race and ethnicity in sports essay

Study Like a Boss

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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Article contents

Gender and cultural diversity in sport, exercise, and performance psychology.

Diane L. Gill Diane L. Gill University of North Carolina at Greensboro
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.148
Published online: 26 April 2017

Gender and cultural diversity are ever-present and powerful in sport, exercise, and performance settings. Our cultural identities affect our behaviors and interactions with others. As professionals, we must recognize and value cultural diversity. Gender and culture are best understood within a multicultural framework that recognizes multiple, intersecting identities; power relations; and the action for social justice. Physical activity participants are culturally diverse in many ways, but in other ways cultural groups are excluded from participation, and especially from power (e.g., leadership roles).

Sport, exercise, and performance psychology have barely begun to address cultural diversity, and the limited scholarship focuses on gender. Although the participation of girls and women has increased dramatically in recent years, stereotypes and media representations still convey the message that sport is a masculine activity. Stereotypes and social constraints are attached to other cultural groups, and those stereotypes affect behavior and opportunities. Race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and physical characteristics all limit opportunities in physical activity settings. People who are overweight or obese are particularly subject to bias and discrimination in sport and physical activity. Cultural competence, which refers to the ability to work effectively with people of a different culture, is essential for professionals in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Not only is it important for individuals to develop their own cultural awareness, understanding, and skills, but we must advocate for inclusive excellence in our programs and organizations to expand our reach and promote physical activity for the health and well-being of all.

cultural competence
stereotypes
weight bias

Introduction

Cultural diversity is a hallmark of society and a powerful influence in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Participants are diverse in many ways, and physical activity takes place in a culturally diverse world. People carry their gender and cultural identities everywhere. Importantly, culture affects our behaviors and interactions with others. Thus, it is essential that professionals recognize and value cultural diversity.

This article takes a broad view of culture, including gender and extending beyond race, ethnicity, and social class to include physicality (physical abilities and characteristics). The article begins with a guiding framework, then reviews scholarship on gender and culture, and concludes with guidelines for cultural competence.

Culture: Basics and a Guiding Framework

This first section draws from psychology and cultural studies to provide a guiding framework for understanding culture and moving toward cultural competence in professional practice. Culture , however, is complex and not easily defined. Narrow definitions emphasize ethnicity, but we will adopt the common practice and broaden the definition to shared values, beliefs, and practices of an identifiable group of people . Thus, culture includes gender as well as race and ethnicity, and extends to language, spirituality, sexuality, physicality, and so on. Multicultural psychology further emphasizes intersections of identities and the totality of cultural experiences and contexts, which leads to the guiding framework for this article.

Psychology, cultural studies, and related areas all emphasize multiple, intersecting cultural identities; highlight power relations; and call for social action and advocacy. First, we all have multiple, intersecting cultural identities . The mix of identities is unique to each person. For example, two young women may both identify as black, Christian women athletes. One may very strongly identify as a Christian athlete, whereas the other more strongly identifies as a black woman. Moreover, the salience of those identities may vary across contexts. For example, religious identity may be salient in family gatherings but not in athletics. Also, when you are the only person with your identity (e.g., the only girl on the youth baseball team, the only athlete in class), that aspect of your identity is more salient.

The second theme of our framework involves power relations . Culture is more than categories; culture is relational, and cultural relations involve power and privilege. That is, one group has privilege, and other groups are oppressed. Privilege refers to power or institutionalized advantage gained by virtue of valued social identities. Oppression refers to discrimination or systematic denial of resources to those with inferior or less valued identities. Given that we all have many cultural identities, most people have some identities that confer privilege and other identities that lead to oppression. If you are white, male, heterosexual, educated, or able-bodied, you have privilege in that identity; you are more likely to see people who look like you in positions of power and to see yourself in those roles. At the same time, you likely have other identities that lack privilege. Most of us find it easier to recognize our oppression and more difficult to recognize our own privilege.

Recognizing privilege is a key to understanding cultural relations, and that understanding leads to the third theme— action and advocacy . Action and advocacy calls for professionals to develop their own cultural competencies and to work for social justice in our programs and institutions.

Understanding cultural diversity and developing cultural competence is not easy. As well as recognizing multiple, intersecting cultural identities, power relations and action for social justice, sport, exercise, and performance psychologists also must retain concern for the individual. The importance of individualizing professional practice is rightfully emphasized. Cultural competence involves contextualizing professional practice and specifically recognizing cultural context. The ability to simultaneously recognize and consider both the individual and the cultural context is the essence of cultural competence.

Gender and Cultural Diversity in Sport and Physical Activity

Physical activity participants are diverse, but not as diverse as the broader population. Competitive athletics are particularly limited in terms of cultural diversity. School physical education and community sport programs may come closer to reflecting community diversity, but all sport and physical activities reflect cultural restrictions. Gender is a particularly visible cultural influence, often leading to restrictions in sport, exercise and performance settings.

In the United States, the 1972 passage of Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions marked the beginning of a move away from the early women’s physical education model toward the competitive women’s sport programs of today. Participation of girls and women in youth and college sport has exploded in the last generation, particularly in the United States and western European nations. Still, the numbers of female and male participants are not equal. Sabo and Veliz ( 2012 ), in a nationwide study of U.S. high schools, found that overall boys have more sport opportunities than girls, and furthermore, progress toward gender equity, which had advanced prior to 2000 , had reversed since then, resulting in a wider gender gap. Following a 2013 conference in Europe ( http://ec.europa.eu/sport/news/2014/gender_equality_sport_en.htm ), a group of experts developed the report: Gender Equality in Sport: Proposal for Strategic Actions 2014–2020 ( http://ec.europa.eu/sport/events/2013/documents/20131203-gender/final-proposal-1802_en.pdf ).

In considering cultural diversity, it is important to go beyond participation numbers to consider power and privilege. Richard Lapchick’s Racial and Gender Report Card shows racial and gender inequities with little progress. For example, the 2015 report card (Lapchick, 2015 ) indicates that African Americans are slightly overrepresented in U.S. Division I athletics, but other racial and ethnic minorities are very underrepresented (see more statistics and reports at the Institute for Diversity and Ethnics in Sport website: www.tidesport.org ). Reports also show clear power relations. Before Title IX ( 1972 ), more than 90 percent of women’s athletic teams in the United States were coached by women and had a woman athletic director. Today less than half of women’s teams are coached by women (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014 ). White men dominate coaching, even of women’s teams, and administration remains solidly white male. The 2015 racial report card indicated that whites hold 90 percent of the athletic director positions, and less than 10 percent are women.

Although data are limited, the international coaching trends are similar (Norman, 2008 ) and suggest even fewer women coaches at the youth level than at the collegiate and elite levels (Messner, 2009 ). The 2012 London Olympics showcased women athletes and also demonstrated intersecting cultural relations. The United States sent more female than male athletes to London, but women were vastly underrepresented in several delegations; coaching positions are heavily dominated by men, and Olympic officials are not as diverse as the athletes.

Considering exercise, recreation, and the wider range of activities, we see more diversity, but all physical activity is limited by gender, race, socioeconomic status, and especially physical attributes. Lox, Martin Ginis, and Petruzzello ( 2014 ) summarized research and large national surveys on physical activity trends from several countries, predominantly in North America and Europe, noting that evidence continues to show that physical activity decreases across the adult life span, with men more active than women, while racial and ethnic minorities and low-income groups are less active. Physical activity drops dramatically during adolescence, more so for girls than boys, and especially for racial or ethnic minorities and lower income girls (Kimm et al., 2002 ; Pate, Dowda, O’Neill, & Ward, 2007 ).

The World Health Organization (WHO, 2014 ) identifies physical inactivity as a global health problem, noting that about 31 percent of adults are insufficiently active. Inactivity rates are higher in the Americas and Eastern Mediterranean and lowest in Southeast Asia, and men are more active than women in all regions. Abrasi ( 2014 ) reviewed research on barriers to physical activity with women from unrepresented countries, as well as immigrants and underrepresented minorities in North America and Europe. Social responsibilities (e.g., childcare, household work), cultural beliefs, lack of social support, social isolation, lack of culturally appropriate facilities, and unsafe neighborhoods were leading sociocultural barriers to physical activity. Observing others in the family or neighborhood participating had a positive influence.

Despite the clear influence of gender and culture on physical activity behavior, sport, exercise and performance psychology has been slow to recognize cultural diversity. Over 25 years ago, Duda and Allison ( 1990 ) called attention to the lack of research on race and ethnicity, reporting that less than 4 percent of published papers considered race or ethnicity, and most of those were sample descriptions. In an update, Ram, Starek, and Johnson ( 2004 ) reviewed sport and exercise psychology journal articles between 1987 and 2000 for both race and ethnicity and sexual orientation content. They confirmed the persistent void in the scholarly literature, finding only 20 percent of the articles referred to race/ethnicity and 1.2 percent to sexual orientation. Again, most were sample descriptions, and Ram et al. concluded that there is no systematic attempt to include the experiences of marginalized groups.

Considering that conference programs might be more inclusive than publications, Kamphoff, Gill, Araki, and Hammond ( 2010 ) surveyed the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) conference program abstracts from the first conference in 1986 to 2007 . Only about 10 percent addressed cultural diversity, and most of those focused on gender differences. Almost no abstracts addressed race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, physical disabilities, or any other cultural diversity issue.

Just as publications and conference programs reflect little diversity, our journal editorial boards and professional organizations have been dominated by men, with few women leaders until very recently. The International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), which was the first organization founded in 1965 , had all men presidents for over 25 years. AASP began in 1985 with John Silva as president, followed by seven male presidents before Jean Williams became president in 1993 . Similarly, APA Division 47 (Exercise & Sport Psychology) had all male presidents from 1986 until Diane Gill became president more than 10 years later. Nearly all of those presidents have been North American or European and white.

An additional consideration is that our major journals have little international reach. Papaioannou, Machaira, and Theano ( 2013 ) found that the vast majority (82 percent) of articles over 5 years in six major journals were from English-speaking countries, and the continents of Asia, Africa, and South America combined had less than 4 percent. Papaionnau et al. noted a high correlation between continents’ representation on editorial boards and publications, suggesting possible systematic errors or bias in the review process.

The International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (IJSEP) recently (Schinke, Papaioannou, & Schack, 2016 ) addressed this issue with a special issue on sport psychology in emerging countries. Sørensen, Maro, and Roberts ( 2016 ) reported on gender differences in an HIV/AIDS education intervention through soccer in Tanzania. The program is community-based and delivered by young peer coaches. Their findings highlight cultural intersections and the importance of considering gender along with local culture in programs. Other articles in that special issue report on Botswana’s active sport psychology in both educational programs and with national teams (Tshube & Hanrahan, 2016 ), and the established and continuing sport psychology in Brazil, which includes major research programs on physical activity and well-being as well as applied sport psychology (Serra de Queiroz, Fogaça, Hanrahan, & Zizzi, 2016 ).

Gender Scholarship in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology

In reviewing the scholarship on cultural diversity, we first focus on gender, which is especially prominent in sport and physical activity, and thus, particularly relevant for sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Gender scholarship in psychology has shifted from early research on sex differences to more current social perspectives emphasizing intersecting identities and cultural relations.

Sex Differences

In their classic review of the early psychology research on sex differences, Maccoby and Jacklin ( 1974 ) concluded that few conclusions could be drawn from the literature on sex differences. Ashmore ( 1990 ) later concluded that average differences are elusive, and the evidence does not support biological dichotomous sex-linked connections. More recent reviews confirm those conclusions.

Hyde ( 2005 ) reviewed 46 meta-analyses of the extensive literature on sex differences and concluded that results support the gender similarities hypothesis. That is, males and females are more alike than different on psychological variables, and overstated claims of gender differences cause harm and limit opportunities. Zell, Krizan, and Teeter ( 2015 ) used metasynthesis to evaluate the many meta-analyses on sex differences. They found that the vast majority of differences were small and constant across age, culture, and generations, and concluded that the findings provide compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis.

Social Perspectives and Stereotypes

Today, most psychologists look beyond the male–female dichotomy to social-cognitive models and cultural relations. As sociologist Bernard ( 1981 ) proposed over 30 years ago, the social worlds for females and males are different even when they appear similar. Today, the social worlds are still not the same for girls and boys in youth sport, male and female elite athletes, or women and men in exercise programs.

Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in sport and physical activity. Metheny ( 1965 ) identified gender stereotypes in her classic analysis, concluding that it was not appropriate for women to engage in activities involving bodily contact, force, or endurance. Despite women’s increased participation, those gender stereotypes persist 50 years later. Continuing research (e.g., Hardin & Greer, 2009 ; Riemer & Visio, 2003 ) confirms that expressive activities (e.g., dancing, gymnastics) are seen as feminine; combative, contact sports as masculine; and other activities (e.g., tennis, swimming) as neutral.

Sport studies scholars have continued that research, with emphasis on sport media. Early research (e.g., Messner, Duncan, & Jensen, 1993 ) showed that female athletes receive much less and different coverage, with the emphasis on athletic ability and accomplishments for men and on femininity and physical attractiveness for women. Despite the increased participation of girls and women at all levels, the media coverage has not changed much. In the most recent update of a 25-year longitudinal study, Cooky, Messner, and Musto ( 2015 ) found televised coverage of women’s sport “dismally low” with no progress. Media representations are a major source of stereotypes, and evidence indicates that all forms of the media send the message that sport is for men.

Stereotypes are a concern because we act on them, restricting opportunities for everyone. Fredericks and Eccles ( 2004 , 2005 ) found that parents held gender-stereotyped beliefs and provided more opportunities and encouragement for sons than for daughters. Chalabaev, Sarrazin, and Fontayne ( 2009 ) found that stereotype endorsement (girls perform poorly in soccer) negatively predicted girls’ performance, with perceived ability mediating the relationship.

Chalabaev, Sarrazin, Fontayne, Boiche, and Clément-Guillotin ( 2013 ) reviewed the literature on gender stereotypes and physical activity, confirming the persistent gender stereotypes in sport and the influence of stereotypes on participation and performance. They further suggested that stereotypes may influence participation and behavior even if they are not internalized and believed. We know the stereotypes, and when situations call attention to the stereotype (e.g., there are only three girls on the co-ed team), it is especially likely to affect us. Beilock, Jellison, Rydell, McConnell, and Carr ( 2006 ) showed that telling male golfers the females performance better on a golf-putting task decreased their performance, and a follow-up study (Stone & McWhinnie, 2008 ) found females similarly susceptible to stereotype threat.

Gender and Physical Self-Perceptions . As part of Eccles’s continuing developmental research on gender and achievement, Eccles and Harrold ( 1991 ) confirmed that gender influences children’s sport achievement perceptions and behaviors and that these gender differences reflect gender-role socialization. Gender differences are larger in sport than in other domains, and as Eccles and Harold noted, even in sport the perceived gender differences are much larger than actual gender differences in sport-related skills.

Considerable research also shows that self-perceptions affect sport and physical activity behavior. For example, Jensen and Steele ( 2009 ) found that girls who experienced weight criticism and body dissatisfaction engaged in less vigorous physical activity. No similar results were found for boys, and so the researchers concluded that body dissatisfaction is important in girls’ physical activity. Slater and Tiggemann ( 2011 ) looked at gender differences in teasing, body self-perceptions, and physical activity with a large sample of adolescents and concluded that teasing and body image concerns may contribute to girls’ lower rates of participation in physical activity.

Physical activity also has the potential to enhance girls’ and women’s physical self-perceptions and activity. Several studies (e.g., Craft, Pfeiffer, & Pivarnik, 2003 ) confirm that exercise programs can enhance self-perceptions, and Hausenblas and Fallon’s ( 2006 ) meta-analysis found that physical activity leads to improved body image. Greenleaf, Boyer, and Petrie ( 2009 ) looked at the relationship of high school sport participation to psychological well-being and physical activity in college women. They found that body image, physical competence, and instrumentality mediated the relationship for both activity and well-being, suggesting that benefits accrue as a result of more positive self-perceptions.

Related research suggests that sport and physical activity programs can foster positive youth development, particularly for girls. A report for the Women’s Sports Foundation— Her Life Depends on It III (Staurowsky et al., 2015 )—updated previous reports and confirmed that physical activity helps girls and women lead healthy, strong, and fulfilled lives. That report, which reviewed over 1500 studies, documented the important role of physical activity in reducing the risk of major health issues (e.g., cancer, coronary heart disease, dementias) as well as depression, substance abuse, and sexual victimization. The report further concluded that all girls and women are shortchanged in realizing the benefits of physical activity and that females of color or with disabilities face even greater barriers.

Sexuality and Sexual Prejudice

Sexuality and sexual orientation are often linked with gender, but biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation are not necessarily related. Furthermore, male–female biological sex and homosexual–heterosexual orientations are not the clear, dichotomous categories that we often assume them to be. Individuals’ gender identities and sexual orientations are varied and not necessarily linked. Gender identity is one’s internal sense of being male or female. For transgender people, gender identity is not consistent with their biological sex (Krane & Mann, 2014 ).

Sexual orientation refers to one’s sexual or emotional attraction to others and is typically classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Herek ( 2000 ) suggests that sexual prejudice is the more appropriate term for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but related scholarship typically refers to homophobia . As Krane and Mann ( 2014 ) point out, heterosexism , which refers to privilege of heterosexual people, is common in sport—we assume people are heterosexual, and we discriminate against those who do not fit heterosexist stereotypes. Also, we clearly discriminate on the basis of gender identity against transgender people.

Messner ( 2002 ) argues that homophobia leads boys and men to conform to a narrow definition of masculinity and bonds men together as superior to women. We expect to see men, but not women, take active, dominant roles expected of athletes. Despite the visibility of a few prominent gay and lesbian athletes and the very recent expansion of civil rights, sexual prejudice persists. Anderson ( 2011 ) suggests that men, and particularly gay men, have more latitude in sports today, but sport is still a space of restricted masculinity and sexual prejudice.

The limited data-based research confirms that sport is a hostile climate for lesbian/gay/bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. In one of the few empirical studies, Morrow and Gill ( 2003 ) reported that both physical education teachers and students witnessed high levels of homophobic and heterosexist behaviors in public schools. Gill, Morrow, Collins, Lucey, and Schultz ( 2006 ) subsequently examined attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities. Overall, attitudes were markedly more negative for both gay men and lesbians than for other minority groups, with males especially negative toward gay men. Vikki Krane ( 2001 ) (Barber & Krane, 2005 ; Krane & Barber, 2003 ; Krane & Mann, 2014 ; Krane & Symons, 2014 ) have done much of the related work in sport and exercise psychology, and that research indicates that sexual prejudice is common in sport at all levels. Most of that research is from North America and Europe, but hostile climates have been reported around the world. For example, Shang and Gill ( 2012 ) found the climate in Taiwan athletics hostile for those with nonconventional gender identity or sexual orientation, particularly for male athletes.

In a review of research on LGBT issues in sport psychology, Krane, Waldron, Kauer, and Semerjian ( 2010 ) found no articles focused on transgender athletes. Lucas-Carr and Krane ( 2011 ) noted that transgender athletes are largely hidden. Hargie, Mitchell, and Somerville ( 2015 ) interviewed 10 transgender athletes and found common themes of intimidation, alienation, fear of public spaces, and overall effects of being deprived of the social, health, and well-being aspects of sport. As Lucas-Carr and Krane concluded, creation of safe and compassionate sport settings for all athletes, including trans athletes, is an ethical responsibility. On a promising note, Krane and Symons ( 2014 ) described several programs that promote inclusive sport climates, including Fair go, sport! an Australian social inclusion project focusing on gender and sexual diversity.

Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment, which has clear gender and sexuality connotations, has received considerable attention in psychology (e.g., Koss, 1990 ). Kari Fasting and Celia Brackenridge have led much of the related research and programs on sexual harassment in sport. The related scholarship indicates that the sport climate fosters sexual harassment and abuse; that young, elite female athletes are particularly vulnerable; that neither athletes nor coaches have education or training about the issues; and that both research and professional development are needed in sport and exercise psychology to address the issues (Brackenridge, 2001 ; Brackenridge & Fasting, 2002 ; Fasting, Brackenridge, & Sundgot-Borgen, 2004 ; Fasting, Brackenridge, & Walseth, 2007 ). That research comes from several European countries and Australia. Rodriguez and Gill ( 2011 ) subsequently reported similar findings with former Puerto Rican women athletes.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC, 2007 ) recognizes the problem and defines sexual harassment as “behavior towards an individual or group that involves sexualized verbal, non-verbal or physical behavior, whether intended or unintended, legal or illegal, that is based on an abuse of power and trust and that is considered by the victim or a bystander to be unwanted or coerced” (p. 3). Fasting ( 2015 ) recently reviewed the research and suggested building on the recent policies of major organizations such as the IOC to curb harassment, as well as continued research to advance systematic knowledge.

Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class

Race and ethnicity are just as salient as gender in sport and physical activity but have largely been ignored in our literature. As noted in the earlier section on gender and cultural diversity in sport and exercise psychology, there is a striking void in our journals on race and ethnicity, and virtually no research has been published on social class in sport, exercise, and performance psychology.

Although race and ethnicity are often conflated, they are not the same, and race is not a clear, biologically determined category. As Markus ( 2008 ) argued, race and ethnicity are not objective, identifying characteristics, but the meanings that we associate with those characteristics carry power or privilege. The psychology scholarship on race and ethnicity most relevant to sport, exercise, and performance psychology involves health disparities and stereotypes.

Race, Ethnicity, and Health Disparities

Health disparities are well documented, showing that racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people receive suboptimal health care (see 2011 National Health Quality and Disparities Reports; available at www.ahrq.gov ). Health disparities are relevant to sport, exercise, and performance psychology in that physical activity is a key health behavior.

Few studies have looked at race and ethnicity or social class disparities in relation to sport and physical activity. Heesch, Brown, and Blanton ( 2000 ) examined exercise barriers with a large sample of women over age 40, including African American, Hispanic, Native American, and white women. They found several common barriers, but they also reported variations by racial and ethnic group, and cautioned that their results and specific community needs precluded definitive guidelines for interventions. Crespo ( 2005 ) outlined the cultural barriers to physical activity for minority populations, including those with lower socioeconomic status, and called for professionals to consider unique needs and cultural constraints when giving advice on exercise. Ethnicity and social class are particularly relevant when considering migrant and refugee populations in Western countries. For example, Frisby ( 2011 ) interviewed Chinese immigrant women in Canada to better understand barriers and guidance for promising inclusion practices in sport and recreation. Promising practices included promoting citizen engagement, working from a broader social ecological framework, improving access policies, and fostering community partnerships to facilitate cross-cultural connections.

Stereotypes and Stereotype Threat

Steele’s ( 1997 ; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002 ) extensive research on stereotype threat , which is the fear of confirming negative stereotypes, has been extended to sport. Steele’s research indicates that stereotype threat particularly affects those minority group members who have abilities and are motivated to succeed. Steele also suggests that simple manipulations (e.g., telling students test scores are not related to race) can negate the effects. Beilock and McConnell ( 2004 ) reviewed the stereotype threat in sport literature, concluding that negative stereotypes are common in sport and lead to performance decrements, especially when the performers are capable and motivated.

Racial and ethnic stereotypes are well documented. For example, Devine and Baker ( 1991 ) found that the terms unintelligent and ostentatious were associated with black athlete , and Krueger ( 1996 ) found that both black and white participants perceived black men to be more athletic than white men. Johnson, Hallinan, and Westerfield ( 1999 ) asked participants to rate attributes of success in photos of black, white, Hispanic, and composite male athletes. Success for the black athlete was attributed to innate abilities, but the white athlete’s success was reported to come from hard work and leadership ability. Interestingly, no stereotyping was evident for the Hispanic athlete.

More important, these stereotypes affect behavior. When Stone, Perry, and Darley ( 1997 ) had people listen to a college basketball game and evaluate players, they found that both white and black students rated black players as more athletic and white players as having more basketball intelligence. Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, and Darley ( 1999 ) found that black participants performed worse on a golf task when told the test was of sport intelligence, whereas white participants performed worse when told the test was of natural ability.

Although much of the work on stereotype threat involves race and ethnicity, gender and athlete stereotype threat effects have also been found. Heidrich and Chiviacowsky ( 2015 ) found that female participants in the stereotype threat condition (they were told women do worse than men) had lower self-efficacy and performed worse on a soccer task than those in the nonstereotype threat condition. Feltz, Schneider, Hwang, and Skogsberg ( 2013 ) found that student-athletes perceive stereotype threat in the classroom, and those with higher athletic identity perceived more threat. They also found that perceived coach’s regard for their academic ability affected athletes’ susceptibility and could serve as a buffer to stereotype threat.

Physicality and Weight Bias

Sport, exercise, and performance are physical activities, and thus physical characteristics are prominent. Moreover, opportunity is limited by physical abilities, skills, size, fitness, and appearance. Exclusion on the basis of physicality is nearly universal in sport and physical activity, and this exclusion is a public health and social justice issue.

Physical Abilities and Disabilities . Rimmer ( 2005 ) notes that people with physical disabilities are one of the most inactive segments of the population, and argues that organizational policies, discrimination, and social attitudes are the real barriers. Gill, Morrow, Collins, Lucey, and Schultz ( 2010 ) examined the climate for minority groups (racial and ethnic minorities, LGB people, older adults, and people with disabilities) in organized sport, exercise, and recreational settings. Notably, the climate was rated as most exclusionary for people with disabilities.

Semerjian ( 2010 ), one of the few scholars who has addressed disability issues in sport and exercise psychology, highlights the larger cultural context as well as the intersections of race, gender, and class with physicality. Physical skill, strength, and fitness, or more correctly, the lack of skill, strength, and fitness, are key sources of restrictions and overt discrimination in sport and exercise. Physical size, particularly obesity, is a prominent source of social stigma, and weight bias is a particular concern.

Obesity and Weight Bias

Considerable research (e.g., Brownell, 2010 ; Puhl & Heuer, 2011 ) has documented clear and consistent stigmatization and discrimination of the obese in employment, education, and health care. Obese individuals are targets for teasing, more likely to engage in unhealthy eating behaviors, and less likely to engage in physical activity (Faith, Leone, Ayers, Heo, & Pietrobelli, 2002 ; Puhl & Wharton, 2007 ; Storch et al., 2007 ). Check the Rudd Center website ( www.uconnruddcenter.org ) for resources and information on weight bias in health and educational settings.

Weight discrimination is associated with stress and negative health outcomes. Sutin, Stephan, and Terracciano ( 2015 ), using data from two large U.S. national studies, found that weight discrimination was associated with increased mortality risk and that the association was stronger than that between mortality and other forms of discrimination. Vartanian and Novak ( 2011 ) found experiences with weight stigma had negative impact on body satisfaction and self-esteem, and importantly, weight stigma was related to avoidance of exercise.

Exercise and sport science students and professionals are just as likely as others to hold negative stereotypes. Chambliss, Finley, and Blair ( 2004 ) found a strong anti-fat bias among exercise science students, and Greenleaf and Weiller ( 2005 ) found that physical education teachers held anti-fat bias and believed obese people were responsible for their obesity. O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks ( 2007 ) found that physical education students had greater anti-fat bias than students in other health areas, and also had higher bias at year 3 than at year 1; this finding suggests that their bias was not countered in their pre-professional programs. Robertson and Vohora ( 2008 ) found a strong anti-fat bias among fitness professionals and regular exercisers in England. Donaghue and Allen ( 2016 ) found that personal trainers recognized that their clients had unrealistic weight goals but still focused on diet and exercise to reach goals.

Weight Stigma and Health Promotion

Anti-fat bias and weight discrimination among professionals has important implications for physical activity and health promotion programs. Thomas, Lewis, Hyde, Castle, and Komesaroff ( 2010 ) conducted in-depth interviews with 142 obese adults in Australia about interventions for obesity. Participants supported interventions that were nonjudgmental and empowering, whereas interventions that were stigmatizing or blamed and shamed individuals for being overweight were not viewed as effective. They called for interventions that supported and empowered individuals to improve their lifestyle. Hoyt, Burnette, and Auster-Gussman ( 2014 ) reported that the “obesity as disease” message may help people feel more positive about their bodies, but they are less likely to engage in health-promoting behaviors. More positive approaches that take the emphasis off weight and highlight health gains are more promising.

Cultural Competence

Cultural competence, which refers to the ability to work effectively with people who are of a different culture, takes cultural diversity directly into professional practice. Culturally competent professionals act to empower participants, challenge restrictions, and advocate for social justice.

Cultural Sport and Exercise Psychology

A few dedicated scholars have called for a cultural sport psychology in line with our guiding framework (e.g., Fisher, Butryn, & Roper, 2003 ; Ryba & Wright, 2005 ). Schinke and Hanrahan’s ( 2009 ) Cultural Sport Psychology , and Ryba, Schinke, and Tenenbaum’s ( 2010 ) The Cultural Turn in Sport Psychology , brought together much of the initial scholarship. Special issues devoted to cultural sport psychology were published in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (Ryba & Schinke, 2009 ) and the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology special issue (Schinke & Moore, 2011 ). These works provide a base and call for cultural competence and social justice.

Cultural Competence for Professionals

Cultural competence is a required professional competency in psychology and many health professions, and is essential for anyone working with others, including sport, exercise, and performance psychology professionals. Cultural competence includes understanding and action, at both the individual and organizational level.

Most psychology resources follow Sue’s ( 2006 ) model of cultural competence with three key components: awareness of one’s own cultural values and biases, understanding of other worldviews, and development of culturally appropriate skills . In line with Sue’s model, the American Psychological Association (APA) developed the APA ( 2003 ) multicultural guidelines that call for psychologists to develop awareness of their own cultural attitudes and beliefs, understanding of other cultural perspectives, and culturally relevant skills. Furthermore, the guidelines call for action at the organizational level for social justice.

The ISSP developed a position stand (Ryba, Stambulova, Si, & Schinke, 2013 ) that describes three major areas of cultural competence: cultural awareness and reflexivity , culturally competent communication , and culturally competent interventions . Awareness and reflectivity refers to recognition of between- and within-culture variations as well as reflection on both the client and one’s own cultural background. Culturally competent communication involves meaningful dialogue and shared language. Culturally competent interventions recognize culture while avoiding stereotyping, take an idiosyncratic approach, and stand for social justice.

Cultural Competence and Inclusive Excellence

Cultural competence extends beyond individual competencies to all levels, including instruction, program development, hiring practices, and organizational policies and procedures. The APA multicultural guidelines call for professionals to recognize and value cultural diversity, continually seek to develop their multicultural knowledge and skills, translate those understandings into practice, and extend their efforts to advocacy by promoting organizational change and social justice. Cultural competence at the individual level is a professional responsibility. Inclusive excellence moves cultural competence to the institutional level. That is, we work for changes in organizations and policies that make our programs accessible and welcoming for diverse people. Taking inclusive excellence into sport, exercise, and performance psychology calls for recognizing and valuing diversity and social justice as goals that will enhance our programs and institutions, as well as bring the benefits of physical activity to participants. Therefore, we work not only to develop our individual cultural competencies, but also to effect change at the institutional level to ensure that our programs are inclusive and excellent.

Gender and culture are highly visible and influential in sport, exercise, and performance settings. Gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and physical characteristics often limit opportunities, sometimes through segregation and discrimination, but often through perceptions and stereotype influence. Sport, exercise, and performance psychology research confirms the influence of culture and offers explanations, but sport, exercise and performance psychology has made little progress in promoting cultural competence and social justice.

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Ethical Considerations in Sport and Performance Psychology
Gender in a Social Psychology Context
Culture and Human Development
Aging Societies and the Ethical Challenges of Long Life
Multicultural Sport Psychology's Consulting Role in the United States Activist-Athlete Movement

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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 .

Google Scholar

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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 .

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

Edwards, Harry . The Revolt of the Black Athlete . New York: New Press, 1969 .

Gorn, Elliot , and Warren Goldstein . A Brief History of American Sports . New York: Hill & Wang, 1993 .

James, C. L. R. Beyond a Boundary . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993 .

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

Peterson, Robert . Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970 .

Regalado, Samuel . Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Interment to the Major Leagues . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013 .

Rhoden, William . $40 million slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete . New York: Crown, 2006 .

Ritchie, Andrew . Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 .

Ruck, Rob . Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game . Boston: Beacon Press, 2011 .

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

Takaki, Ron . Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America . New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 .

Thomas, Damion . Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012 .

Zirin, Dave . A Peoples History of Sports in the United States . New York: New Press, 2009 .

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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 .

Alex Manning, Email: [email protected] .

Kyle Green, Email: ude.tropkcorb@neergk .

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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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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.

‘‘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.

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Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Sport

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Akilah R. Carter-Francique PhD 2 &
Courtney L. Flowers PhD 3

Part of the book series: Teaching Gender ((GEND))

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The purpose of this chapter is to describe the relationship between gender, race, and ethnicity in sport. Gender has been a topic of conversation in sport for many decades, with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) anchoring many of those conversations (Acosta & Carpenter, 2012).

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Carter-Francique, A.R., Flowers, C.L. (2013). Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Sport. In: Roper, E.A. (eds) Gender Relations in Sport. Teaching Gender. SensePublishers, Rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-455-0_5

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Race & Ethnicity—Definition and Differences [+48 Race Essay Topics]

Race and ethnicity are among the features that make people different. Unlike character traits, attitudes, and habits, race and ethnicity can’t be changed or chosen. It fully depends on the ancestry.

But why do we separate these two concepts and what are their core differences? How do people classify different races and types of ethnicity?

To find answers to these questions, keep reading the article.

Also, if you have a writing assignment on the same topic due soon and looking for inspiration, you’ll find plenty of race, racism, and ethnic group essay examples. At IvyPanda , we’ve gathered over 45 samples to help you with your writing, so you don’t have to torture yourself looking for awesome essay ideas.

Race and Ethnicity Definitions

It’s important to learn what race and ethnicity really are before trying to compare them and explore their classification.

Race is a group of people that belong to the same distinct category based on their physical and social qualities.

At the very beginning of the term usage, it only referred to people speaking a common language. Later, the term started to denote certain national affiliations. A reference to physical traits was added to the term race in the 17th century.

In a modern world, race is considered to be a social construct. In other words, it’s a distinguishable identity with a cultural meaning behind. Race is not usually seen as exclusively biological or physical quality, even though it’s partially based on common physical features among group members.

Ethnicity (also known as ethnic group) is a category of people who have similarities like common language, ancestry, history, culture, society, and nation.

Basically, people inherit ethnicity depending on the society they live in. Other factors that define a person’s ethnicity include symbolic systems like religion, cuisine, art, dressing style, and even physical appearance.

Sometimes, the term ethnicity is used as a synonym to people or nation. It’s also fair to mention that it’s sometimes possible for an individual to leave one ethnic group and shift to another. It’s usually done through acculturation, language shift, or religious conversion.

Though, most of the times, representatives of a certain ethnic group continue to speak their common language and share some other typical traits even if derived from their founder population.

Differences Between Race and Ethnicity

Now that we know what race and ethnicity are all about, let’s highlight some of the major differences between these two terms.

It divides people into groups or populations based mainly on physical appearance
The main accent is on genetic or biological traits
Because of geographical isolation, racial categories were a result of a shared genealogy. In modern world, this isolation is practically nonexistent, which lead to mixing of races
The distinguishing factors can include type of face or skin color. Other genetic differences are considered to be weak

Members of an ethnic group identify themselves based on nationality, culture, and traditions
The emphasis is on group history, culture, and sometimes on religion and language
Definition of ethnicity is based on shared genealogy. It can be either actual or presumed
Distinguishing factors of ethnic groups keep changing depending on time period. Sometimes, they get defined by stereotypes that dominant groups have

It’s also worth mentioning that the border between two terms is quite vague . As a result, the choice of using either of them can be very subjective.

In the majority of cases, race is considered to be unitary, which means that one person belongs to one race. However, ethnically, this same person can identify themselves as a member of multiple ethnic groups. And it won’t be wrong if a person have lived enough time within those groups.

Race and Ethnicity Classification

It’s time to look at possible ways to classify racial and ethnical groups.

One of the most common classifications for race into four categories: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid. Three of them have subcategories.

Let’s look at them more closely.

– Caucasoid. White race with light skin color. Hair ranges from brown to black. They have medium to high structure. The subcategories are as follows:

Alpine. Live in Central Asia
Nordic . Baltic, British, and Scandinavian inhabitants
Mediterranean. Hail from France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

– Mongoloid. The race’s majority is found in Asia. Characterized by black hair, yellow skin tone, and medium height.

Asian mongol. Found in japan, China, and East-India
Micronesian. Inhabitants of Malenesia

– Negroid. A race found in Africa. They have black skin, wooly hair, and medium to high structure.

Negro. African inhabitants
Far Eastern Pygmy. Found in the south Pacific islands
Bushman and Hottentot. Live in Kala-Hari desert of Africa

– Australoid. Found in Australia. They have wavy hair, light skin, and medium to tall height.

It’s fair to mention yet again that it’s practically impossible to find pure race representatives because of how mixed they all got.

Speaking of ethnicity classification, one of the most common ways to do that is by continent. And each of continent’s ethnic groups will have their own subcategory.

So, we can roughly divide ethnic groups into following categories:

North American
South American

Race Essay Ideas

If all the information above was not enough and you’re looking for race essay topics, or even straight up essay examples for your writing assignment—today’s your lucky day. Because experts at IvyPanda have gathered plenty of those.

Check out the list of race and ethnic group essay samples below. Use them for inspiration, or try to develop one of the suggested topics even further.

Whatever option you’ll choose, we’re sure that you’ll end up with great results!

The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement
Race, Ethnicity and Crime
Representation of Race in Disney Films
What is the relationship between Race, Poverty and Prison?
Race in a Southern Community
African American Women and the Struggle for Racial Equality
American Ethnic Studies
Institutionalized Racism from John Brown Raid to Jim Crow Laws
The Veil and Muslim
Race and the Body: How Culture Both Shapes and Mirrors Broader Societal Attitudes Towards Race and the Body
Latinos and African Americans: Friends or Foes?
Historical US Relationships with Native American
The experiences of the Aborigines
Contemporary Racism in Australia: the Experience of Aborigines
No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery
Racism (another variant)
Hispanic Americans
Racism in the Penitentiary
How the development of my racial/ethnic identity has been impacted
My father’s black pride
African American Ethnic Group
Ethnic Group Conflicts
How the Movie Crash Presents the African Americans
Ethnic Groups and discrimination
Race and Ethnicity
Racial and ethnic inequality
Ethnic Groups and Conflicts
Ethnics Studies
Ethnic studies and emigration
Ethnicity Influence
Immigration and Ethnic Relations
A comparison Between Asian Americans and Latinos
Analysis of the Chinese Experience in “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” by Ronald Takaki
Wedding in the UAE
Social and Cultural Diversity
The White Dilemma in South Africa
Ethnocentrism and its Effects on Individuals, Societies, and Multinationals
Reduction of ethnocentrism and promotion of cultural relativism
Racial and Ethnic Groups
Gender and Race
Child Marriages in Modern India
Race and Ethnicity (another variant)
Racial Relations and Color Blindness
Multiculturalism and “White Anxiety”
Cultural and racial inequality in Health Care
The impact of colonialism on cultural transformations in North and South America
African American Studies
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Social Sciences

Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Sports

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Academic level: College

Paper type: Article

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The intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender in sports through the article “The Portrayal of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Televised International Athletic Events,” defines the concepts which depict the relationship between gender, race, and ethnicity in sports; specifically through international events. Generally, the world of entertainment illustrated through the black woman, female athlete, sports organization and participation portrays relevant ideas and issues on sports . The goal of this essay is to provide a summary of the article illustrated above, focusing on the main points and to provide a critique of how it has impacted on the sporting arena.

According to Druckman et al. (2018), e thnicity refers to a state of belonging to a particular societal group which has a specific cultural tradition or a nation. Race, on the other hand, is the grouping of humans based on social or physical qualities. Gender refers to, the socio-cultural characteristics that distinguish one as either man or woman or boy/girl, depending on the cultural norms, mores, beliefs, customs, and values.

Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.

Summary of the “The Portrayal of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Televised International Athletic Events Article

Race, ethnicity, and gender are treated differently in production

The concepts of race, nationality, and gender in sports exist in various forms. For instance, the Goodwill Games facilitates different kinds of narrators and a multilingual methodology which is opposite on the other types of games. However, when it comes to athletes, cases of rationalism are rarely indicated. Ethnicity, on the other hand, defined by the commentators, was at a high level with the historical overview of ethnic conflicts ( Sabo, Jansen, Tate, Duncan, & Leggett, 2018). A good example is that of the Mirsada Buric, a Bosnian Runner who was mentioned of ethnical background in his nation .

Asian Athletes are Frequently Depicted from Cultural Stereotypes Concept

The article defines how Asians athletes are based on their stereotypes and even referred to as conformists and obsessive hard workers. According to Sabo et al. (2018), their physical characteristics are not left behind and, described from the pounds perspectives and emotional personality such as being nervous, confident and so on.

The Ethnic Minorities are Under-Represented as Announcers

The announcer positions in sports are rarely availed to the ethnic minority individuals who have qualifications laid on the platform. Announcers are vital in as they provide relevant information on live sports events. Often have they been distinguished based on their section, but rather termed on the aspect of their nationality, religion and cultural identity ( Sabo et al., 2018). Such ideology has limited the roles played by minorities which diminishes their aspirations such as those of being sports announcers.

Black Athletes are Represented Negatively

Despite, several people discussions of how black athletes are being portrayed based on their race, ethnicity, and gender, the article expands on how they are represented positively in the athlete's section. The announcers, for instance, have been seen building a pleasant reputation for the white players as opposed to the blacks ( Sabo et al., 2018). However, the blacks have been termed physically fit with a pleasing intellectual mind.

Article Critique

Having read the author’s article concerning the “The Portrayal of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Televised International Athletic Events,” I agree with the segments outlined. For instance, how race, ethnicity, and gender are treated differently in the various types of production, how the blacks are often treated negatively, how the Asians athletes are described from cultural stereotypes and also, how ethnic minorities are underrepresented as announcers. The author adds how announcers have often distinguished the white players more pleasantly as opposed to the blacks. In several incidences , Asian players are defined from their physical abilities and at times ridiculed in public. In specific incidences, they are reminded of their inabilities and compared to the black athletes who are physically stronger and more honors in panels.

Correspondingly, the field of sports still faces the challenges of racial bias, gender discrimination and ethnic stereotyping . Recommendations are hence gathered in the article as to how a well-defined nation should be and how to treat people with equity and equality measures. Generally, a need to reinforce and implement better measures on ethnicity, gender, and racial law is essential (McDonald, 2017).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the field of sport is conjoined with several ideas of ethnicity, race and gender ideologies. The role of men and women and their physical characteristics have always been used to depict their abilities in sports. This has added up to a biased view of ethnic minorities who are even underrated by some of the sports announcers. It is, therefore, useful to enforce and implement several equitable laws to tackle the problems related to gender, race and ethnicity disparities.

References

Druckman, J. N., Trawalter, S., Montes, I., Fredendall, A., Kanter, N., & Rubenstein, A. P. (2018). Racial bias in sport medical staff’s perceptions of others’ pain. The Journal of social psychology , 158 (6), 721-729. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2017.1409188

McDonald, M. G. (2017). Feminist Perspective of Race/Ethnicity and Gender in Sport. In Sport & Gender–(inter) nationale sportsoziologische Geschlechterforschung (pp. 109-119). Springer VS, Wiesbaden.

Sabo, D., Jansen, S. C., Tate, D., Duncan, M. C., & Leggett, S . (2018). The Portrayal of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Televised International Athletic Events. Retrieved from https://la84.org/the-portrayal-of-race-ethnicity-and-nationality-in-televised-international-athletic-events/

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Olympian Kristi Yamaguchi is ‘tickled pink’ to inspire a Barbie doll

Champion figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi now has her own Barbie. The May release of the doll, part of Barbie’s “Inspiring Women Series,” is timed for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. (April 23)

This image provided by Mattel in April 2024 shows the company’s Kristi Yamaguchi Barbie doll. Yamaguchi became the first Asian American to win an individual gold medal for figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics. (Mattel via AP)

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This photo provided by Mattel in April 2024 shows Kristi Yamaguchi with the company’s Barbie doll based on the figure skater. Yamaguchi became the first Asian American to win an individual gold medal for figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics. (Mattel via AP)

FILE - Kristi Yamaguchi of the U.S. skates in the free skating portion of the women’s figure skating competition at the XVI Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France on Friday, Feb. 21, 1992. The Fremont, Calif., woman won the women’s gold medal. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)

Like many little girls, a young Kristi Yamaguchi loved playing with Barbie. With a schedule packed with ice skating practices, her Barbie dolls became her “best friends.”

So, it’s surreal for the decorated Olympian figure skater to now be a Barbie girl herself.

This image provided by Mattel in April 2024 shows the company’s Kristi Yamaguchi Barbie doll. (Mattel via AP)

“It’s a huge, huge honor. I think a lot of pride comes along with it, not just recognizing the Olympic achievement, but also being recognized during AAPI Month and following in the footsteps of some incredible women that I idolize — Anna May Wong , Maya Angelou and Rosa Parks,” Yamaguchi told The Associated Press. “It’s hard to see me put in the category with them.”

Yamaguchi, who became the first Asian American to win an individual figure skating gold medal, at the 1992 Winter Olympics, has been immortalized as a doll for Barbie’s “Inspiring Women Series,” Mattel announced Wednesday. The release is timed for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, in May.

This photo provided by Mattel in April 2024 shows Kristi Yamaguchi with the company's Barbie doll based on the figure skater. Yamaguchi became the first Asian American to win an individual gold medal for figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics. (Mattel via AP)

This photo provided by Mattel in April 2024 shows Kristi Yamaguchi with the company’s Barbie doll based on the figure skater. (Mattel via AP)

This isn’t Yamaguchi’s first doll depiction. In the ‘90s, touring show Stars on Ice put out a line of dolls modeled after notable skaters. The Barbie version is a lot more detailed.

Mattel duplicated everything the then 20-year-old medalist wore at the Olympics in Albertville, France: the sparkling black-and-gold brocade outfit designed by Lauren Sheehan, the gold hair ribbon and even a red-and-white bouquet like Yamaguchi held atop the podium.

Yamaguchi said both she and Sheehan are “just so tickled pink.”

She also is happy with the doll’s visage.

“It looks like me for sure. You know, the eyes and just the shape of the face. And then, of course, the hair, for sure. I mean, it has the bangs that are the ‘90s,” Yamaguchi said, chuckling.

Emily Henry poses for a portrait on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

She appreciates that the doll’s release comes on the high heels of the blockbuster “Barbie” movie last year. Her daughters, ages 18 and 20, are fans of the Oscar-nominated film. Their initial reaction to their mother being a Barbie? Disbelief.

“When they found out I was getting a doll, they were kind of flabbergasted and being like, ‘What? Like Mom, like how do you qualify? But that’s way too cool for you,’” Yamaguchi said.

When Yamaguchi became a household name in the ‘90s, most Asian American children were growing up feeling like toys-aren’t-us kids. If you were an Asian parent looking for an Asian doll in the U.S., you likely turned to independent mail-order companies or waited until you were visiting your country of heritage.

Since then, the toy market has evolved somewhat with big companies like Mattel diversifying and independent entrepreneurs filling the void. Two Asian doll lines — Jilly Bing and Joeydolls — launched within the last year, one by an Asian American mother and the other by an Asian Canadian mother. Both could not find dolls that looked like their daughters.

Sapna Cheryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who served a year on Mattel’s Barbie Global Advisory Council in 2018, said Asian Americans have long dealt with two stereotypes: the model-minority whiz kid or the perpetual foreigner. Toys can help dispel those myths, and instead signal acceptance and inclusivity.

Dolls modeled after real people can get people talking about their human counterparts. Cheryan applauded Barbie’s choice of Yamaguchi.

“There are so many Asian American athletes but they’re just not propped up in a way that athletes of other racial groups are,” said Cheryan, who researches cultural stereotypes and their impact on race and gender disparities. “Having a match in terms of racial identification or gender or both,” she said, is important in creating effective role models for kids.

Mattel has mostly garnered praise for its diversity efforts but it’s had some missteps along the way. In 2021, the toy maker said it “fell short” by failing to include an Asian doll in a line of Tokyo Olympics-themed Barbies. In January, there was some backlash to Asian “You Can Be Anything” Barbies that seemed stereotypical. One was a violinist and the other a doctor in panda scrubs.

Tying Yamaguchi to Barbie, a symbol of American pop culture, is especially remarkable considering what she and her family have dealt with as Japanese Americans. She has spoken about how her maternal and paternal grandparents were forced into U.S. incarceration camps in response to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

When she captured the gold over 50 years later, media coverage partially focused on why she didn’t seem to have many endorsement deals. In an AP article from 1992 , a sports advertising executive blamed her Japanese heritage, citing an economic climate that was anti-Japan. “It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, but that is the way it is,” the executive said.

So while Barbie may seem like just a toy, it’s so much more for Yamaguchi.

“When kids see themselves or see someone who inspires them, then it just opens up their world and their imagination to what’s possible,” she said.

Tang is a Phoenix-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on X at @ttangAP .

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U.S. journalists’ beats vary widely by gender and other factors

Reporters interview Boston Red Sox pitcher James Paxton at Fenway South in Fort Myers, Florida, on Feb. 16, 2023. (Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The beats American journalists cover vary widely by gender and other factors, according to a new analysis of a Pew Research Center survey of nearly 12,000 working U.S.-based journalists conducted in 2022. The analysis comes amid continued discussion about the demographic composition of U.S. newsrooms .

A chart showing that men overwhelmingly cover sports while women tend to cover health, education and social issues.

The survey asked reporting journalists to identify up to three topic areas or beats that they cover regularly, 11 of which had large enough sample sizes to study. Men are far more likely than women to cover certain beats – especially sports – while journalists who are women are more likely than men to cover news about social issues, education and health.

Men account for 83% of the surveyed journalists who indicated that they cover sports, far higher than the 15% who are women. Men also account for majorities of those who cover political news (60%) and news about science and technology (58%).

By comparison, women are more likely than men to cover three of the 11 news beats studied: health, education and families, and social issues and policy. For instance, women account for nearly two-thirds (64%) of surveyed journalists who cover news about health, while only about a third (34%) are men.

The source of data for this analysis is a Pew Research Center survey of 11,889 U.S.-based journalists who are currently working in the news industry and say that they report, edit or create original news stories in their current job. The survey was conducted online between Feb. 16 and March 17, 2022.

Because there is no readily available list of all U.S. journalists, Center researchers relied on commercial databases of journalists based in the U.S., as well as supplemental lists of news organizations to create a broad and diverse sample of over 160,000 journalists from as many types of outlets and areas of reporting as possible. Although it is impossible to be certain every segment of the journalism profession in the U.S. is covered by the sample, the use of multiple databases and supplemental lists ensured that journalists from a variety of different reporting areas, news platform types, as well as outlet sizes and types – such as those who work for organizations that are intended to primarily reach a particular demographic group – were represented.

Propensity weighting was used to ensure that the responses of the 11,889 respondents aligned with the full sample of over 160,000 journalists with respect to job titles, media outlet type, freelance status and geographic location.

This analysis looks at the journalists who cover 11 topic areas or beats. In the survey, reporting journalists were asked to write down up to three topic areas they report on in a typical month. In the survey, reporting journalists are those who indicated that they have one of the following job titles: reporter, columnist, writer, correspondent, photojournalist, video journalist, data visualization journalist, host, anchor, commentator or blogger. About three-quarters of all journalists surveyed (76%) are reporting journalists.

Researchers coded these open-ended responses into distinct categories. Eleven of the coded topic areas (or beats) had enough reporting journalists in our sample to reliably study: crime and law, economy and business, education and family, entertainment and travel, environment and energy, government and politics, health, local and state, science and technology, social issues and policy, and sports.

Refer to the topline for the questions asked in the survey. For more information on the development of the sample of journalists or the survey weighting., please read the methodology .

This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The remaining five beats studied – economy, crime and law, local and state, environment and energy, and entertainment and travel – are more evenly split between men and women journalists.

Overall, 51% of the reporting journalists surveyed are men and 46% are women. In the survey, reporting journalists are those who indicated that they have one of the following job titles: reporter, columnist, writer, correspondent, photojournalist, video journalist, data visualization journalist, host, anchor, commentator or blogger. About three-quarters of all journalists surveyed (76%) are reporting journalists.

Majority of journalists who cover entertainment, travel are freelancers or self-employed

A chart showing that a majority of U.S. journalists who cover entertainment and travel are freelance or self-employed.

Journalists’ beats also vary by their employment status – that is, whether they are freelance or self-employed journalists, or full- or part-time journalists at a news organization.

Entertainment and travel stands out as the only topic area in which a majority of those who cover it (57%) are freelance or self-employed journalists. Nearly half of journalists who cover science and technology (46%) are also freelancers or self-employed.

On the other hand, some beats are overwhelmingly covered by either full- or part-time employees of news organizations. For instance, 87% of reporting journalists who cover crime and law fall into this category.

Overall, about a third of the reporting journalists surveyed (34%) indicated that they are freelance or self-employed, compared with about two-thirds (65%) who are full- or part-time employees of a news organization.

Journalists’ beats vary somewhat by race, ethnicity

Journalists’ beats also differ modestly by other demographic factors, including race and ethnicity.

One reporting area particularly stands out by the race and ethnicity of the journalists who cover it: social issues and policy. Hispanic and Black journalists make up a greater portion of those who cover this beat (20% and 15%, respectively) than any other studied.

White journalists make up about half (53%) of those who report on social issues and policy, but they make up large majorities of the other 10 beats studied, including 84% of those who cover environment and energy. Asian journalists account for no more than 7% of those who cover any of the 11 beats studied.

Overall, 76% of all reporting journalists surveyed indicated that they are White, while 8% are Hispanic, 6% are Black and 3% are Asian. These figures align closely with previous research showing that a large portion of newsrooms’ employees are White , higher than the share of U.S. workers overall who are White.

Note: Here are the questions used for the report , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

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Emily Tomasik is a research assistant focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center

Jeffrey Gottfried is an associate director focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center

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Race and Ethnicity in the Sociology of Sport in the United States

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization. " W.E.B. Dubois These words, written in 1900 as Dubois prepared for the first Pan African Congress in London, predated a similarly prophetic statement in the forward of his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For six decades Dubois used sociological theory and methods to study race and racial relations in the United States, producing numerous books and hundreds of insightful essays. However, it wasn't until 1944 when Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy that the topic of race attracted concerted attention from sociologists and other scholars in the United States. When the sociology of sport emerged as a sub-discipline in the fields of sociology...

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Article contents

Introduction

Culture: Basics and a Guiding Framework

Gender and Cultural Diversity in Sport and Physical Activity

Gender Scholarship in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology

Sex Differences

Social Perspectives and Stereotypes

Sexuality and Sexual Prejudice

Sexual Harassment

Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class

Race, Ethnicity, and Health Disparities

Stereotypes and Stereotype Threat

Physicality and Weight Bias

Obesity and Weight Bias

Weight Stigma and Health Promotion

Cultural Competence

Cultural Sport and Exercise Psychology

Cultural Competence for Professionals

Cultural Competence and Inclusive Excellence

Related Articles

Bibliography

30 Race and Sport

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

Alex Manning

Introduction

Existing Literature, Analytic Goals, and Theoretical Foundations

Athlete Agency

Context and Contingencies

Synthesis: The Dramatization of Struggle

Biographies

Contributor Information

11.7: Sports, Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity

ANTHROPOLOGY MEETS POPULAR CULTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Center for Race & Ethnicity in Sport

Ketra Armstrong, PhD

Academic Writing Services

Sport and Race as Social Phenomena

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Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Sport

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Race & Ethnicity—Definition and Differences [+48 Race Essay Topics]

Race and Ethnicity Definitions

Differences Between Race and Ethnicity

Race and Ethnicity Classification

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Regions & Countries

U.S. journalists’ beats vary widely by gender and other factors

Majority of journalists who cover entertainment, travel are freelancers or self-employed

Journalists’ beats vary somewhat by race, ethnicity

About one-in-six U.S. journalists at news outlets are part of a union; many more would join one if they could

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Race and Ethnicity in the Sociology of Sport in the United States

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