Routledge Handbook of Sport, Race and Ethnicity

John Nauright, David K Wiggins, John Nauright, David K Wiggins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317596660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

Few issues have engaged sports scholars more than those of race and ethnicity. Today, globalization and migration mean all major sports leagues include players from around the globe, bringing into play a complex mix of racial, ethnic, cultural, political and geographical factors. These complexities have been examined from many angles by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and scientists. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of the full sweep of approaches to the study of sport, race and ethnicity.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Race and Ethnicity makes a substantial contribution to scholarship, presenting a collection of international case studies that map the most important developments in the field. Multi-disciplinary in its approach, it engages with a wide range of disciplines including history, politics, sociology, philosophy, science and gender studies. It draws upon the latest cutting-edge research to address key issues such as racism, integration, globalisation, development and management.

Written by a world-class team of sports scholars, this book is essential reading for all students, researchers and policy-makers with an interest in sports studies.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I

Key themes of race and ethnicity in sport

1
HISTORY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY IN SPORTS^*

David K. Wiggins and John Nauright

Introduction

In the white-dominated countries of Europe and North America, race and ethnicity are central to discussions of who is included in the nation and in local, regional, and national identities, what sports are played and how the media covers participation by athletes from differing backgrounds. Issues of racism among sport spectating groups, particularly in football (soccer) in Europe, remain, though there have been some positive improvements during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Victorian-era ‘scientists’ categorized humans on a continuum known as the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which placed Africans at one end of the spectrum and Northern Europeans at the other, with other ‘races’ in between, thus creating a dichotomy between blacks and whites that has been difficult to eliminate. In addition, many scholars have argued that blacks have been viewed primarily in physical terms at the expense of mental acuity, going back to the era of slavery: ‘Classical racism involved a logic of dehumanization, in which Africans were defined as having bodies but not minds: in this way the superexploitation of the black body as muscle-machine could be justified. Vestiges of this are active today.’¹

In 2010 we published a chapter on ‘Race’ in the Routledge Companion to Sports History and we base our discussion here on that overview, applying it specifically to the role of race and ethnicity in sport over time, examining major issues and events and how they have been interpreted by scholars. Several years after we published that work, there are still few issues that receive more attention from historians of sport internationally. Indeed, the massive international refugee crisis which sent millions of refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East, several African nations and beyond to other regions and continents, notably Europe and North America, has reignited debates about perceived cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial differences. Many stakeholders view sport as an ideal vehicle to help address integration of migrant communities as well as a tool to fight ‘radicalization’ in disaffected and impoverished communities in Europe with diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds.

For the entire history of modern sport, race and ethnicity have been key dividing concepts, particularly in relation to people with black and white skin colour. Race was a legitimating concept used during the age of Empire and in the dissemination of sport across European and US empires. This soon led to debates about sporting merits of differing races, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. More recently, the literature on race in Asia and Latin America has expanded as well, as has the focus in the USA on Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans in sport. As late as 1904, indigenous peoples were put on display during ‘Anthropology Days’ at the St. Louis World’s Fair, which coincided with the 1904 Olympic Games. Among sport history research in the USA, race plays a prominent role, exceeding almost any other area of study. In Europe, examinations of race and ethnicity have largely taken place in the postcolonial context, though historians realize that race has a complex relationship to the expansion of European empires and the colonial and postcolonial contexts that emerged as a result.

In ‘settler’ and plantation societies such as the USA, Australia, South Africa, and the British West Indies, race and class were closely intertwined, which led to the development of a black underclass that took many decades to achieve equality of opportunity on the playing field. Barriers to participation in white-dominated competitions hardened in the imperial era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such that whether in the USA, Barbados, or South Africa, blacks were forced to participate in their own competitions segregated from white ones.

After the Second World War, though, these barriers to participation began to fall, with Jackie Robinson beginning the process of integrating white professional baseball in the USA in 1945 and the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team appearing in 1960 in the person of Frank Worrell. The Olympic Games opened increasingly to athletes from all countries, particularly as colonialism gave way to independence in Asia and then Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Black African runners began to achieve success, beginning with Kenyan middle-distance runners at the 1954 Empire Games.² While South Africa was slower to integrate, by the 1990s competitions were open to all regardless of racial background.³

The role of race in sport is complex and one that has been examined from many angles by historians, sociologists, and biological scientists. In this chapter we outline the achievements in sport by racially and ethnically marginalized peoples and the reactions by analysts and historians to these achievements, most of whom have been white, conceding that the literature on race and sport has focused heavily on the black/white divide.⁴ We also discuss in the conclusion the need to continue expanding on this line of research.⁵

The literature and experience of black athletes in the USA is most well developed and provides the majority of examples, though Rob Ruck specifically discusses the USA in this volume. Here we begin to break down the tradition of purely national-level analyses and view race and sport from a more global perspective. Indeed, an American myopia on race and sport has begun to be challenged by scholars working on issues of race and sport outside the USA.⁶ A few key examples of why this is important will be given here. The famous late nineteenth-century black boxer Peter Jackson was born in the Danish Virgin Islands, and participated in famous bouts in the USA and Australia, the latter being where he died and is buried. American cyclist Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor achieved acclaim in Europe, the USA, and Australia. One of American boxer Jack Johnson’s best known fights was held in Sydney, Australia and top West Indian cricketers by the 1920s and 1930s were playing league cricket in the north of England, most famous of whom was the great Learie Constantine.⁷

With the closer integration of ideas and better communication and transport in the world by the early 1900s, it was impossible for events in the USA, for example, not to appear in Caribbean and South African newspapers. Great black thinkers such as Marcus Garvey had a significant impact in the West Indies, Africa, USA, and beyond, and the sporting exploits of African-American boxer Joe Louis could be lauded in Johannesburg or Bridgetown as much as in Detroit. White-controlled newspapers targeting white audiences rarely mentioned black sport; newspapers focused on black readers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier or the Baltimore Afro-American in the USA or the Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu in South Africa, reported widely on black sporting activities. These sources have provided historians with a wealth of information that has aided in the recovery and wider presentation of histories of blacks in sport.⁸ Without these sources, much of what we have learned has had to be unearthed via oral histories and the piecing together of a wide array of official and unofficial documents.

The history of black involvement in sport has been a tumultuous one. First, black athletes faced segregation until the latter decades of the twentieth century. When competitions operated in an integrated fashion, discrimination frequently occurred. In recent years there has been a more level playing field, with many athletes of colour in the West obtaining more equal opportunities in sport, at least once they reach the playing field. Finally, we have seen the emergence of what some scholars have suggested are post-racial athletes such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, though this has certainly not applied universally to black athletes and began to dismantle with scandals surrounding Jordan, Woods, and other widely popular African-American sporting stars.⁹ Opportunities for black men and women beyond the playing field have increased in recent years as well, though not as equally as on the playing fields and courts. As African-American activist and scholar Harry Edwards noted in 1999, ‘Michael Jordan doesn’t just want to be on the team – he wants to own the team.’¹⁰ While positions for black leaders and owners in sport have been limited, aspirations in all areas of sport are not completely unrealistic for black athletes and former athletes internationally.

Contemporary analyses during the past century have tended to place black athletes in the category of Nature as either the ‘primitive’, unable to compete with intellectually superior whites, or as ‘beast’, linked to superior physicality.¹¹ Even in recent studies, these concepts about race and physicality and mental abilities have been central in debates about blacks and sport.¹²

These tensions when examining race in sport will be explored with reference to specific periods in the history of sport, along with approaches to the examination of race as problematic in sport history. In particular, recent work in sport history has begun to move beyond the ‘recovery’ phase of telling the his- and her-stories of forgotten sportsmen and women, or to paraphrase the title of one of our books, to move beyond merely bringing black sports Out of the Shadows, to a more sophisticated interrogation of the ways in which ‘race’ has been used in sport and wider society in the practice of sport, the telling of sports stories, and the memorializing of the sporting past and sporting heroes and heroines. Or to use Douglas Booth’s taxonomy, much of the writing on race and sport history prior to 2000 involved ‘reconstruction’ of previously hidden pasts.¹³ Recent scholarship has sought to more fully understand the historical operation of systems of power, interpretations of race, and how athletes have been constructed as racial beings.

Racial segregation in sport

In colonial societies blacks were initially exposed to different sports on plantations or in larger cities. In limited cases, some blacks appeared in competitions in the metropole as well. Before the 1860s, though, there were only a handful of recognized successes by black sportsmen (all women were largely excluded from sports), though a more complex picture of racial mixing in sporting activities before the mid-nineteenth century is beginning to emerge.¹⁴ Tom Molineaux was perhaps the most famous international black athlete in the period before 1860 and the era of ‘modern’ sports. In 1810 and 1811 he famously fought Tom Cribb in England for the ‘world’ boxing championship. Cribb was a rare exception, though it appears that racial barriers in sport in many places were less rigid in 1860 than they became by the end of the 1890s.

A number of outstanding African-American athletes distinguished themselves in highly or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Key themes of race and ethnicity in sport
• Part II Race and ethnicity in sport: case studies from around the world
• Index