Race, Gender and Sport

Catalog description

In 1969, sociologist Harry Edwards declared that a surge of protest among African American athletes marked "the newest phase of the black liberation movement in America." Nearly five decades later, athletes such as Richard Sherman, Serena Williams, and Michael Sam proved that the relationship between race, gender, and sport remains complicated, and that athletes continue to offer meaningful contributions to a variety of struggles for liberation. This course addresses the race, gender and sport relationship from two complementary angles. First, we will examine the ways that sport gives meaning to racial and gender identity. As concepts that shift over time, race and gender derive their influence from prevailing forms of scientific reason, social attitudes, and cultural mythologies. From Jack Johnson to Serena Williams, sport has found and intervened itself in each of these contexts, particularly as society and culture produce marginal or subordinate identities. We will consider, for example, how and why sport posits the differences between men and women according to assumptions about physical strength, and how and why sport reinforces dubious assumptions regarding the physical superiority and cognitive inferiority of black athletes. Second, we will examine the ways that sport works as a setting in which political struggles around race and gender are imagined and expressed. From the 1968 stand by black track and field Olympians, to Billie Jean King's 1973 famous "Battle of the Sexes," to tennis player Venus Williams' achievement of gender pay equity in 2007, to sports figures protesting on behalf of the Movement for Black Lives in 2016, athletes have long placed their social identities at the center of political speech. Finally, we will consider the historical trajectory of a narrative about the "activist athlete," which once held that athletes had abdicated political obligations in pursuit of wealth, but which now seems to herald athletes' return to the nation's political scene in examples like LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. This course will address sport's potential to rethink, resist, or challenge race and gender relations and other social hierarchies.