseball, golf, tennis, and heavyweight boxing would each promote racial exclusion with varying degrees of success. College football was mixed, with segregated Southern universities retaining white teams until the 1960s, while Northeastern universities allowed integrated competitions throughout the Jim Crow era. It is crucial, however, to resist the temptation to view the American dilemma as a purely Southern problem. Charles Martin notes that Fritz Pollard, who played football for Brown University during World War I, was taunted with cries of “catch that nigger” and serenaded by Yalies singing “Bye Blackbird.” 6

In this era, a few prominent black sportsman rose to the fore. Marshall “Major” Taylor became a championship cyclist despite his formal exclusion from the League of American Wheelmen; in 1901, jockey James Winkfield won 220 races, including his second consecutive Kentucky Derby. The case of Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion between 1908 and 1915, is of course well known. For the era of segregation as a whole, there is a strong literature in what African American scholars call the “vindicationist” tradition that extols these and other figures. 7

For the pre–World War II period, the most extensive research into race and sport concerns racial segregation in baseball. The most celebrated response to exclusion was the development of Negro League Baseball. Bolstered by legendary players like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and James “Cool Papa” Bell, as well as teams like the Homestead Grays, Kansas City Monarchs, and Pittsburgh Crawfords, black professional baseball represented a proud, if financially precarious, form of “race” business during the Jim Crow era. 8

Baseball proved exceptionally popular among other nonwhite Americans as well. Jeffrey Powers-Beck details “the dozens of American Indians who played Major League Baseball between 1897 and 1945, the hundreds who played Minor League ball, and the thousands who played collegiate and semipro ball.” 9 The bibliography on Japanese American baseball is substantial, aided by the efforts of the nonprofit Nisei Baseball Research Project. 10 The case of Mexican American baseball is likewise complex, as it contains both a transnational dimension (given the established Mexican professional leagues) and the contradiction between the reality of racial subjugation in the Southwest and constantly shifting definitions applied to “Hispanic” people in the United States. 11 In the case of Cuban and Puerto Rican baseball, Adrian Burgos’ work stands out for its attention to the particular ways in which Caribbean Latinos complicated and challenged the color line, both by their proximity and their interaction with African Americans and through the difficulty their own racial mentalities posed for whites eager to maintain the color line. 12

As this history makes clear, it is crucial to avoid limiting discussions of race and sport to African Americans and whites. Indeed, there is growing attention to Asian Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans in sport. During the era of segregation, each of these communities developed distinct sporting traditions as well as intriguing “interethnic” links across racial boundaries. Baseball furnishes numerous examples of these, from exhibitions in California between Nisei and barnstorming Negro League teams, the presence of Spanish-Caribbean players on “Negro” teams like the Cuban Giants, the presence of African Americans in the Mexican professional leagues, and the widespread practice of African American winter baseball in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Each of these phenomena is slightly different, but the overarching narrative is one of contact among marginalized minority populations.

If baseball furnishes contrasting examples of exclusion and episodic contact, boxing highlights evolving patterns of racial conflict. Writing in 1938, Ring magazine publisher Nat Fleischer unearthed a hidden history of black champions dating back to the Early Republic. 13 These men were the forebears of Jack Johnson, whose 1910 victory over legendary heavyweight Jim Jeffries ranks only a little bit behind Little Bighorn, Pearl Harbor, and the Tet Offensive on the list of world historical defeats of the American white man. With his riches, white wives, and irresistible talent, Johnson was among the most visible and controversial of sportsmen. Johnson was eventually forced to earn his living outside the borders of the United States, foreshadowing the career of Muhammad Ali. Johnson would also serve as a crucial example for subsequent sportsmen like Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, whose success required they match Johnson’s achievements while comporting themselves in ways that whites found less objectionable.

Although the United States, the European colonial powers, and racist democracies like Brazil preferred to view their problems as internal, questions of race and sport received an international airing in the interwar years. Theresa Runstedtler traces Jack Johnson’s antiracist itineraries across Cape Town, Paris, Havana, Mexico City, London, and Sydney. 14 The confrontations between Joe Louis and Jesse Owens and the Nazi regime is better known. Ironically enough, European fascism helped usher in the age of the jogo bonito , as Mussolini’s search for South American talent (of suitably Italian ancestry) helped end the amateurism and exclusion that had characterized the first epoch of Brazilian football. 15

In the case of Brazilian domestic football, the opening of space for Afro-Brazilians came as part of a process that was simultaneously about the introduction of working-class participation and professionalism as well. With social relations shaped by the lateness of abolition (1888), fears of popular participation, and the tendency of elites to import fashions, practices, and ideas from Europe, it comes as little wonder that the blacks would initially find themselves barred from football pitches. In contrast to that other marker of Brazilian national identity, Samba, football was linked to sporting clubs that generally excluded nonwhites, and the gradual democratization of the sport was uneven and slow. Despite this, football became an active part of debates about national identity during the middle of the twentieth century, attracting the attention of Rogério Daflon and Teo Ballvé, two of Brazil’s most celebrated public intellectuals. In general, exclusionist racism gave way to a shifting pattern of partial inclusion that regarded some form of “racial admixture” as a positive good. Profound problems remain. 16

As a number of observers, C. L. R James foremost among them, have observed, no game provided so precise a means for delineating the intricacies of caste, class, and color during the colonial epoch as did cricket. Writing of the implications of his decision to choose between a club comprising members of the brown-skinned middle class and a one composed of darker-skinned, lower-middle-class islanders, James argued that “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics, I did not have much to learn.” In the fifty years since Beyond a Boundary appeared, many excellent studies have appeared that track the interplay between Victorian culture, colonialism, anticolonial resistance, and the problems of postcolonial identity on and off the cricket pitch in South Asia, the West Indies, Australia, and Africa.

Crucial changes affected the entire globe during the last half of the nineteenth century. The spread of modern sport and the emergence of truly global patterns of white supremacy were two of these. New ideas regarding recreation and leisure grew alongside, and indeed shaped, new restrictions on the social and physical mobility of nonwhites. Thus in the United States, among the colonial powers, and within the racially stratified societies of Latin America, race and sport combined in fundamentally similar ways. The principal dynamics that shaped this era were those of exclusion and diffusion, with new sports spreading to new places even as provision was made to avoid embarrassing incidents across the color line. In this context, resistance was delimited by the proliferation of separate traditions like negro baseball and “colonial” cricket; highly charged if symbolic contests, such as the Louis–Schmelling fights and the lives of pioneering individuals like the cricketer Krom Hendricks, the footballer Walter Tull, or the cyclist “Major” Taylor.

A permanent alteration of race relations was one global legacy of the world historical changes wrought by the confrontations between fascism, communism, and liberal democracy between 1939 and 1945. In the United States, blacks who had a generation earlier been urged by their leaders to “close ranks” in the hope of a post-Armistice seat at the table now pushed for a “double victory” over fascism abroad and racism at home. Between 1941 and 1944, tens of thousands of black industrial workers took jobs and struck for better conditions and pay; thousands more pledged to join A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement. Under legal pressure from Latinos, African Americans, Jews, and Asian Americans, the edifice of segregation showed its first cracks, as the courts declared restrictions like the Texas all-white primary elections unconstitutional.

Other victories would come forth in a gradual and uneven way. By 1948, military segregation and racial restrictions in home sales would go, well in advance of school segregation (1954) or antimiscegenation laws (1967). For some, this progress was not enough, and wartime incidents of draft resistance on the part of urban hipsters (Detroit Red), musicians (Charlie Parker), and political activists (Elijah Muhammad) foreshadowed the black power critiques of American society during Vietnam. Small wonder, then, that one historian would term the Second World War the “forgotten years of the Negro revolution.” 17

As with all revolutions, cultural changes both shaped and reflected the altered landscape. In 1946, activists who noted that the Los Angeles Rams played their home games in a stadium supported by public funds forced the franchise to offer a professional contract to Kenny Washington. This brought about the beginning of the end of segregation in professional football, although the Washington Redskins retained Jim Crow until 1962. The first nonwhite player in the National Basketball Association, Japanese American guard Wataru Misaka, joined in 1947, following a stretch as part of the American occupation Army in Japan. Three years would pass before a trio of African Americans would join the league. Integration of college basketball and football, as well as minor league baseball, accelerated during this period as well. 18

During the middle of the twentieth century, however, basketball and professional football were little more than footnotes in an American sporting scene dominated by baseball. As noted earlier, baseball’s racial landscape was rich and complex, with barnstorming Negro League outfits, local Asian American and Native American clubs, interracial exhibitions held outside the United States, integrated Mexican Leagues, and Latinos whose shifting places along the color line repeatedly exposed the idea of Jim Crow as impossible, in practice, to maintain.

All of this, however, was different than the existence of a formally integrated, and professional, major league. Despite the favorable context promised by a world war against the singularly white supremacist Nazi regime, it is unlikely that the integration of sports would have come when and how it did without the intercession of two factors that have disappeared from the landscape of American life, an independent black-owned press and an organized radical left. Between 1933 and 1947, the Pittsburgh Courier’ s circulation grew from 40,000 to more than 260,000, making the paper the largest black periodical in the United States. David Wiggins argues that this growth came about in part as a result of the attention the paper gave its campaign to force the integration of baseball. The Communist press, particular the Daily Worker , was unceasing as well, with sports editor Lester Rodney among the most vocal white critics of racial segregation to be found in the United States. 19

Given the extensive extant biography of Robinson, only the briefest of recapitulations is necessary. A children of Georgia sharecroppers who had brought him to California as a child, Robinson was carefully selected by Branch Rickey, a baseball official whose other reforms would include the development of the minor league “farm” system and the introduction of the batting helmet. After searching for two years for a candidate with, as he put it, “guts enough not to fight back,” Rickey offered Robinson a minor league contract. Robinson’s inclusion would set in motion the rapid desegregation of professional baseball.

Much as Joe Louis had, Robinson rapidly found himself lionized by blacks and marshaled as a racial spokesman by whites. In the context of rising Cold War tensions, this meant entry into debates concerning the relationship between America’s racial problems and its international aims. 20 As the global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union shifted from Europe and the Far East to the rapidly decolonizing regions of Africa, South Asia, and the Arab world, the persistence of domestic racial troubles proved an embarrassing vulnerability for the United States. Efforts to find a counterweight to international depictions of American racism drew African American entertainers and athletes into the orbit of the US Department of State and other federal agencies. International touring exhibitions were duly organized, and visual artists, jazz musicians, dancers, and athletes were all part of a process meant to highlight an American culture defined by supposedly “free market” values of exuberance, innovation, and spontaneity. 21 As a result, black athletes found themselves cast as actors on a larger and more important stage.

Take, for example, the Harlem Globetrotters. Founded in the 1920s as a kind of touring comedy basketball troupe, the Cold War transformed the team from minstrels to diplomats. In 1951, the American embassy in Berlin wired Secretary of State Dean Acheson asking that he bring the Globetrotters to West Berlin as a counterweight to a massive Third World Festival of Youth and Students being held in East Berlin. By decade’s end, the “splendid propaganda stunt” of touring black athletes would culminate in a visit to the Soviet Union, where the team met Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev and received the USSR’s top athletic honors. 22

As part of what a number of scholars term “Cold War civil rights,” the dual opening provided Robinson (as racial spokesman) and the Globetrotters (as representative of core American capitalist values) should not be understated. By the middle of the 1960s, older forms of exclusionist racism were on their way out. In 1956, Althea Gibson won the first of her eleven major tournaments, having already integrated enough tournaments to receive the sobriquet “the female Jackie Robinson.” Soon after, Arthur Ashe would become, one supposes, “the male Althea Gibson.” Between 1956 and 1963, Gibson and Ann Gregory would integrate women’s professional and amateur golf, and by 1961, the PGA would remove “Caucasian-only” restrictions, allowing black participation at many, though certainly not all, PGA-sponsored events.

By the end of the decade, however, minority participation in formerly restricted venues was increasingly beside the point. In a world of black power, black panthers, and the Year of the Heroic Guerilla, what came to be termed the “revolt of the black athlete” was inevitable and inescapable. Even before Harry Edwards, then a twenty-five-year-old assistant professor, sought to organize black athletes into a boycott of the 1968 Olympiad, shifting attitudes were finding their way into the world of sport. 23 Arguably no figure better captured black power’s mix of affective and materialist elements than Muhammad Ali. Ali’s complex persona and extensive itinerary allow him to be approached from numerous angles, from Jeffrey Sammons’ historicist placement within black history, Sohail Daulatzai’s framing as part of a global anticolonial Muslim international, Grant Farred’s depiction of Ali as a postcolonial vernacular intellectual, or Mike Marquesee’s portrayal as simultaneously a global icon of resistance and a “flawed” hero. Ali’s embrace of Islam; unilateral revocation of his “slave name,” Cassius Clay; and refusal of induction into the Vietnam War–era armed forces cost him popularity and wealth even as these sacrifices endeared him to Third World and domestic minorities alike. 24

In the former lands of the British Empire, cricket provided a crucial terrain for athletic resistance to racism. How to negotiate the politics surrounding the racist South African regime constituted one of the great questions of cricket and race during the 1970s and 1980s. What to make of the dominant West Indies test side was the other. Led by a quartet of fast bowlers derided as “assassins” and worse, the West Indies lost only 13 of 112 test matches over a fifteen-year period. During this time, the “Windies” won all five test matches against the British and beat the Australians, considered the strongest side in the world, five times out of six. In the era of Michael Manley and the Cuban Revolution, the West Indies Test side stood as a powerful symbol of anticolonialism for Caribbean communities in Britain and the islands. In his foreword to Liberation Cricket , Sir Viv Richards claimed “In my own way, I would like to think that I carried my bat for the liberation of African and other oppressed people everywhere.” 25 In the postwar period, cricket’s anticolonial and antiracist elements attracted the attention of writers and observers based in India, South Africa, and the Kiriwina Islands. 26

In ways distinct from cricket, the postwar landscape of football (soccer) likewise illustrates the crucial role of race. Numbers rose steadily during the 1970s and 1980s, and by the end of the twentieth century, black footballers constituted around 15 percent of the total population. The conditions faced by players and black spectators, first in England and later across Europe, have led to a variety of research projects, educational campaigns, and minor sanctions. Events from the most recent seasons of European football indicate a continuing problem that highlights the inability of many Europeans to imagine a truly multiethnic continent, or even constituent nations, in which nonwhite populations are “insiders and agents” as opposed to permanent, irreducible, and inassimilable others. 27

This pattern of conceptual exclusion, so familiar to American historians of slavery and empire, requires a Europe that is profoundly inattentive to its colonialist past. Yet this past is a constant presence, on and off the playing field. Midway through the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), FLN operative Mohamed Boumezrag persuaded a group of footballers to leave France and form a football team dedicated to publicizing Algerian independence. Despite threats from soccer’s governing body, FIFA, the team played ninety-one competitive matches between 1958 and 1961. The symbolic and material value of the FLN team set the stage for an ongoing dynamic in which the complicated relationship between the two Mediterranean nations would find partial negotiation on the soccer field. 28

One month after French acknowledgement of Algerian independence, South African police captured Nelson Mandela on the road between Durban and Johannesburg. Mandela’s subsequent captivity was not his first, but it was fated to be his longest, and he spent the next twenty-seven years in prison. The year of Mandela’s arrest coincided with calls for a boycott of segregated sports competitions by African National Congress president Albert Luthuli and the formation of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee by poet Dennis Brutus and others. Questions of sport would remain at the heart of antiapartheid activity until 1994.

South Africa was excluded from the 1964 Olympiad. Ostracism accelerated in the 1970s with the apartheid regime’s formal expulsion from the IOC; the spiraling cancellation of cricket, hockey, track and field, and football tournaments and exhibitions; and unprecedented efforts to isolate South African cricket and rugby on the world stage. 29 By the time of the Gleneagles Agreement (1977) and the 1985 United Nations International Convention against Apartheid in Sports, the effort to exclude South Africa from international sport had become one of the most visible dimensions of the broader move to place external pressure on the regime.

Yet it would be a great error to reduce the story of South African sport to its external dimension. Indeed, with the exception of the United States, in no other case is there as developed a bibliography concerning race and sport as in South Africa. Beyond those studies of global efforts to exclude the apartheid regime, the domestic context contains at least three distinct types of studies. The first of these are books that seek to illustrate the racial elements of apartheid era sport as a whole. These generally include the terms “race,” “sport,” and “apartheid” in some combination in their titles and can be found in a sufficient number to confirm Archer and Bouillon’s claim that “South Africa, sport, apartheid: together these three words compose a political know which has fascinated the media and tormented the sporting world.” 30 These works are distinct from studies that illustrate particular dimensions of domestic sport history such as the football played by prisoners on Robben Island; Laduma !, Peter Alegi’s history of South Africa football; and Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal . For the most part, these works tend to operate within the basic division of South African sport into the efforts to produce nonracialism in those major traditions favored by the black majority (football), the Afrikaner community (rugby), and among Anglophone whites (cricket).

Finally, the period since 1994 has seen the generation of a body of scholarship dedicated to examining South African sport after apartheid. Ashwin Desai’s The Race to Transform: Sport in Post-Apartheid South Africa is a prime example of this latest tendency. These works generally afford greater attention to minor sports, thus providing a more nuanced depiction of racial conditions in the democratic era. They also serve as an antidote to the idea that events such as winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup (which famously featured Nelson Mandela donning the Springbok jersey reviled as a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism) or hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup Finals illustrate a playing field that is no longer unequal.

As the sight of Nelson Mandela in a Springbok jersey illustrates, the contemporary landscape of race and sport seems quite different from that of a generation ago. The notion that the rugby and football World Cups combined to serve as the final drama in the elimination of apartheid creates an evocative narrative about the power of sport to play a concrete role in social transformation. And while even the most Pollyannaish understand that South African society is a far cry from that envisioned by the masses who made up the liberation movement, for many it seems that class, rather than race, is the crucial question. If one sets the film Invictus alongside the recent protests that surrounded the FIFA Confederations’ Cup in Brazil, or the lawsuit by Ed O’Bannon and other college athletes demanding compensation for the use of their images during their time as amateurs, there is a temptation to argue for global confirmation of William Julius Wilson’s contention regarding the declining significance of race in favor of more class-based approaches.

In part, this complexity is a function of the increasingly global nature of sport in the context of the larger neoliberal era. Michael Dyson has discussed the process by which Michael Jordan became a “crossover” icon of widespread appeal to white spectators and consumers. 31 As the NBA expanded in popularity beyond the United States, Jordan’s mantle seemingly passed to Los Angeles Laker guard Kobe Bryant, whose jersey remained the top selling one in China between 2007 and 2012. Unsurprisingly, golfer Tiger Woods led Forbes’ list of the 100 highest paid athletes, while Serena Williams, one of only three women to make the list, and the only woman tennis player to have won more than $40 million in total prize money, landed at #68.

The visibility and wealth of athletes like Bryant, Woods, and the Williams sisters offers one aspect of the changed racial landscape produced by the era of globalized sport. The sight of athletes of African descent representing the national football teams of ostensibly “white” nations, as in the case of Mario Balotelli (Italy) or Theodore Gebre Selassie (Czech Republic), suggests another. Patterns of talent scouting and labor migration have produced professional soccer teams across the European continent with significant numbers of black players. The manager of Tottenham Hotspur could, if he chose, field a team with ten outfield players of black British descent, while the first team at Manchester United features black players from France (Patrice Evra), Ecuador (Antonio Valencia), Brazil (Anderson), England, (Rio Ferdinand), and Portugal (Nani).

Far below these men are the vast masses of black youth desperate for a career in professional athletics. Henry Louis Gates writes of the challenge of getting black audiences to accept the fact that the United States has far more black lawyers and black doctors than black professional athletes. Less than 2 percent of all college students receive athletic scholarships, suggesting that even that goal remains out of reach for most. Earl Smith notes that of the fifty-six colleges that sent teams to postseason bowl games during the 2005 season, forty-one (73 percent) had graduation rates less than 50 percent among their black players. The problem is transatlantic. In France alone, there are more than seven thousand young Africans living on the streets following failed attempts at making it as professional footballers. Without work or immigration papers, nearly all were lured to Europe under false pretense, leaving Jean Claude Mbvoumin to speak of a modern form of slavery in which unscrupulous agents lure children into a life of poverty and loneliness. 32

Taking the crucial contexts noted here as a point of departure, contemporary works explore the continuing centrality of racial questions within the world of American and global amateur and professional sport. These range from popular titles like Thabiti Lewis’ Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America to Joseph Price’s peer-reviewed economics research, which holds that “more personal fouls are called against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race refereeing crew than when officiated by an own-race crew” and that “these biases are sufficiently large” to affect the likelihood of victory or defeat on the basis of the racial composition of a given professional basketball team. 33 Moreover, there is an evolving body of scholarship that connects two crucial facts of contemporary black life in America: the mass incarceration of African American men and the hypervisibility of the black male athlete. Titles in this trend include Billy Hawkins’ The New Plantation , David Leonard and C. Richard King’s Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports , and William Rhoden’s Forty Million Dollar Slaves . 34

Cultural theorists increasingly note how the world of sport serves as a redoubt of biologistic racism at a time when many have come to otherwise accept race as a “social” construct. 35 Brett St. Louis, for example, notes how “suggestions of a racially distributed genetic basis for athletic ability and performance are strategically posited as a resounding critique of the `politically correct’ meta-narratives of … that emphasize the social and cultural construction of race.” 36 Gamel Abdel-Shehid has written of the need to develop a black queer theory of sport and masculinity to move beyond the supposedly masculinist limitations implied by Edwards and James. Broadly speaking, these projects draw attention to the crucial role advanced research has to play in explicating the precise contours of race within the evermore lucrative world of sport. 37

Europe provides examples as well. In Italy, football appears to reflect Italian society’s general inability to reconcile itself to demographic reality. Thus striker Mario Balotelli regularly faces crowds waving swastikas, throwing bananas, and chanting, “there are no black Italians.” In France, the 1998 World Cup victory by a team led in part by footballers of Algerian (Zinedine Zidane) and Caribbean (Lilian Thuram) descent birthed a short-lived conversation about the possibility of harmonious integration in France before giving way to recriminations concerning unofficial quotas aimed at limiting the number of nonwhite players in the national team pipeline as well as controversy over “nonwhite” members of the national team not singing the national anthem. 38

In the United Kingdom, where mass demonstrations of racist behavior were common a generation ago, black footballers are seemingly integrated enough that Tottenham Hotspur fullback Benoit Assou-Ekotto, of French and African descent, can say, “I have no feeling for the France national team; it just doesn’t exist. When people ask of my generation in France, ‘Where are you from?’, they will reply Morocco, Algeria, Cameroon or wherever. But what has amazed me in England is that when I ask the same question of people like Lennon and Defoe, they’ll say: ‘I’m English.’ That’s one of the things that I love about life here.” 39

As these interventions make clear, the ostensibly “postracial” moment is one in which neither exclusion nor resistance encompasses the entirety of events. Indeed, it is probably the case that as yet we lack a vocabulary for determining what the central “problem” of the twenty-first century is to be. Perhaps issues of economic inequality will provide enough common ground that “class” will come be the modality in which class is lived. Or perhaps the contributions of the new social movements, including issues of sexuality, intersectionality, and debates about ableism, for example, will prove sufficient to ignite truly mass movements that echo in the world of sport. Perhaps something else will take us from Marvin Gaye to Lenin—that is, from what’s going on to what is to be done. Certainly, as long as sport retains its unique ability to generate dramatic narratives, to counterpoise nations, and to set individuals within a realm pregnant with symbolic meaning, the matrix of race and sport will continue to call attention to the problems and possibilities of our modern world.

1. Ron Takaki , Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) ; Amy Kaplan , The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) ; Elliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein , A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993) ; Gail Bederman , Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) .

2. After C. L. R. James, the following mix a commitment to black liberation with an interest in the study of sport. Jeffrey Sammons , “‘Race’ and Sport: A Critical and Historical Examination,” Journal of Sport History 21.3 (1994): 203–278 ; Brett St. Louis , “The Vocation of Sport Sociology,” Sociology of Sport Journal 24.1 (2007): 119–122 ; Ben Carrington , Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (London: SAGE, 2010) ; Grant Farred , Re-Thinking C. L. R. James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 165–186 . Dave Zirin , A People’s History of Sports in the United States (New York: New Press, 2009) . For an excellent bibliographic overview, see David K. Wiggins and Patrick Miller , eds., The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 447–477 .

3. W. E. B. DuBois , The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1903), 19 .

4.   Ben Finney , “The Development and Diffusion of Modern Hawaiian Surfing,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 69.4 (1960): 315–331 .

5. Gerald R. Gems , “Sport, Colonialism, and United States Imperialism,” Journal of Sport History 33.1 (2006): 3–25 ; Louis A. Perez Jr ., “Between Baseball and Bullfighting: The Quest for Nationality in Cuba, 1868–1898,” The Journal of American History 81.2 (1994): 493–517 . The bibliography on cricket is extensive. See Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart , eds., Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995) ; J. A. Mangan , ed., Pleasure, Profit and Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad, 1700–1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1988) ; Ashis Nandy , The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York: Viking, 1989) ; Bruce Marray and Goolam Vahed , eds., Empire and Cricket: The South African Experience, 1884–1914 (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2009) .

6. Charles Martin , Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 12 .

7. Andrew Ritchie , Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) ; Edward Hotaling , The Great Black Jockeys (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1999) ; Marvin Dawkins and Graham Kinloch , African American Golfers during the Jim Crow Era (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000) ; Sundiata Djata , Blacks at the Net: Black Achievement in the History of Tennis (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006) . This list is not exhaustive.

8. For an introduction to the Negro Leagues, see Robert Peterson , Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970) .

9. Joseph Powers-Beck , The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 1 .

10. For an overview of Japanese-American baseball, see Samuel Regalado , Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Interment to the Major Leagues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) .

11. José M. Alamillo , “ Peloteros in Paradise: Mexican American Baseball and Oppositional Politics in Southern California, 1930–1950,” in Mexican Americans and Sports: A Reader on Athletics and Barrio Life , ed. Jorge Iber and Samuel Regalado , 51 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007) .

12. Adrian Burgos , Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) . See also Rob Ruck , Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) .

13. Nat Fleischer , Black Dynamite: The Story of the Negro in the Prize Ring from 1782 to 1938 , 5 vols. (New York: C. J. O’Brien, 1938–1947) .

14. Theresa Runstedtler , Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) .

15. Sergio Leite Lopes , Class, Ethnicity, and Color in the Making of Brazilian Football Daedalus 129 (2010): 239–270 .

16. Mario Rodrigues , O Negro No Futebol Brasileiro , 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira, 1964) ; Rogerio Daflon and Teo Ballvé , “The Beautiful Game? Race and Class in Brazilian Soccer,” NACLA Report on the Americas 37.5 (2004): 23–26 .

17. Richard M. Dalfiume , “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” The Journal of American History 55.1 (1968): 90–106 .

18.   Bruce Adelson , Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999) ; Martin, Benching Jim Crow .

19. Mark Naison , “Lefties and Righties: The Communist Party and Sports during the Great Depression,” Radical America (July-August 1979): 47–59 ; Henry D. Fetter , “The Party Line and the Color Line: The American Communist Party, the Daily Worker, and Jackie Robinson,” Journal of Sport History 28 (2001): 375–402 .

20. Mary Dudziak , Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) .

21. On the “cultural front” of the Cold War, see Eva Cockcroft , “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum (June 1974): 39–41 ; Penny Von Eschen , Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) .

22. Damion Thomas , Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 41–102 (passim).

23. The starting point for any discussion of the “revolt of the black athlete” must be Harry Edwards , The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: New Press, 1969) ; Amy Bass , Not the Triumph But the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) .

24. Jeffrey Sammons , Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) ; Sohail Daulatzai , Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) ; Grant Farred , What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) ; Mike Marqusee , Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (London: Verso, 1999) .

Beckles, Liberation Cricket , vii.

26. In addition to C. L. R. James , Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) ; Nandy, Tao of Cricket see Jack Williams , Cricket and Race (Oxford: Berg, 2001) ; Ashwin Desai , Vishnu Padayachee , Krish Reddy , and Goolam Vahed , eds., Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in Kwa-Zulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002) .

27. Fatima El-Tayeb , European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxix .

28. Laurent DuBois , Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), esp. 161–206.

29. Robert Archer and Antoine Bouillon , The South African Game: Sport and Racism (London: Zed, 1982), 1 ; Ashwin Desai , ed., The Race to Transform: Sport in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2010) ; Christopher Merrett , Sport, Space and Segregation: Politics and Society in Pietermaitzburg (Scotsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009) ; Richard Thompson , Race and Sport (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) .

Archer and Bouillon, South African Game , 1.

31. Michael Eric Dyson , “Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” Cultural Studies 7.1 (1993): 64–72 . See also David L. Andrews , ed., Michael Jordan Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) .

33. Thabiti Lewis , Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America (Chicago: Third World Press, 2010) ; Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers , “Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125.4 (2010): 1859–1887 .

34. Billy Hawkins , The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) ; David J. Leonard and C. Richard King , eds., Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) ; William Rhoden , $40 Million Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Crown, 2006) .

35. John Hoberman , Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) .

36. Brett St. Louis , “Sport, Genetics and the Natural Athlete”: The Resurgence of Racial Science,” Body & Society 9.2 (2003): 75–95 .

37. Gamal Abdel-Shehid , Who Da Man? Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2005), 139–149 .

38. Christos Kassimerris , ed., Anti-Racism in European Football (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009) ; Phil Vasili , Colouring over the White Line: The History of Black Footballers in Britain (London: Mainstream, 2000) .

39. David Hytner , “Benoît Assou-Ekotto: ‘I Play for the Money: Football Is Not My Passion.’” Guardian , April 30, 2010 .

Bass, Amy . Not the Triumph But the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 .

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Burgos, Adrian . Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 .

DuBois, Laurent . Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 .

DuBois, W. E. B.   The Souls of Black Folk . New York: New American Library, 1903 .

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'Race', racism and participation in sport

Related Papers

Thomas Fletcher

Kevin Hylton

This review, conducted for Sporting Equals and the sports councils by the Carnegie Research Institute, examines participation in sport and physical recreation by black and minority ethnic (BME) communities as segments of the population identified in the government’s equality legislation (as reflected in the remit of the Equality and Human Rights Commission). It is a review of a decade’s research literature. In conducting the review this report is not just concerned with what is, but how opportunities might be extended and improved. The challenge, then, is to establish what works for whom in what circumstances and how programmes work. The goal is to inform policy and practice.

Jamie Cleland

"Ethnic minority participation in sport or physical activity has been the subject of recent sociological debate but has received relatively limited empirical analysis. This article assesses the extent to which two local authorities in the UK, Stoke-on-Trent City Council and East Staffordshire Borough Council, had developed strategies to increase participation rates for ethnic minorities. It draws on 16 semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority community leaders, local authority employees and a selection of active ethnic minority participants involved in projects in both areas. The results highlight projects established by both local authorities to engage with ethnic minorities and although this is acknowledged as a step forward, racial inequalities and other barriers to participation remain. The article concludes by suggesting that there are still many opportunities for local authorities to work more closely with ethnic minorities to reduce racial inequalities and barriers to participation."

Thomas Fletcher , Ian McDonald

Kevin Hylton , Jonathan Long

Background: The universal sport discourses of meritocracy and equality are so engrained that few challenge them. The most cursory interest in sport, Physical Education (PE), and society will reveal that the lived reality is quite different. Racial disparities in the leadership and administration of sport are commonplace worldwide; yet, from research into ‘race’ in sport and PE, awareness of these issues is widespread, where many know that racism takes place it is generally claimed to be somewhere else or someone else. For many, this racism is part of the game and something to manipulate to steal an advantage; for others, it is trivial. This paper explores the contradictions and tensions of the author’s experience of how sport and PE students talk about ‘race’ and racism. ‘Race’ talk is considered here in the context of passive everyday ‘race’ talk, dominant discourses in sporting cultures, and colour blindness. Theoretical framework: Drawing on Guinier and Torres’ [2003. The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. London: Harvard University Press] ideas of resistance through political race consciousness and Bonilla- Silva’s [2010. Racism Without Racists: Colour-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Plymouth: Rowan and Littlefield] notion of colour blindness, the semantics of ‘race’ and racialisation in sport and PE are interrogated through the prism of critical race theory (CRT). CRT is used here to centre ‘race’ and racialised relations where disciplines have consciously or otherwise excluded them. Importantly, the centring of ‘race’ by critical race scholars has advanced a strategic and pragmatic engagement with this slippery concept that recognises its paradoxical but symbolic location in society. Discussion: Before exploring ‘race’ talk in the classroom, using images from the sport media as a pedagogical tool, the paper considers how ‘race’ is recreated and renewed. The paper then turns to explore how the effortless turn to everyday ‘race’ talk in the classroom can be viewed as an opportunity to disrupt racialised assumptions with the potential to implicate those that passively do so. Further, the diagnostic, aspirational, and activist goals of political race consciousness are established as vehicles for a positive sociological experience in the classroom. Conclusion: The work concludes with a consideration of the uses and dangers of passive ‘race’ talk and the value of a political race consciousness in sport and PE. Part of the explanation for the perpetuation of ‘race’ talk and the relative lack of concern with its impact on education and wider society is focused on how the sovereignty of sport and PE trumps wider social concerns of ‘race’ and racism because of at least four factors: (1) the liberal left discourses of sporting utopianism, (2) the ‘race’ logic that pervades sport, based upon the perceived equal access and fairness of sport as it coalesces with the (3) ‘incontrovertible facts’ of black and white superiority (and inferiority) in certain sports, ergo the racial justifications for patterns of activity in sport and PE, and (4) the racist logic of the Right perpetuated through a biological reductionism in sport and PE discourses. Keywords: ‘race’ talk; critical race theory; political race consciousness; pedagogy

Thomas Fletcher , Kevin Hylton

In a recent policy debate in this journal, focusing on gender and the events industry, Rhodri Thomas states that his intention in writing the piece was to challenge policy-makers and those working in representative organisations related to events to take equalities more seriously. The aim of this paper is to both react to this call and to make a similar one, explicitly challenging the need for more policy considerations and research into ‘race’, ethnicity and whiteness in the context of the events industry. While the notion of social justice is receiving greater scrutiny in the event literature, ideas of ‘race’, ethnicity and their intersections, and whiteness are neither currently addressed or understood. Many of the privileges afforded by whiteness processes rely on its reported invisibility, hegemony and supremacy. The first step in combating these privileges and their effects, is in explicitly identifying whiteness and making it visible. A simple acknowledgement that the lack of Black and minoritised ethnic people on the Boards of events organisations, is a good starting point, but alone, this is not enough. If the commitment to racial equality is to be more than a form of paying lip-service, then it is also necessary to engage with the deep-rooted cultural relations of power that sustain racially exclusive practices. If not addressed, the disproportionate number of leadership positions in events organisations will continue to perpetuate the ‘snowy white peaks’ of the industry’s representative bodies.

Jonathan Long , Kevin Hylton

Recognising that a normative concept like social justice makes it easy to presume that our own norms prevail we examine our own biographies to makes us more aware of the forces at play in sport and leisure. We demonstrate how this helps us to challenge such essentialising categories, an exercise that enhances the pursuit of social justice. We consider the implications of our selves, two academics, one Black, one White, with diverging and converging backgrounds, researching vexed issues of ‘race’ in sport and leisure. We do this by interrogating our biographies in the context of our sensitivity to the use of problematic political approaches, labels, ideas and experiences surrounding ‘race’ and ethnicity. To demonstrate their significance for a continued critical approach to social justice we draw on these reflective narratives to identify links to issues emerging from our empirical research.

Since the turn of the millennium there have been some significant policy developments aimed at tackling racial inequalities in English football, perhaps most notably in 2002 when the Football Association (FA) approved its own Ethics and Sports Equity Strategy (hereafter E&SES). High on the agenda of this new strategy was a range of statements about race equality and encouraging the involvement of minority ethnic participants in all aspects of the English game. Despite the longer-standing anti-racist campaigns in football such as ‘Kick It Out’, this was the FA’s first internal commitment to equality, and the first to directly cover the grass-roots level of English football. The overwhelming focus of research on anti-racist and race equality initiatives in English football has been on the professional game; we know much less about what is going on at the local, grass-roots football governance organisations known as County Football Associations. These bodies have, until very recently, largely avoided any direct interaction with broader campaigns such as Kick It Out (Long et al 2000). Previous research has identified some difficulties in implementing race equality, particularly at this grass-roots level (see Spracklen et al 2006, Horne 2005). While an anti-racist discourse has emerged within English football structures and cultures, the actual adoption of race equality policies – particularly those that call for institutional changes and positive action – appears to be much more problematic (see Back et al 2001). In some cases, claims have even been made that these relatively new race equality initiatives are actually creating a range of new problems and tensions (Long et al 2003, Lusted 2009). This chapter attempts to make some sense of the early reception of race equality initiatives in grass-roots football, specifically from County FA Council Members – voluntary members drawn from the local football population who sit on a range of important decision making County FA committees.

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Race In Sports

The odds that any high school athlete will play a sport on the professional level are about 10,000 to 1. Yet according to a recent survey conducted by Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, 66 percent of all African-American males between the ages of 13 and 18 believe they can earn a living playing professional sports. That is more than double the proportion of young white males who hold such beliefs. Black parents also are four times more likely than white parents to believe that their children are destined for careers in professional athletics.

As an industry, sports have also created a relatively small, elite class of black multimillionaires. But these black players and their outrageous salaries, together with the media and advertising endorsements, have created the impression among many lower-income blacks that there are unlimited opportunities on the playing field. The result, say experts, is an obsession with sports among many young African-American males often at the expense of the more traditional, if less glamorous, route to upward mobility: education.

There is an overemphasis on sports in the black community, and too many black students are putting all their eggs in one basket,” says Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. (www. usnews. com/usnews/Febissue/sports. htm) In his controversial book, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, “The whole problem here,” writes author John Hoberman, “is that the black middle class is rendered essentially invisible by the parade of black athletes and criminals on television.

That in turn fuels the perception that African-Americans excel in physical pursuits and Caucasians in intellectual endeavors. As in most high schools, the real social champions at a nearly all-black public academy on Chicago’s South Side are not the boys and girls who can think and problem solve but, rather, the kids who can dunk a basketball or run a quick 40-meter dash. “A lot of kids will tell you they want to be like Mike,” says one student, referring to the most recognized black athlete, basketball star Michael Jordan. In this context, being like Mike does not mean becoming an entrepreneur, a corporate spokesman, or a college graduate.

It means being a highflying, windmill slammer of a ballplayer. (http://racerelations. about. com/gi/dynamic/offsite. htm) Faced with the historic indignities of racism and segregation, blacks came to view sports as a source of inspiration. During the early part of the century, for instance, the boxing victories of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis served as tangible proof that black men could compete against whites and win. The same held true for Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League Baseball in 1947. Black baseball fans, no matter where they lived, became instant Brooklyn Dodger loyalists.

The sports arena became a battleground against white supremacy. Ironically, the victory also concerned the black middle class, which did not want sports to replace churches and schools as the major focuses of the black community. To some degree, this is what has happened since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line. Some of the numbers are striking. More than 40 percent of pro-baseball players are now black or Latino, a figure that has come to look low compared with the National Football League, which is 65 percent black, and the National Basketball Association, which is 80 percent black.

This is such that Jason Williams, a rare white star, is nicknamed “White Chocolate. ” (http://racerelations. about. com/gi/dynamic/offsite. htm) Whites have in some respects become sports’ second-class citizens. In a surreal inversion of Robinson’s era, white athletes are frequently the ones now tagged by the stereotypes of skin color. White athletes, even when they play sports dominated by blacks, are still entering an industry not only controlled by whites in every phase of authority and operation but also largely sustained by white audiences.

Although blacks dominate the most popular team sports, they still make up only 9 percent of all people in the United States who make a living or try to make a living as athletes, less than their percentage in the general population. With five African Americans among their players, the Edmonton Oilers are leading infamously white-dominated professional hockey into a new era. The Oilers have the most African-American players on any professional hockey roster since the 1940s. “Any time you can have series of five players on one team it creates a focus for the audience,” said Ken Martin, spokesperson for the NHL.

First off, they’re great players. But it’s a bonus that they happen to be minorities and have the great personalities necessary to be role models. ” The African-Americans of the team, which accounts for five of the 15 black players in the league, is expected to arouse interest in the sport among African Americans. “It’s a transition period right now, similar to what baseball went through,” Martin said. Currently, there are only 27 minorities in the whole league. The costly nature of the sport has been the biggest barrier for African Americans to date.

Expensive equipment and a lack of access to ice rinks can discourage those in low-income neighborhoods from participating. (http://www. diversityinc. com/insidearticle. cfm) It is easy enough to explain black dominance in some sports like boxing. It is the Western sport that has the longest history of black participation, so there is tradition. Moreover, it is a sport that has always attracted poor and marginalized men. Black men have persistently made up a disproportionate share of the poor and the marginalized.

Also, instruction is within easy reach; most boxing gyms are located in poor neighborhoods, where a premium is placed on being able to fight well. Jose Torres, light heavyweight boxing champ in the sixties talked of how boxers are generally perceived to be the most feeble-minded athletes, and not just because of the nature of their contest but because many are black and Latino. “Boxing is a contest of intelligence and character,” he said. “It is never perceived that way. It’s not the person who punches the hardest that wins. It’s the guy who punches when he has to punch and where he has to punch. ” (www. bergen. com/moresports/races. m)

Despite the enormous success of Kenyan marathon runners in the past 15 years, running remains a relative problem for the national sport of soccer. Unfortunately, Kenyans are among the world’s worst soccer players. Despite the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of the country’s sparse sports resources, Kenya, is regularly trounced by far smaller countries in West Africa. In fact, there is no such thing as an East African soccer powerhouse. The same thing is true of sprinting. Kenya has tried desperately over the past decade to replicate its wondrous success in distance running at the sprints, to no avail.

The best Kenyan time ever of 10. 28 seconds in the 100 meters, ranks somewhere near 5,000th on the all-time list. This leaves many spectators questioning the training capabilities of these athletes. Some say that they are not living up to their potential as excellent running machines. This stereotype holds true within others sports. (http://www. salon. com/news/sports/olympics/2000/race/index. html) Sadly, black athletes have had to contend with these stereotypes that would limit their opportunities to fill on-field leadership slots, the so-called thinking positions, such as quarterback or head coaches.

But the current crop of black quarterbacks leading their teams to the playoffs has helped to dispel these thoughts. In 1999, two of the top three players in the NFL draft were black quarterbacks. The story line for last year’s NFL playoff games revolves around five “minority” superstar quarterbacks: four blacks and a Jew. An outraged letter to the Los Angeles Times in response to its entry in the black quarterback phenomenon sweepstakes correctly addressed the problem.

I find it sad and disappointing that you find it necessary to label these athletes as ‘black quarterbacks. ‘ Why can’t they just be quarterbacks? ” On one playoff team, the Philadelphia Eagles, 20 of the 22 starters, including all 11 on defense, are black. (www. usnews. com/usnews/Febissue/sports. htm) Given that blacks are over represented in the most popular sports and that young black men are more likely than young white men to consider athletics as a career, there has been much commentary about whether sports are bad for blacks.

One could make the analogy that sports are a form of slavery or blatant political and economic oppression. Superficially, this argument is made by discussing a player is the “property” of his team or of his manager; he can be traded or “sold” to another team. On a more sophisticated level, the slavery analogy is used to describe sports structurally: the way audiences are lured to sports as a false spectacle, and the way players are controlled mentally and physically by white male authority, their lack of access to the free-market worth of their labor.

Contrary to the white perception that it was an absolute triumph for African-Americans when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, former Negro Leaguer Bob Scott of Elizabeth told of the flip side: the destruction of the Negro Leagues after their stars defected to the white-owned major leagues. “It was the only empire, the only big business that Negroes had in those days,” he said. “It was a source of pride. People came dressed to the ballpark the way they came to church. Today, we make millions of dollars and still we don’t own anything. “

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Race and Sports: Inequality in Sports

In her New York Times article “Equity in Sports Has Focused on Gender, Not Race. So Gaps Persist,” Alanis Thames discusses mass gender and racial inequality in sports. Even though Black women are beneficiaries of the Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments, which prohibited sex-based discrimination, the door for sports participation has historically been open to White women (Thames, 2022). As a result, Black female athletes remain significantly underrepresented in most sports programs, especially such sports as swimming, tennis, and soccer. The inequalities stem from the fact that Title IX favored White women because of the lack of consideration for the intersection of race and gender.

In the article, the author discusses the experiences of Black women in sports, commenting on the issue of their race preventing them from participating. One of the sportswomen interviewed for the piece said that people saw their Blackness first and not gender, which was quite problematic, with the “essence of their race” defining their experiences (Thames, 2022). Women of color lack representation in sports because, since school and college, they were limited in their opportunities to play sports. Dominantly White schools had twice as many programs for sports training for their students compared to non-White ones, laying out a foundation for the unequal racial distribution in sports. In addition, the costs associated with engaging in sports have significantly limited Black women’s participation because their socioeconomic background, such as family income, did not allow for much flexibility. Thus, the lack of resources and limited opportunities available to Black women prevented the group’s participation in sports despite the efforts in Title IX aiming to guarantee equal opportunities.

Thames, A. (2022). Equity in sports has focused on gender, not race. So gaps persist. The New York Times . Web.

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Essay on Racism In Sports

Students are often asked to write an essay on Racism In Sports in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Racism In Sports

Introduction.

Racism in sports is a serious issue. It means treating people unfairly because of their race or skin color. This problem is common in different sports worldwide. It can hurt players’ feelings and affect their performance.

Types of Racism in Sports

There are two types of racism in sports. Individual racism is when a person is racist. Institutional racism is when rules or systems are racist. Both types can make sports unfair for some players.

Effects of Racism

Racism can make players feel bad. It can make them lose confidence. It can also make fans and players angry. This can lead to violence in sports.

Combating Racism

To fight racism in sports, we need education. Teaching people about racism can help. Also, strict rules against racism are important. These can make sports more fair and enjoyable for everyone.

Racism in sports is a big problem. But, with education and rules, we can fight it. Everyone should be treated fairly in sports, no matter their race or skin color.

250 Words Essay on Racism In Sports

Understanding racism in sports.

Racism is when someone is treated badly because of their race or skin color. Sadly, it is seen in many areas of life, including sports. It is a serious issue that needs to be talked about.

Examples of Racism in Sports

Many athletes have faced racism. For example, black football players often hear mean words from fans. Sometimes, they are even treated unfairly by referees or coaches. This can make them feel bad and stop them from playing their best.

Effects of Racism on Athletes

Racism hurts athletes in many ways. It can make them feel sad, angry, or scared. It can also make them feel like they do not belong in the sport. This can stop them from reaching their full potential.

What Can Be Done?

There are many ways to fight racism in sports. One way is to teach everyone about the harm it causes. Another way is to punish those who act in a racist way. We can also support athletes who face racism. This can help them feel safe and respected.

Racism in sports is a big problem. It hurts athletes and makes sports less fun for everyone. But if we all work together, we can make sports a place where everyone is treated fairly, no matter their race or skin color. Remember, everyone deserves respect, both on and off the field.

500 Words Essay on Racism In Sports

Racism in sports: an introduction.

Racism in sports is a big issue. It is when people treat others badly because of their skin color or where they come from. This problem is not new. It has been around for a long time in different sports around the world.

There are many examples of racism in sports. One example is when black football players are called bad names by some fans. This can make the players feel very sad and not want to play anymore. Another example is when teams are not fair in picking players. They might pick players based on their skin color, not their skills. This is not fair and is a form of racism.

Effects of Racism in Sports

Racism in sports can hurt people a lot. It can make players feel bad about themselves. They might lose their love for the game. It can also make fans feel bad. They might stop watching or supporting their favorite teams. Racism in sports can also make it hard for people of different races to work together. This can hurt the team’s success.

Fighting Racism in Sports

There are ways to fight racism in sports. One way is to teach everyone about the importance of respect and equality. This means treating everyone the same, no matter their skin color or where they come from. Another way is to punish those who are racist. This could mean banning them from games or even the sport.

Role of Sports Organizations

Sports organizations have a big role to play in fighting racism. They can make rules that say racism is not allowed. They can also teach players, coaches, and fans about the harm racism can do. They can use their power to make a big difference.

Racism in sports is a big problem. It hurts players, fans, and the sport itself. But there are ways to fight it. Everyone has a role to play in this fight. By working together, we can make sports a place where everyone is treated with respect and fairness.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Racism In Criminal Justice System
• Essay on Racism In America

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How to Write a Non-Cliche College Essay About Sports + Examples

What’s covered:, what makes a sports essay cliche.

• How To Make Your Sports Essay Unique

Great Examples of College Essays About Sports

Where to get your college essay edited for free, or by an expert.

You’ve been brainstorming essay topics for your college applications, and you think you’ve finally found the right one: an extended metaphor likening your experience on the field with overcoming personal struggles. The problem: many other students have this same thought. 

The purpose of a college essay is to make yourself stand out as a unique individual, but when students write about sports, they often blend in. Because of that, students are usually advised to pick a different topic.

That being said, it is possible to write a non-cliche college essay about sports if you put in a little extra effort. Read along to learn how to make your sports essay different from all the other sports essays.

Sports essays are cliche when they follow a standard trajectory. Some of these trajectories include writing a story about:

• An agonizing defeat
• Forging bonds with teammates
• Overcoming adversity
• Overcoming an injury
• Refusing to quit
• Victory during a big game

Because sports essays have very similar themes and “lessons learned,” it can be difficult to make your story stand out. These trajectories also often focus too much on the sport or storyline, and not enough on the writer’s reflections and personality.

As you write your essay, try to think about what your experience says about you rather than what you learned from your experience. You are more than just one lesson you learned!

(Keep in mind that the sports essay is not the only college essay cliche. Learn about other essay cliches and how to fix them in our complete guide).

How to Make Your Sports Essay Unique

1. focus on a specific moment or reflection..

The college essay is a way for students to humanize themselves to admissions officers. You do not feel human if you are describing yourself as just another player on the field!

One important way to make your essay about you (not just about sports) is by focusing on a specific moment in time and inviting the reader to join you in that moment. Explain to the reader what it would be like to be sitting in that locker room as you questioned the values of the other players on your team. Ask your reader to sit with you on the cot in the trainer’s room as your identity was stripped away from you when they said “your body can’t take this anymore.” Bring your reader to the dinner table and involve them in your family’s conversation about how sports were affecting your mental health and your treatment of those around you.

Intense descriptions of a specific experience will evoke emotions in your reader and allow them to connect with you and feel for you.

When in doubt, avoid anything that can be covered by ESPN. On ESPN, we see the games, we see the benches, we even see the locker rooms and training rooms. Take your reader somewhere different and show them something unique.

2. Use sports to point out broader themes in your life.

The main risk when writing about sports is neglecting to write about yourself. Before you get started, think about the main values that you want to express in your sports essay. Sports are simply your avenue for telling the reader what makes you unique. 

As a test, imagine if you were a pianist. Would you be able to talk about these same values? What if you were a writer? Or a chemist? Articulating your values is the end, and sports should simply be your means.

Some values that you might want to focus on:

• Autonomy (you want to be able to set your mind to anything and achieve it on your own)
• Growth (you seek improvement constantly)
• Curiosity (you are willing to try anything once)
• Vulnerability (you aren’t afraid to fail, as long as you give it your all)
• Community (you value the feedback of others and need camaraderie to succeed)
• Craft (you think that with deliberate care, anything can be perfected)
• Responsibility (you believe that you owe something to those around you and perhaps they also owe something to you)

You can use the ESPN check again to make sure that you are using sports as an avenue to show your depth.

Things ESPN covers: how a player reacts to defeat, how injuries affect a player’s gameplay/attitude, how players who don’t normally work well together are working together on their new team.

Things ESPN doesn’t cover: the conversation that a player had with their mother about fear of death before going into a big surgery (value: family and connection), the ways that the intense pressure to succeed consumed a player to the point they couldn’t be there for the people in their life (value: supporting others and community), the body image issues that weigh on a player’s mind when playing their sport and how they overcame those (value: health and growth).

3. Turn a cliche storyline on its head.

There’s no getting around the fact that sports essays are often cliche. But there is a way to confront the cliche head-on. For example, lots of people write essays about the lessons they learned from an injury, victory, and so on, but fewer students explain how they are embracing those lessons. 

Perhaps you learned that competition is overwhelming for you and you prefer teamwork, so you switched from playing basketball to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe, when your softball career ended abruptly, you had to find a new identity and that’s when you became obsessed with your flower garden and decided to pursue botany. Or maybe, you have stuck with football through it all, but your junior-year mental health struggle showed you that football should be fun and you have since started a nonprofit for local children to healthily engage with sports.

If your story itself is more cliche, try bringing readers to the present moment with you and show why the cliche matters and what it did for you. This requires a fair amount of creativity. Ensure you’re not parroting a frequently used topic by really thinking deeply to find your own unique spin.

Night had robbed the academy of its daytime colors, yet there was comfort in the dim lights that cast shadows of our advances against the bare studio walls. Silhouettes of roundhouse kicks, spin crescent kicks, uppercuts and the occasional butterfly kick danced while we sparred. She approached me, eyes narrowed with the trace of a smirk challenging me. “Ready spar!” Her arm began an upward trajectory targeting my shoulder, a common first move. I sidestepped — only to almost collide with another flying fist. Pivoting my right foot, I snapped my left leg, aiming my heel at her midsection. The center judge raised one finger. 

There was no time to celebrate, not in the traditional sense at least. Master Pollard gave a brief command greeted with a unanimous “Yes, sir” and the thud of 20 hands dropping-down-and-giving-him-30, while the “winners” celebrated their victory with laps as usual. 

Three years ago, seven-thirty in the evening meant I was a warrior. It meant standing up straighter, pushing a little harder, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am”, celebrating birthdays by breaking boards, never pointing your toes, and familiarity. Three years later, seven-thirty in the morning meant I was nervous. 

The room is uncomfortably large. The sprung floor soaks up the checkerboard of sunlight piercing through the colonial windows. The mirrored walls further illuminate the studio and I feel the light scrutinizing my sorry attempts at a pas de bourrée, while capturing the organic fluidity of the dancers around me. “Chassé en croix, grand battement, pique, pirouette.” I follow the graceful limbs of the woman in front of me, her legs floating ribbons, as she executes what seems to be a perfect ronds de jambes. Each movement remains a negotiation. With admirable patience, Ms. Tan casts me a sympathetic glance.   

There is no time to wallow in the misery that is my right foot. Taekwondo calls for dorsiflexion; pointed toes are synonymous with broken toes. My thoughts drag me into a flashback of the usual response to this painful mistake: “You might as well grab a tutu and head to the ballet studio next door.” Well, here I am Master Pollard, unfortunately still following your orders to never point my toes, but no longer feeling the satisfaction that comes with being a third degree black belt with 5 years of experience quite literally under her belt. It’s like being a white belt again — just in a leotard and ballet slippers. 

But the appetite for new beginnings that brought me here doesn’t falter. It is only reinforced by the classical rendition of “Dancing Queen” that floods the room and the ghost of familiarity that reassures me that this new beginning does not and will not erase the past. After years spent at the top, it’s hard to start over. But surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become. In Taekwondo, we started each class reciting the tenets: honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet. 

The thing about change is that it eventually stops making things so different. After nine different schools, four different countries, three different continents, fluency in Tamil, Norwegian, and English, there are more blurred lines than there are clear fragments. My life has not been a tactfully executed, gold medal-worthy Taekwondo form with each movement defined, nor has it been a series of frappés performed by a prima ballerina with each extension identical and precise, but thankfully it has been like the dynamics of a spinning back kick, fluid, and like my chances of landing a pirouette, unpredictable. 

Why it works:

What’s especially powerful about this essay is that the author uses detailed imagery to convey a picture of what they’re experiencing, so much so that the reader is along for the ride. This works as a sports essay not only because of the language and sensory details, but also because the writer focuses on a specific moment in time, while at the same time exploring why Taekwondo is such an important part of their life.

After the emotional image is created, the student finishes their essay with valuable reflection. With the reflection, they show admissions officers that they are mature and self-aware. Self-awareness comes through with statements like “surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become” and maturity can be seen through the student’s discussion of values “honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet.” These are the kinds of comments that should find their way into a sports essay!

“Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one. 

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we compete with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

In the beginning, you might think this is another cliche sports essay about overcoming adversity. But instead, it becomes a unique statement and coming-of-age tale that reads as a suspenseful narrative. 

The author connects their experience with martial arts to larger themes in their life but manages to do so without riffing off of tried-and-true themes. Through statements like “I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was” we learn about the students values and their desire to be there for those who depend on them. 

The student also brings it full circle, demonstrating their true transformation. By using the “Same, but Different” ending technique , the student places themself in the same environment that we saw in the intro, but experiences it differently due to their actions throughout the narrative. This is very compelling!

“1…2…3…4 pirouettes! New record!” My friends cheered as I landed my turns. Pleased with my progress, I gazed down at my worn-out pointe shoes. The sweltering blisters, numbing ice-baths, and draining late-night practices did not seem so bad after all. Next goal: five turns.

For as long as I can remember, ballet, in all its finesse and glamor, had kept me driven day to day. As a child, the lithe ballerinas, donning ethereal costumes as they floated across the stage, were my motivation. While others admired Messi and Adele, I idolized Carlos Acosta, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet. 

As I devoted more time and energy towards my craft, I became obsessed with improving my technique. I would stretch for hours after class, forcing my leg one inch higher in an effort to mirror the Dance Magazine cover girls. I injured my feet and ruined pair after pair of pointe shoes, turning on wood, cement, and even grass to improve my balance as I spun. At competitions, the dancers with the 180-degree leg extensions, endless turns, and soaring leaps—the ones who received “Bravos!” from the roaring audience—further pushed me to refine my skills and perfect my form. I believed that, with enough determination, I would one day attain their level of perfection. Reaching the quadruple-pirouette milestone only intensified my desire to accomplish even more. 

My efforts seemed to have come to fruition two summers ago when I was accepted to dance with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet at their renowned New York City summer intensive. I walked into my first session eager to learn from distinguished ballet masters and worldly dancers, already anticipating my improvement. Yet, as I danced alongside the accomplished ballerinas, I felt out of place. Despite their clean technique and professional training, they did not aim for glorious leg extensions or prodigious leaps. When they performed their turn combinations, most of them only executed two turns as I attempted four. 

“Dancers, double-pirouettes only.” 

Taken aback and confused, I wondered why our teacher expected so little from us. The other ballerinas seemed content, gracing the studio with their simple movements. 

As I grew closer with my Moscow roommates, I gradually learned that their training emphasized the history of the art form instead of stylistic tricks. Rather than show off their physical ability, their performances aimed to convey a story, one that embodied the rich culture of ballet and captured both the legacy of the dancers before them and their own artistry. As I observed my friends more intently in repertoire class, I felt the pain of the grief-stricken white swan from Swan Lake, the sass of the flirtatious Kitri from Don Quijote, and I gradually saw what I had overlooked before. My definition of talent had been molded by crowd-pleasing elements—whirring pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and mind-blowing leg extensions. This mindset slowly stripped me from the roots of my passion and my personal connection with ballet. 

With the Bolshoi, I learned to step back and explore the meaning behind each step and the people behind the scenes. Ballet carries history in its movements, from the societal values of the era to each choreographer’s unique flair. As I uncovered the messages behind each pirouette, kick, and jump, my appreciation for ballet grew beyond my obsession with raw athleticism and developed into a love for the art form’s emotive abilities in bridging the dancers with the audience. My journey as an artist has allowed me to see how technical execution is only the means to a greater understanding between dancer and spectator, between storyteller and listener. The elegance and complexity of ballet does not revolve around astonishing stunts but rather the evocative strength and artistry manifested in the dancer, in me. It is the combination of sentiments, history, tradition, and passion that has allowed ballet and its lessons of human connection to become my lifestyle both on and off stage.

This essay is about lessons. While the author is a dancer, this narrative isn’t really about ballet, per se — it’s about the author’s personal growth. It is purposefully reflective as the student shows a nice character arc that begins with an eager young ballerina and ends with a reflection on their past. The primary strength of this essay is the honesty and authenticity that the student approaches it with.

In the end, the student turns a cliche on its head as they embrace the idea of overcoming adversity and demonstrate how the adversity, in this case, was their own stereotypes about their art. It’s beautiful!

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay uses the idea of sports to explore a more profound topic—growing through relationships. They really embrace using sports as an avenue to tell the reader about a specific experience that changed the way they approach the world. 

The emphasis on relationships is why this essay works well and doesn’t fall into a cliche. The narrator grows not because of their experience with track but because of their relationship with their coach, who inspired them to evolve and become a leader.

Have a draft of your college essay? We’re here to help you polish it. Students can participate in a free Peer Review, or they can sign up for a paid review by CollegeVine’s experts. Sign up for your free CollegeVine account today to start improving your essay and your chances of acceptance!

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Race, Gender, and Sexuality Issues in Sports Essay

Sports is a part of the human culture, which means that sports can be regarded as the reflection of the society. It is possible to note that sports world is associated with controversies related to race, gender and sexuality. Researchers claim that the modern sports can be characterized by such notions as discrimination as well as white and masculine dominance (Knijnik, 2015). Importantly, the world is evolving so does the sports community. The aspects mentioned above have shaped the society, but it is still premature to state that race, gender, and sexuality issues have been resolved or can be resolved in the nearest future.

As has been mentioned above the central features of the contemporary sport are white and masculine domination. Elsey (2014) stresses that such sports as football are still associated with strong masculine players (or rather machos). This trend is specifically prevailing in some countries. For instance, Argentinian football fans do not find Messi or Ronaldo good enough due to these players’ unconventional behavior as they do not try to prove their masculinity in the way other players do (Elsey, 2014). Furthermore, issues associated with sexuality are still tabooed in many kinds of sports. Butterworth (2006) emphasizes that gay players in baseball have to silent their identities to remain in the game as people (fans, directors, and so on) still see the game as the manifestation of masculinity. More so, the division between the feminine and masculine is still very strong in the USA and in the global arena. Pieper (2012) sheds light on the way the life of Renée Richards, a male-to-female transsexual, is an illustration of the way gender distinction is central in the world of sports. People still perceive male and female bodies as fit for a number of specific activities and sports, and any deviations are unaccepted with only a few exclusions.

However, irrespective of the prevalence of the traditional norms, the world of sports has changed significantly during the past decades. The major shifts have taken place in the sphere of the race. Many societies have become less concerned about the race of players especially if those are high-achievers. For instance, Brazilians (who used to be rather ethnocentric decades ago) do not focus on their football players’ race but concentrate on their achievements (Maranhão, 2007). Nonetheless, when the team is not winning, some players (usually those pertaining to ethnic minorities) are accused of playing non-Brazilian football. Burgos (2009) notes that African Americans and Latinos had to fight for their inclusion, but the fight is not won to date. When it comes to gender and sexuality, the changes are even less apparent, but they are still present. The mentioned case of Renée Richards shows that some societies are ready to be more liberal when it comes to gender distinctions as the athlete won in the New York Supreme Court (Pieper, 2012). Nonetheless, the international sports committees are more traditional, which means that different nations have different views on the matter.

On balance, it is possible to note that the world of sports can be characterized by such features as white and masculine dominance. Such areas as race, gender and sexuality are still associated with prejudice and bias. It is noteworthy that the major shift in people’s perspectives has occurred in the sphere of race and ethnicity. As for gender and sexuality, sports remain very traditional even though there is some tokenism. Nevertheless, the presence of tiniest changes shows that the world of sports is evolving and discrimination (in all aspects) is likely to disappear.

Burgos, A. (2009). Left out: Afro-Latinos, black baseball, and the revision of baseball’s racial history. Social Text 98 , 27 (1), 37-58.

Butterworth, M. (2006). Pitchers and catchers: Mike Piazza and the discourse of gay identity in the national pastime. Journal of Sport and Social Issues , 30 (2), 138-157.

Elsey, B. (2014, November 17). Messi, Maradona, and Argentine machismo. The Allrounder . Web.

Knijnik, J. (2015). Femininities and masculinities in Brazilian women’s football: Resistance and compliance. Journal of International Women’s Studies , 16 (3), 54-70.

Maranhão, T. (2007). Apollonians and Dionysians: The role of football in Gilberto Freyre’s vision of Brazilian people. Soccer & Society , 8 (4), 510-523.

Pieper, L. (2012). Gender regulation: Renée Richards revisited. The International Journal of the History of Sport , 29 (5), 675-690.

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IvyPanda. (2020, November 21). Race, Gender, and Sexuality Issues in Sports. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sports-issues-of-gender-race-and-sexuality/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Race, Gender, and Sexuality Issues in Sports." November 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sports-issues-of-gender-race-and-sexuality/.

1. IvyPanda . "Race, Gender, and Sexuality Issues in Sports." November 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sports-issues-of-gender-race-and-sexuality/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Race, Gender, and Sexuality Issues in Sports." November 21, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sports-issues-of-gender-race-and-sexuality/.

Race, Class, and Gender

The Race to Gender Equality in Sports

Although women are increasingly becoming involved in sports, there is still a discrepancy between the way society treats male and female athletes. There is a long history of privileging men in athletic competitions. For example, although the Olympic games have been around since 776 B.C., women were not permitted to compete until the 1900 games in Paris ( Frantz, 2016 ). At that time, women made up only 2% of total athletes. This ratio has increased over time with women comprising of 44% of the total athletes competing at the 2012 London games. However, even this number can be improved. And that’s just the Olympics.

The gender divide in sports begins at an early age and widens over time. After the age of six, there is a lasting gender gap in athletics, with more males involved in sports than women ( Tinsley, 2015 ). There are many factors that contribute to this divide. Boys are often more encouraged to play sports than girls. Boys begin to receive sports related toys at age two ( Women’s Sports Foundation, 2011 ), and generally enter athletics two years earlier than girls. This causes many girls involved in organized sports to feel inferior to boys who have already developed the practice skills required to perform well in sports ( Women’s Sports Foundation, 2011 ).

Although in recent years young girls have become increasingly involved in athletics, statistics show that “teenage girls drop out of sports at a rate that is six times higher than that of boys” ( Hardin and Greer, 2009 ). During their teenage years, girls become more concerned with their body images. Since sports cause people to look sweaty and red-faced, many girls decide to stop engaging in athletics ( Tinsley, 2015 ). As boys mature, they are respected and envied if they are particularly skilled at sports.

While girls are not necessarily discouraged from participating in sports, they do not receive the same incentives encouraging them to continue athletic involvement. While this pattern begins in childhood, it persists at all life stages for female athletes. Even at professional levels, female athletes competing on national sports teams in the United States receive less recognition compared to their male counterparts. The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) contains 12 teams compared to the 30 in the National Basketball Association (NBA). In 2015, the United States women’s soccer team won the World Cup, while the men’s team did not win. Yet, as of 2016, female soccer players still receive smaller salaries for winning all of their games ($99,000) than male soccer players who lose all of their games ($100,000) ( Yourish, Ward and Almukhtar, 2016 ). Without the same resources and encouragement, girls are less likely to pursue athletic endeavors.

Gender inequality extends to the broadcasting of sports. Women’s events receive less coverage than those of their male counterparts. Gymnastics and figure skating, which portray women as graceful, delicate, beautiful creatures ( Harding and Greer, 2009 ) receive the most broadcasting.

Women who appear strong and powerful in athletics often receive less media coverage because society continues to place large importance on a woman’s appearance. Leading up to the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, the very muscular, track athlete Marion Jones confidently expressed her chances of winning multiple gold medals. Yet, Jones received little media coverage compared to her teammate, Amy Acuff, a part-time model whose chances at winning a medal were slim. When interviewed, reporters rarely asked about Acuff’s athletic endeavors. They instead focused mostly on questions relating to her upcoming Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue ( Bernstein, 2002 ). Not only did Acuff receive more media coverage than Jones because of her traditionally “feminine” appearance, but also the attention Acuff received did not focus on her athletic ability at all.

Society is happy to allow women to prance around in leotards and sparkles, but it does not want to see women dripping with sweat or developing large muscles. Such displays compromise a person’s ability to appropriately “do” gender as public audiences would expect. Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987) explain, “doing gender consists of managing such occasions so that, whatever the particulars, the outcome is seen and seeable in context as gender appropriate or, as the case may be, gender inappropriate, that is, accountable.” If a woman does not present herself in a way that is “physically appealing,” she is not playing into her gender role and is more likely to receive criticism. Society has taught females that participation in sports goes against feminine performance norms, and thus, women receive little praise for their involvement in athletics.

If a female decides to participate in athletics, especially in male-dominated sports, she is often subject to harsh criticism. After tennis powerhouse Serena Williams, won her 21 st Grand Slam title, reporters were quick to judge her for her deviant portrayal of femininity. Rather than asking her about her athletic achievement, reporters questioned why she was not sitting, smiling and acting as if she had not just completed an exhausting athletic feat.

When girls decide to opt out of sports, they miss out on many of the benefits that physical exercise offer. Girls who participate in athletics tend to lead healthier lifestyles and perform better in school compared to girls who do not regularly participate in athletics. They are also less likely to consume alcohol, use drugs, or become pregnant as a teenager. Female athletes report higher levels of contentment with their lives than girls who do not participate in physical activities.

Girls should not lose out on all the benefits that physical exercise provides because of concern with their appearance—something they would not be conscientious about if society did not place such a large importance on it. Rather than imposing standards of beauty that discourage girls from participating in athletics, women and society would be better off focusing on the elimination of the inequality gaps between the genders in sports.

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Race in American Sports: Essays Paperback – June 10, 2014

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These essays critically examine the issue of race in college and professional sports, beginning with the effects of stereotypes on black female college athletes, and the self-handicapping of black male college athletes. Also discussed is the movement of colleges between NCAA designated conferences, and the economic impact and effects on academics for blacks. An essay on baseball focuses on changes in Brooklyn during the Jackie Robinson years, and another essay on how the Leland Giants became a symbol of racial pride. Other essayists discuss the use of American Indian mascots, the Jeremy Lin spectacle surrounding Asians in pro sports, the need to hire more NFL coaches of color, and ideals of black male masculinity in boxing.

Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here .

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher McFarland & Company
• Publication date June 10, 2014
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 6 x 0.58 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0786473193
• ISBN-13 978-0786473199
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McFarland & Company (June 10, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786473193
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786473199
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.58 x 9 inches
• #1,354 in Sociology of Sports (Books)
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Essay on Importance of Sports for Students and Children

500+ words essay on importance of sports.

First of all, Sport refers to an activity involving physical activity and skill . Here, two or more parties compete against each other. Sports are an integral part of human life and there is great importance of sports in all spheres of life. Furthermore, Sports help build the character and personality of a person. It certainly is an excellent tool to keep the body physically fit. Most noteworthy, the benefits of Sports are so many that books can be written.  Sports have a massive positive effect on both the mind and body.

Physical Benefits of Sports

First of all, Sports strengthen the heart. Regular Sports certainly make the heart stronger. Hence, Sport is an excellent preventive measure against heart diseases . This certainly increases the life expectancy of individuals. Furthermore, a healthy heart means a healthy blood pressure.

Sports involve physical activity of the body. Due to this physical activity, blood vessels remain clean. Sports reduces the amount of cholesterol and fats in the body. This happens because of the increase of flexibility of the wall of the blood vessels. The flexibility increases due to physical exertion, which is the result of Sports.

Furthermore, the sugar level in blood also gets lower thanks to Sports. The sugar certainly does not accumulate in the blood due to physical activity.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

A person experiences a good quality of breathing because of Sports. Sports strengthen the lungs of the body. Sports certainly escalate the lung capacity and efficiency of the body. Hence, more oxygen enters the blood which is extremely beneficial. Furthermore, there are fewer chances of developing lung diseases due to Sports.

Appropriate body weight is easy to maintain because of sports. A Sports playing person probably does not suffer from obesity or underweight problems. Sports certainly help the body remain fit and slim.

Furthermore, Sports also improves the quality of bones. A person who plays sports will have strong bones even in old age. Several scientific research reports that Sports prevent many diseases. For example, many researchers conclude that Sports prevent the development of cancer.

Other Benefits of Sports

Sport is certainly an excellent tool to build self-confidence . Playing Sports increases confidence to talk properly. A sport certainly improves the skills of communicating with others. Furthermore, the person experiences confidence in sitting, standing, and walking properly. Hence, Sports enriches the social life of an individual.

Sports bring discipline in life. It certainly teaches the values of dedication and patience. Sports also teach people how to handle failure. Furthermore, the importance of following a time schedule is also present in Sports.

Above all, Sports improves the thinking ability of individuals. Sports certainly sharpen the mind. Children who play Sports probably perform better at exams than those who don’t.

Finally, Sports reduces the stress of mind . A Sports playing person would certainly experience less depression. Sports ensure the peace of mind of those playing it. Most noteworthy, Sports brings happiness and joy in the life of individuals.

A sport is an aspect of human life that is of paramount importance. It certainly increases the quality of human life. Sports must be made mandatory in schools. This is because it is as important as education. Everyone must perform at least one Sport activity on a regular basis.

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What does John Green's book of essays say about the Indy 500? About the Indianapolis nod

Author John Green is no stranger to Indianapolis and the Indy 500, which is Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Green has many works in his back pocket, including several with nods to Indianapolis. It seems fitting to revisit some of the mentions as we wait for drivers to start their engines.

The IndyStar has several guides to get fans ready for the Greatest Spectacle in Racing including a printable starting lineup , how to tune in to the race from outside the racetrack and what people can bring to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

What to know about John Green and the Indy 500:

What does John Green's book of essays say about the Indy 500?

In " The Anthropocene Reviewed ," Green writes essays reviewing different topics from Halley's Comet to Diet Dr Pepper and even the Indianapolis 500, the IndyStar previously reported.

He wrote the Indy 500 review during the pandemic.

“I wanted to write about my experience of suddenly being unable to go to the race, and how it felt to go through all the same rituals that I always go through on that Sunday, and to bike to the race as I always do and to arrive at an empty Speedway, with the gates locked shut."

"It can be hard at times because we have to get used to a new normal to be able to reflect on how much has been lost in the last year and a half," he said. "And obviously the loss of fans at the speedway wasn't one of the big losses, but it was a loss. One loss among billions. For me, it was a way to feel that."

But people don't have to feel that loss again as they can attend the race on Sunday.

The book, which was released in 2021, is his first work of nonfiction and is inspired by his podcast of the same name where he also published monthly reviews.

'The Anthropocene Reviewed': John Green's new nonfiction book finds wonder in Diet Dr Pepper, Indianapolis 500

What John Green books mention Indianapolis?

"The Fault in Our Stars" and "Turtles All the Way Down" are both situated in Indianapolis.

In the latter, there are many references to the city, including:

• White River
• Pogue's Run
• Michigan Road mansion
• Applebee’s at 86th and Ditch
• IU Health North Hospital
• The Indianapolis Star
• The Indianapolis Prize
• Juan Solomon Park

Others are reading: John Green’s ‘Turtles’ at home in Indianapolis

Is John Green from Indianapolis?

Not originally.

In his webpage , Green states that he grew up in Orlando. He moved to Indianapolis in 2007 when his wife got a job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the IndyStar previously reported.

John Green on TikTok: Author still can't stop talking about how great Indianapolis is

How to watch 'Turtles All the Way Down'

The movie adaptation is now available streaming on Max .

When is the 2024 Indy 500?

This year's Indy 500 race is on Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

David Lindquist, Rachel Fradette and Ethan May contributed to this article.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: What does John Green's book of essays say about the Indy 500? About the Indianapolis nod

Caitlin Clark marketing boom is celebrated but also draws questions of race and equity

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Women’s basketball has never seen anything like Caitlin Clark , the sweet-shooting rookie guard for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever. She’s Taylor Swift with a jump shot, Mia Hamm in a singlet; a figure so transcendent she is changing her profession.

More than 55,000 people showed up to watch her play a practice game last fall and her final college game drew 24 million TV viewers this spring. That’s 3 1/2 times larger than the audience for Serena Williams’ final tennis match .

More than 3 million people tuned in on ESPN just to watch her get drafted . After that, Nike signed her to the most lucrative sponsorship deal in women’s basketball history, a $28-million agreement that includes a signature shoe. Michael Jordan’s first deal with Nike was worth less than a tenth of that.

So what makes the pony-tailed Clark, just 22, so special? Sure, she’s the leading scorer in women’s college basketball history, but how many people have heard of Lynette Woodard, the woman she passed? And for all of her individual accomplishments, she has never won a state or national team title.

What really makes her stand out is the fact she almost blends in. Despite her talents, at 6 feet and a slender 152 pounds she’s one of the smallest players in the WNBA.

“She looks like your mom,” said Ann Bastianelli, a professor of marketing at Indiana University and a former college basketball player. “These women who are well over six feet and strong and athletic and determined and all of these other sorts of things, I think are scary to lots of men and I think they would be scary to lots of people who have very firm and rigid views of gender and sexual stereotypes.”

And while Clark passes and shoots with laser-like precision the way NBA star Stephen Curry does, she makes it look so easy that everyone thinks they can do it.

“People love Steph Curry because he’s the Everyman,” said Jemele Hill, an Emmy-winning sports journalist and former ESPN personality. “Caitlin Clark has the same relatability.”

But Clark, who will lead the Fever against the Sparks on Friday at Crypto.com Arena , also stands out for who she’s not. In a league in which approximately 70% of the players are Black, nearly a third identify as LGBTQ and most come from urban environments, Clark is white, straight and from Iowa.

And that sets her apart even more than her shooting skills.

“We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity,” said Hill, now a contributing writer at the Atlantic and host of the “Jemele Hill is Unbothered” podcast. “While so many people are happy for Caitlin’s success — including the players; this has had such an enormous impact on the game — there is a part of it that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there.”

Nicole Melton, co-director of the Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport at the University of Massachusetts, agrees.

“Cailtin fits a very comfortable narrative for a lot of people in the United States,” she said. “She comes from the heartland. She’s an amazing talent. She’s also a white, straight woman, right? There’s not a lot of things that would make people feel uncomfortable with that person being successful.”

Granderson: Caitlin Clark is having a moment in women’s basketball. She shouldn’t be the only one

Women’s basketball is catching more interest than usual thanks to the star of the NCAA tournament. What would it take to hold Americans’ attention?

April 1, 2024

Except, maybe, in some WNBA locker rooms. For veteran players who have struggled for years with low pay, commercial travel and little media coverage, the attention and riches showered on Clark, who has played only three professional games, has fueled some bitterness. For them, there is more than just basketball at play and their issue isn’t with Clark, but rather the hype machine that has beatified her.

“A lot of people may say it’s not about Black and white, but to me, it is,” Las Vegas forward A’ja Wilson, a two-time WNBA champion and two-time MVP, told the Associated Press .

“You can be top-notch at what you are as a Black woman, but yet maybe that’s something that people don’t want to see. They don’t see it as marketable, so it doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug. That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.”

Asked about Wilson’s comments, Clark chose to deflect the criticism and talk instead about the big picture.

“There’s opportunities for every single player in women’s basketball,” she said. “The more opportunities we can give across the board, that’s what’s going to elevate women’s basketball.”

Yet it’s because of players like Wilson that Clark is joining a league primed for explosive growth. The WNBA’s 36 million unique TV viewers in 2023 marked a 27% increase from the previous season while revenue was up about $200 million. And whether by coincidence or coordination, a month after Clark joined the league, commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced teams would be traveling by charter flights this season .

If Clark delivers the WNBA the kind of record-breaking TV audiences she brought to college basketball, that could mean even more money for a league in the final year of its current broadcast deal.

“The boom of social media, there’s more accessibility and visibility. And so when you have a phenom like Caitlin Clark, who is kind of a product of that generation, it can certainly bring a lot of great attention,” said Seattle Storm forward Nneka Ogwumike, who is also president of the players’ association.

That, in turn, will mean higher pay and better working conditions for every WNBA player. And while the players welcome that, Hill said it hasn’t stopped many from wondering why talented, charismatic women such as Brittney Griner, Candace Parker and Maya Moore didn’t get the same media attention when they took the league by storm.

“It’s not jealousy. It’s just the fact that in our society, Black women are often erased from the picture,” Hill said. “While Caitlin Clark’s success should be widely celebrated, there are various points where we have seen dynamic phenoms and how they have been able to popularize the game. It’s just that, for whatever reason, could be race, could be gender, could be a myriad of factors, that same marketing muscle that seems very intentional about making sure that Caitlyn Clark is a superstar was missing for them.

“Coke and Pepsi and all these other brands didn’t come running for Cheryl Miller. So I think it’s OK to have multiple conversations at once. There’s plenty of room to highlight and celebrate Caitlin Clark’s popularity while also discussing ways in which to not erase Black women from a league that they have built and continue to build.”

There is evidence to suggest that erasure is real. Four years ago, Melton and Risa Isard, a research fellow with the Laboratory of Inclusion and Diversity, counted each mention of an active WNBA player in more than 550 online articles from ESPN, Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports and found that Black players received significantly less coverage.

Wilson, for example, who is Black and was the league’s MVP, received half as much coverage as rookie Sabrina Ionescu, the No. 1 draft pick who is white and played only three games that season.

Plaschke: Gritty Sparks bring new hope and winning effort during their season opening loss

The Sparks played formidable defense, worked well as a team and showed signs they can win a lot of games despite dropping their season opener.

May 16, 2024

“I do think that’s shifting, but it’s still there. It’s still an undercurrent,” Melton said. “[Clark] kind of stands on the shoulders of all those women that came before, that have been building this narrative and making people realize how great women’s sport is, especially basketball.”

Melton attended Clark’s sold-out WNBA debut, in which she scored 20 points but committed 10 turnovers in a 21-point loss to the Connecticut Sun. Clark scored only nine points in her second game, the Fever’s home opener, and her team suffered a 36-point loss to the New York Liberty. Clark bounced back with 22 points during an 11-point loss to the Liberty on Saturday.

Melton found the crowd at Clark’s first WNBA game to be far more diverse than the league’s media coverage.

“It was just an amazing environment,” she said. “You had different races, different genders, different sexual orientations. It was a whole melting pot of different people from different walks of life.”

It was, in fact, the kind of diverse crowd the WNBA needs to succeed. And while many of those people had come to watch Clark, they left just as impressed with the play of Connecticut’s Alyssa Thomas, who had a league-record 12 th triple-double, and DeWanna Bonner, who moved into fifth place on the league’s all-time scoring list. Ultimately that’s the kind of role the WNBA and its players are hoping Clark will play: a box-office draw who introduces new fans to great talents they might have never heard of.

“A lot of people have a gateway into women’s basketball right now. And that is going to give them an opportunity to not only come for what they’re interested in, but also to find something to discover something that they haven’t before,” Ogwumike said. “But however people get interested in women’s basketball, they’re also now going to discover that there’s definitely more than one person that can do a few things in this league that that makes our league as amazing as it is.”

In the meantime, Clark, the league’s poster girl, is being burned by the intense glare of a spotlight she never wanted. All she ever wanted to do was play basketball yet now, like Taylor Swift, she finds herself at the center of political conversations she didn’t start, but ones that are long overdue.

“In that regard, I feel bad for Caitlin Clark because she didn’t ask for any of that,” Hill said.

But, Hill continued, “her success in forcing accountability. And I think that’s a great thing. Now the WNBA has to evaluate everything they do. While it’s shameful that they waited until they got the right player to start behaving in ways they could have been doing all along, the point is that her presence is going to force a level of accountability in the sport that wasn’t always there.”

More to Read

‘Take my story back’: How Layshia Clarendon earned redemption with the Sparks

May 14, 2024

Five storylines for WNBA’s 28th season: From Caitlin Clark to Aces’ three-peat bid

May 13, 2024

Caitlin Clark’s L.A. debut and two other Sparks games moved to Crypto.com Arena

May 7, 2024

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Kevin Baxter writes about soccer and hockey for the Los Angeles Times. He has covered seven World Cups, four Olympic Games, six World Series and a Super Bowl and has contributed to three Pulitzer Prize-winning series at The Times and Miami Herald. An essay he wrote in fifth grade was voted best in the class. He has a cool dog.

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Tyler Anderson pitches eight innings of one-run ball to lift Angels over Astros

NASCAR Cup Series at North Wilkesboro: Starting lineup, TV schedule for Sunday's race

The NASCAR Cup Series takes on North Wilkesboro Speedway for the 2024 NASCAR All-Star Race.

The race itself is set for Sunday, but rain has played a factor in North Carolina.

Saturday's heat races have been canceled and the first 17 spots of the starting lineup will be determined by the NASCAR rule book. Penske Racing's Joey Logano won the pole after his team won Saturday's Pit Crew Challenge.

Two drivers earned the transfer spot from the All-Star Open to make the final field for the All-Star Race. The final spot was determined by a fan vote going to the driver with the most votes who had not raced his way into the field.

Here's the starting lineup for Sunday's NASCAR All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway.

NASCAR All-Star Race starting lineup

1. Joey Logano, No. 22 Team Penske Ford

2. Brad Keselowski, No. 6 Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing Ford

3. Christopher Bell, No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

4. Daniel Suarez, No. 99 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet

5. Chris Buescher, No. 17 Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing Ford

6. Tyler Reddick, No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota

7. Ross Chastain, No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet

8. Martin Truex Jr., No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

9. Michael McDowell, No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford 

10. AJ Allmendinger, No. 16 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet

11. Denny Hamlin, No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

12. Kyle Larson, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

13. William Byron, No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

14. Kyle Busch, No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet

15. Chase Elliott, No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

16. Ricky Stenhouse Jr., No. 47 JTG Daugherty Racing Chevrolet

17. Ryan Blaney, No. 12 Team Penske Ford

18. First place finisher in All-Star Open

19. Second place finisher in All-Star Open

20. Fan vote (to be determined after the All-Star Open)

NASCAR TV schedule, start time for All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway

Green Flag Time:  Approx. 7 p.m. (CT) on Sunday, May 19 (prerace coverage begins at 6 p.m. CT Sunday)

Track: North Wilkesboro Speedway (0.62-mile oval), North Wilkesboro, North Carolina

Length:   200 laps, 125 miles

Stages:  100 laps, 50 laps, 50 laps

TV coverage:  FS1

Radio:   MRN

Streaming:  FUBO   (free trial available) ; FOX Sports app (subscription required); MRN.com and SiriusXM on Channel 90 for audio (subscription required)

The NASCAR All-Star Race will be broadcast nationally on FS1. Streaming options for the race include the FOX Sports app and  FUBO , which offers a  free trial  to potential subscribers.

Sports Betting

2024 Preakness Stakes date and time: When is the race, how to watch, odds, horses and weather

The 2024 Preakness Stakes (Saturday, May 18 on NBC/Peacock) will be the 149th running of the annual horse race in Baltimore. It’s the yearly second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown pursuit. Mystik Dan will be running in this year’s Preakness after some doubt that he would run in the race due to the short turn around between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.

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Here’s everything you need to know about the 2024 Preakness Stakes.

What is the Preakness Stakes?

The Preakness Stakes is the second race in the Triple Crown series and is running for the 149th time this year. A blanket of yellow flowers is draped on the winner each year and the weather vane at Pimlico is painted with the silk’s colors immediately after a winner is declared. The field is much smaller than the 20 horses that start the Kentucky Derby each year. This year, only eight horses will run in the Preakness. Only horses that are three years old are eligible to race in the Preakness Stakes, and it is open to both male and female horses. Swiss Skydiver, a filly, won the Preakness Stakes in 2020 and Rachel Alexandra won in 2009.

Everything you need to know about the horses running the Preakness on Saturday

When is the 2024 Preakness Stakes?

The 2024 Preakness Stakes will be held on Saturday, May 18, 2024, at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.

What horses are in the 2024 Preakness Stakes and their odds?

• Mugatu – 20-1
• Uncle Heavy – 7-1
• Catching Freedom – 7-2
• Muth – Scratched
• Mystik Dan – 5-2
• Seize the Grey – 8-1
• Just Steel – 9-1
• Tuscan Gold – 7-2
• Imagination – 9-2

What time does the 2024 Preakness Stakes start?

The post-time for the Preakness Stakes is set for 7:01 p.m. ET.

How long is the Preakness Stakes?

The race is 1 3/16 miles long. Secretariat owns the Preakness Stakes record at 1:53, although he wasn’t credited with the record until a 2012 meeting of the Maryland Racing Commission. Smarty Jones owns the record for margin of victory with a 11 1/2 length victory in 2004. Trainer Bob Baffert has won the Preakness Stakes eight times, most recently in 2023.

Who won the 2023 Preakness Stakes?

In 2023, National Treasure won the Preakness Stakes by a head over Blazing Sevens. National Treasure was 4-1 on the morning line odds. Mage, the 2023 Kentucky Derby winner, finished third.

What is the weather forecast for the 2024 Preakness Stakes?

The forecast for Saturday calls for a high of 66 degrees and a low of 58 degrees. The bigger news is there’s an 80 percent chance of rain on Saturday throughout the day with an accumulation of around half an inch.

How can I watch and stream the 2024 Preakness Stakes?

Television coverage for the 2024 Preakness Stakes starts at 4:30 p.m. ET on NBC. Preliminary coverage starts at 1:30 p.m. on CNBC. All coverage can also be streamed on Peacock.

Five long-standing traditions of the Kentucky Derby

Who is the favorite for the 2024 Preakness Stakes?

Mystik Dan is the 5-2 favorite for the 2024 Preakness Stakes. Muth, who is trained by Bob Baffert, was the morning line favorite when the post positions were drawn on Monday evening, but Muth scratched due to a high-fever.

Catching Freedom (6-1) and Imagination (6-1) have the second best odds.

What does morning line mean?

It is the first set of odds, released after the post positions were announced. Horse racing is parimutuel betting, meaning you can buy a ticket on the horse you want to win (or place or show, etc) but the odds are going to fluctuate up until the start of the race and eventually land on final odds as the horses go off, based on what everyone else is betting. In regular sports betting, you can buy a ticket at 5-to-1 odds and even if it’s down to 2-to-1 by the start of the game, your bet will pay out at 5-to-1. In horse racing, those 5-to-1 odds moving to 2-to-1 means you get stuck with those 2-to-1 odds like everyone else, no matter when the ticket was purchased (but, on the bright side, the odds can always go in the other direction, too).

What is the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes?

The Black-Eyed Susan Stakes is held on the Friday before the Preakness at Pimlico. It puts the best 3-year-old fillies against each other. The event is a Grade II race and offers $300,000 purse. It will stream starting at 4:30 p.m. ET Friday on Peacock.

How does betting on the Preakness Stakes work?

There are many different ways to bet on the Preakness Stakes, and it can be confusing to understand what an exacta, trifecta and superfecta are. It’s also confusing on how actually to place a bet on them.

The easiest way is to bet on the winner of the race. We explained all of the different types of horse racing bets here.

(Photo: Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan leaves the track after a workout at Pimlico Race Course: Julio Cortez / AP Photo)

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Andrew DeWitt is The Athletic's senior editor for sports betting. Andrew previously worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning, CBSSports.com and the St. Joseph News-Press. He graduated from the University of Missouri and is from Kansas City.

Transgender teen booed after winning girls' track race at state championship

A transgender teenager was booed at an Oregon sports stadium after winning a race during the state’s high school track and field championship over the weekend.

Multiple videos posted on social media show McDaniel High School sophomore Aayden Gallagher being booed by a crowd of onlookers as she crossed the finish line first in the 200-meter race at the Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) Track and Field State Championships on Saturday. Boos could also be heard as the teenage runner received her gold medal at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field in Eugene, the videos show.

Gallagher’s win quickly went viral on social media, with some critics characterizing her participation in the girls’ division as unfair, arguing that those assigned male at birth are inherently stronger and faster than those assigned female at birth. Others hurled transphobic insults at the high schooler.

“Another proud moment for women’s sports!” Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who has consistently spoken out against trans athletes participating on women’s sports teams, wrote sarcastically on X following the race . “Aayden Gallagher (male) just placed 1st in the Oregon state championship in the women’s 200m after placing 2nd in the 400m. Just listen to the audible BOOS. People are over this...& it’s about time.”

Libs of TikTok , a far-right social media account that is largely dedicated to mocking LGBTQ people and has more than 3 million followers on X, also condemned Gallagher’s win, posting about it several times over the weekend.

“Listen to the audience’s loud BOOs as they announce him as the winner!,” the account, which was started by former real estate agent Chaya Raichik, shared on Saturday . “People are sick of this madness!”

A representative for OSAA, which governs public and private high school athletics in Oregon, did not immediately return a request for comment regarding Gallagher’s win, the response from the crowd and the resulting backlash.

Valerie Feder, the director of media relations for Portland Public Schools, the school district that operates McDaniel High School, said in a statement that the high school was following OSAA’s rules and declined to comment further. 

The backlash following Gallagher’s win is the latest flashpoint in a yearslong and divisive debate over whether trans athletes, and particularly trans girls and women, should be allowed to participate in sporting events that match their gender identities. 

A majority of Americans, 69%, say that trans athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth, according to a 2023 Gallup poll of roughly 1,000 adults living in the United States. 

Half of U.S. states — not including Oregon — have bans on transgender students participating in school sports that align with their gender identity, according to LGBTQ think tank Movement Advancement Project. Injunctions are temporarily blocking some of these laws, including those in Arizona, Idaho and Utah, according to MAP.

The OSAA’s policy on trans athletes “allows students to participate for the athletic or activity program of their consistently asserted gender identity while providing a fair and safe environment for all students.” It does not require that trans athletes undergo transition-related medical care before competing.

Twelve Republican state lawmakers sent a letter to the OSAA in April condemning the policy and vowing to challenge it. The lawmakers, all of whom are women, cited Gallagher’s participation in the girls’ high school track and field division as reason for their concern. 

Cyd Zeigler, the founder of LGBTQ sports site Outsports and a longtime LGBTQ advocate, condemned the backlash against Gallagher’s win.

“For conservatives to attack her as a ‘cheater’ and saying she couldn’t make it as a boy so now she’s a girl, it’s just disgusting,” Zeigler said in an interview. “This is the kind of rhetoric — when you’re a teenager and you hear it on the stands and you see it on social media — this is the kind of stuff that causes kids to hurt themselves.”

Zeigler also noted that Gallagher did not break any rules in participating in the girls' track race, as her participation is allowed under OSAA guidelines. 

“The criticism is misdirected,” Zeigler said of those taking issue with Gallagher’s participation. “Their real problem is with the rulemakers, not this kid.”

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Reporter, NBC OUT