Race and Sports Review

The issue of race, class, and sports in the United States remains complex in that it continues to be overlooked by our society and few scholarly journals exist within the topic. However, sports have been intertwined with racial issues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. While the institution of sports constructs masculinity, race and class differences are also emphasized and manipulated, mostly with the help of the media. It continually represents one of the many forms of systematic racism, segregation, prejudice, and discrimination. As portrayed in all four articles, sports demonstrate a forum of racialized politics and a protest against inequality. The articles, examine the tangled relations among race, sports and commercialism.
In her article Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? Race, Nation and Power at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Amy Bass presents a history of the black athlete. Embarking on the racial eugenics topic of the twentieth century pertaining to blacks and their continuing effects on the black community, Amy examines African Americans attempt to challenge such stereotypes. In particular, she explores the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), an organization that was developed to mobilize black athletes. She states, “OPHR forcefully recast the role of the black athlete, making it integral to both local and global struggles surrounding race and human rights as it couched its claims in specific terms of blackness” (189).
Using the OPHR and the Black Power protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the author portrays the relationship between racism and global politics. Also, Amy explores the history of the black struggle for racial equality and social justice. Amy Bass reveal Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing on the platform in black stockings and wearing a black glove during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner, as a moment of resisting and confronting the dominant forms of racial identity. It demonstrated the pursuit of “blackness” and human rights. In her conclusion Amy asserts, “the role of the black athlete, particularly as cultivated by the OPHR, emerged as an overt attempt to make America fulfill its promises, understanding that while sport allows for the location of a black face in one of the most important social arenas, it also exists as a space accompanied by devastating implications, often alleviating America’s racial culpability within consequential framework of popular culture” (200).
“Sport subsists as a fundamental model for other forums of social existence. It potentially serves as a stage with tremendous symbolic power, one literally—physically—focused on human possibility, transforming the quest for speed and power into a broader pursuit for equality” (188). Through the institution of sports, both African Americans and Latinos struggled over racial and class inferiority. They used sports as away to challenge and resist the issue of racism, class and white domination. In addition, African Americans and Latinos used sports to assert their racial identity. The four articles pertaining to race and sports help discover the politics of racial difference and the construction of racial hierarchy. Creating this idealized notion of “whiteness,” that continues to have a profound effect on African American and Latinos.
In the article Mexican American Baseball, Jose Alamillo explores the racial and class dynamic of sports, focusing on the all Mexican American baseball team. Baseball teams such as the Corona Athletics Club were formed to convey racial and ethnic pride among Mexican Americans. In addition, it formed resistance to the white dominant culture, which aimed to control Mexican Americans. Jose describes how Mexican citrus workers were forced to play baseball by their employers to assimilate and increase their efficiency at work. According to Jose, “Southwestern growers organized baseball clubs to potentially increase discipline, obedience, and productivity of its immigrant workforce. Baseball also prompted a particular kind of white middle-class masculinity (87).” Baseball became a tool for Mexican Americans to challenge the ideas of white superiority and Mexicans as racially inferior. (102). Also, it empowered Mexican Americans to stand up against limited economic opportunities, segregation and racial discrimination; creating a Mexican American.
I found each of the four articles interesting and easy to read. Though I do not know much about sports, I appreciate how each author provided concrete details and a historical background. The authors approach and use of sports as a way to portray inequality, racism and white superiority was appealing.