Sport in the U.S. has been a contested terrain involving issues related to race and relations. This session will engage how African American athletes have experience issues related to race and developed meaning about race that give insight into how sport contribute to race as a social construct. It will also examine how sport selection can affect athletic and racial identity among African American Athletes.
Using ethnographic and interview data gathered from a boys’ high school basketball team May explores the ways in which young African American male athletes experience issues of race. In particular, May examines player-coach relations and players’ on-the-court experiences to understand the implicit and explicit ways the players’ interactions may be centered on race. He argues that the players’ experiences highlight the ways in which broader social structures reinforce racialized understandings of sports. Ultimately, these experiences reinforce the racial status quo and support continued racial divisions within competitive sports.
The African American over representation in particular sports phenomena has been examined genetically, anthropocentrically, physiologically, and sociologically. The profusion of interpretations is a testimony to the complexity of this phenomenon. Harrison’s paper provides yet another compelling perspective. Nigrescence theory outlines the metamorphic process whereby African Americans “become Black.” This is a developmental process in which African Americans develop a manner of thinking about and evaluating themselves in terms of being “Black.” The degree to which individuals identify with the athlete role or labels themselves as athlete is termed Athletic Identity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships of racial and athletic identity particularly in African American athletes. It is theorized that the interaction of these identity constructs has a significant influence on sport preferences, patterns of participation, and possibly performance.
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