'Race', Youth Sport, Physical Activity and Health

Global Perspectives

Symeon Dagkas, Laura Azzarito, Kevin Hylton, Symeon Dagkas, Laura Azzarito, Kevin Hylton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351122924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

'Race', Youth Sport, Physical Activity and Health provides a resource that addresses 'race' and racism in an accessible way by contextualizing theory with practical evidence-based examples drawn from global geographical and cultural settings.

This is the first book to focus on issues of 'race' and racism in youth sport, physical activity and health. Drawing on critical race theory, intersectionality and post-feminism, and presenting a range of international empirical case studies, it explores racialization processes in pedagogical and non-pedagogical settings. The book examines how 'race' and racism in pedagogical settings shape young peoples' dispositions towards participation in sport and physical activity, and how identity discourses are being shaped in contemporary sport, physical activity and health.

Essential reading for anybody working in sport and exercise studies, physical education, sociology or health studies.

Chapter 1

‘Race’, racism and race logic

Kevin Hylton

Introduction

Race, racism and race logic was the focus of a paper that I wrote in PE and Sport Pedagogy entitled Race Talk (Hylton, 2015). Race Talk examined the easy way that academics and students turn to conversations about ‘race’, and is commonly reflected in the classroom. The cultural importance of sport and physical activity for many was criticised by me for obscuring broader concerns about ‘race’ and racism because of four main factors:

(1) the liberal left discourses of sporting utopianism, (2) the ‘race’ logic that pervades sport, based upon the perceived equal access and fairness of sport as it coalesces with the (3) ‘incontrovertible facts’ of black and white superiority (and inferiority) in certain sports, ergo the racial justifications for patterns of activity in sport and PE, and (4) the racist logic of the Right perpetuated through a biological reductionism in sport and PE discourses.

(Hylton, 2015: 512)

Sport in the classroom and elsewhere draws on ideals of fairness, that it is uncontested, meritocratic, objective and value free. What can startle professionals in sport and related arenas is the notion of a hidden curriculum where ‘race’ is enlivened and Fields and Fields (2012) notion of racecraft does the work of managing ideas, aspirations and behaviours. For instance, Harrison et al., (2004) concluded that due to stereotypes and biological reductionism in their classes, European American students found themselves cautioned away from some athletic activities due to an imagined physical inferiority. The impact of such race logic is likely to lead to a stereotype threat as illustrated by Stone (2002). Stone (2002) considered the way that racialised ideas affect the way black and white athletes interpret and internalise their own potential for success consequently effecting motivation and levels of effort in regard to related activities. Negative stereotypes can affect self-worth and self-esteem to the point that defensive behaviours become manifest by stigmatised groups (Stone et al., 1999). In addition, mainstream groups not normally stigmatised have been observed to be impacted by stereotype threat like those revolving around basketball, skiing, golf, sprinting and swimming (Carrington, 2013, 2010; Hylton, 2018, 2009). In such cases ideologies concerning ‘natural ability’ and ‘superior intelligence’ pervade. For Stone et al. (1999: 1214) sport is one of the few social settings where white people experience negative stereotypes that can cause distress and directly affect performance. The pressure of potentially confirming a negative stereotype adds a level of stress that can affect performance.

The increased concern created by the threat imposes an additional psychological burden to the task, which, in turn, reduces an individual’s ability to perform to their potential. Thus, in the absence of interpersonal interaction, negative stereotypes, when made salient in a stereotype-relevant domain, can have a negative impact on performance in that context.

Taking this a step further, the effect of negative stereotypes that raise doubts about levels of competency in other domains of coaching, leadership, governance and administration should not be under-estimated. Contributing factors to racialised patterns in sport can stem from such subtle almost undetectable starting points in the classroom, gyms, the media and in other sites of education, recreation and leisure. Stereotype threat can effect a double jeopardy in sport as individual behaviours compound the (dis)advantages of institutionalised ideologies and behaviours. The influence of identity cues in social groups can be managed by sport practitioners through lessening stereotype threat where there is a recognition of its deleterious dynamics (Steele, 2003). I argue that in PE and Sport Pedagogy those with an interest in sport must develop a political race consciousness as a vehicle for a productive and inclusive engagement with sport and PE in the classroom and beyond its walls. Critical race theory (CRT) is used in this chapter as an important way to engage such a critical position, regardless of cultural context (Hylton, 2018; Coram and Hallinan, 2017; Tate, 2016; Hawkins et al., 2017; Bruno Massao and Fasting, 2014; Burdsey, 2011).

‘Race’, racism and race logic are examined in this edited collection as a result of concern with their operation and stealthy insidious effects on how we engage in sport and its cognate disciplines today. The contemporary unease with ‘race’ is revealed in the increasing ethnic divisions across nation states, the prevalence of Islamophobia and rise of the Right at all levels of politics across the globe. Online hate speech is readily shared on social media where it is clear that considerably more energy is required to apply critical voices to the racism and xenophobia on show in this under-policed arena. In this space, ‘race’ and its intersections require more attention. The construction of ‘race’ in society emerges from a plethora of sources online and offline, just as approaches to racism emerge as a consequence of everyday engagements with knowledge formers from all walks of life, disciplines and professions.

This will not be the last chapter to state that sport is a contested arena, that it does not exist in a vacuum nor is it free from politics. Sport environments have sufficient conditions to perpetuate epistemologies of ‘race’, and contribute to approaches to racism and race logic in a society where such behaviours are commonplace. It is with this backdrop that it is clear why scholarship is necessary to disrupt the harmful effects of racialised dynamics in society while revealing informed insights into their operation. Sport is viewed in this chapter as a racial formation (Omi and Winant, 1994, 2002) that is constituted of racial projects and a hegemonic set of ideas and unwritten rules that maintain its resilience. Omi and Winant (1994: 55) describe a racial formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. In explaining the status and relationship of ‘race’ and racism in this chapter it becomes evident how race logic emerges as a category of explanations for the presence and salience of ‘race’ in sport. The chapter also hints at the scale, complexity and status of ‘race’ beyond. In this chapter it will be seen how examples within sport can be described as racial projects which, connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organised (Omi and Winant, 1994: 56).

Critical race theory

Critical race theory can be viewed as a transdisciplinary compass that supports such a critical approach to understanding sport and its cognate disciplines. A theoretical framework emerging from social activism, CRT can be used to focus a critical lens on specific issues of ‘race’ where mainstream epistemologies have filtered it out. Even though oppressions are not neatly separable or useful as strict categories (Bell, 1992) ‘race’ becomes the central, starting ‘unit of analysis’ to consider the roles of ’race’, racism and power (Tyson, 2003: 16). CRT’s broad lexicon facilitates useful intellectual tools that reveal the embedded everyday practice of racism, the everyday significance of ‘race’, and consequently the dangers of ‘race’ neutrality. CRT accepts the centrality of racism (Aylward, 1999) that racism is pedestrian rather than spectacular (Holland, 2012), normal and not aberrant (Delgado and Stefancic, 2013) insidious, systemic and permanent (Bell, 1992). Being able to isolate racism and the underpinning circumstances of racial inequalities generates optimism that disparities and necessary solutions become more readily available (Hylton, 2018).

Fields and Fields (2012) believe that certain ideas have become engrained in everyday life through ways of thinking and behaving that have insinuated their way into our customs and practices. Ideas have become embedded in the way we talk and act to the point that dominant hegemonic ideas about ‘race’ are reinforced, even by those with the best intentions of trying to disrupt them. Just as Audre Lorde (1979) coined the term that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ it can be seen even in the language of public policy that part of the problematic dynamics of ethnic identification is illustrated by the seemingly innocuous growth of terms like ‘mixed race’. Mixed race on one level represents an owned and accepted identity for many as the fastest growing ethnic category in the UK, and on another hand it necessarily defers to a notion of ‘unmixed’, ‘pure’, biological races which is clearly problematic for those whom accepted many years ago that there is only one race. As Fields and Fields (2012: 4) would argue,

Restoring notions of race mixture to centre stage recommits us […] to the discredited idea of racial purity, the basic premise of bio-racism.

In education, student ethnicities are necessarily employed to differentiate the lived student experience, to focus pedagogy and to recognise inequities. Popular movements have asked questions like ‘why is my curriculum white?’ to denote the lived reality of ‘race’. Similarly, related campaigns have challenged the conspicuous whiteness of faculties by asking the question ‘why isn’t my professor black?’ In each case ‘race’ is used to explain a particular set of circumstances or identifiers that lead to a move for decolonising approaches to the curriculum and the academy (Hylton, 2016). Invariably, white privilege and the supremacy of whiteness are problematic in each context. Spurious folk-loric myths and stereotypes replicated in sport and PE curricula and policy discourses that draw on race logic is doing the work of racecraft, to which we now turn.

‘Race’, racism and race logic

Fields and Fields (2012: 5) use the term ‘racecraft’ to define a practice that highlights the ability of pre- or non-scientific modes of thought to hijack the minds of the scientifically literate. A sport science or coaching experiment could be derailed by the acceptance of the ethnic identity that an individual gives researchers especially in circumstances where racial stereotypes are at play. Venter (2007) was concerned by such dangers where biases in the social found their way into the scientific. Venter (2007) used his seminal work on the human genome to clarify the state of race and ethnicity in science when he argued that not only is skin colour as a surrogate for ‘race’ a social concept (BBC News, 2007), his analysis of the five group genomes described as races helped him to,

Illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis; and that there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another in the five Celera genomes.

Like Fields and Fields (2012) I define ‘race’, racism and race logic to clarify how racial dynamics manifest in society and especially in specific contexts in sport and its related fields. For Fields and Fields (2012) a shorthand use of ‘race’ to explain phenomena obscures the work of racism in many cases, just as Guinier and Torres (2003) posit that ‘race’ is the miner’s canary because its presence denotes the close proximity of something more odious and toxic; racism.

Fields and Fields (2012: 16–17) argue that racism, ‘refers to the theory and practice of applying a social, civic or legal double standard based on ancestry, and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard’. For example, professional sport leadership and governance has had many concerns about its lack of diversity. Many sports with a prevalence of Black and Minoritised Ethnic players have poor representation in senior leadership positions. This is an issue that goes beyond sport though is clearly manifest in sport’s contested arena. Some of the reasons promoted by those with a closer view of the dynamics concerning ‘race’ and the professions have touched upon the double standards that have perpetuated the progression of reductionist ideas of some about racialised others. For instance, Gasman (2016) has observed how senior managers in education will,

Bend rules, knock down walls, and build bridges to hire those they really want (often white colleagues) but when it comes to hiring faculty of color, they have to ‘play by the rules’ and get angry when any exceptions are made. Let me tell you a secret – exceptions are made for white people constantly in the academy; exceptions are the rule in academe.

The advent of the Rooney Rule in the US and English professional football and positive (or affirmative action) in the workplace are examples of where ‘play[ing] by the rules’ is in operation while in the backstage the double standard outlined by Fields and Fields (2012) continues unabated. Though the Rooney Rule had some success in guaranteeing interviews for minority candidates in the NFL where some high profile and successful hires emerged, even here, there has been serious slippage in adherence. Such lapses perpetuate established hiring practices and the turn to a less diverse, white network of prospects The Rooney Rule in Reverse (ESPN, 2016). African American Super Bowl winning coach Tony Dungy (ESPN, 2016) argues that the spirit of the Rooney Rule is being ignored,

Now it seems like in the last few years, people haven’t really done what the rule was designed for. It has become, ‘Just let me talk to a couple minority coaches very quickly so I can go about the business of hiring the person I really want to hire anyway’.

Hiring processes in some sports are highly ‘race’ biased yet where a phenomenon of selective hiring prevails against a diverse sport, organisation or society it becomes apparent that racial dynamics are at play. Such aversive behaviour lead to the forms of racism that Dovidio and Gaertner (2000) argue cause ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’. Racism seems to appear without racists because practices are the result of a work culture rather than overt individual bigotry. Institutional racism in sport is not unusual but it is not always so transparent. Lay conceptions of racism often relate to individual behaviours, and because nobody wants to be labelled a racist, institutional processes tend to avoid scrutiny. Ignoring these everyday racist behaviours reinforce racism in the workplace and beyond, enabling it to prevail (Trepagnier, 2010).

The colour-blindness of organisations continues in the operation of racecraft when ‘race’ is ignored as a factor in how business is done in sport (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). The resilience of racism in organisations is bolstered by those that ignore the effect of ‘race’ and racial dynamics in the workplace and by those whose idealist-enlightened views of post-raciality invite us to agree that since an African American can become the President of the United States ‘race’ is no longer relevant in today’s society. Fields and Fields (2012) are two of many questioning the idea of the ‘post’ in ‘post-racial’. Does it mean that racism does not exist, or does it purely reinforce the currency of ‘race’, racism and race logic? For them, racism always accepts the objectivity of race. This is emphasised suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the project
• 1 ‘Race’, racism and race logic
• 2 Social justice and intersectionality in sport, physical activity and health pedagogy: creating connections
• 3 Why is our PE teacher education curriculum white? A collaborative self-study of teaching about ‘race’ in PETE programmes
• 4 Stories of difference and sameness: South Asian, Muslim young women talk physical education
• 5 Athleticising young black lives: confusing education with commerce in high school sports
• 6 “Playing the game” and “finding my way”: minority ethnic female PE teachers’ counter-stories
• 7 Race logic in American college sports: athletic exploitation, privilege and institutional resentment
• 8 Challenging the stereotypical construction of black physical superiority and intellectual inferiority in sport
• 9 Le parkour, freerunning and young white men: identities, resistances and digital representations
• 10 Sport and the normalisation of Australian Aboriginal peoples
• 11 British Asians, racial framing and football exclusion
• 12 Physicality and health inequalities in British Pakistani Muslim women: analysis of a participatory theatre-based play
• 13 Decolonising health in education: considering Indigenous knowledge in policy documents
• 14 The “health gap” from a social justice perspective: critical race theory, post-colonialism, and post-feminism
• Index