Race and Sport

This chapter explores the relationship between race and sport from the late nineteenth century to the present. It tracks processes of racial exclusion, colonial control, and antiracist contestation, as well as the more diffuse context of an ostensibly postracial neoliberal sporting landscape. Included are discussions of crucial figures such as Jack Johnson, Jackie Robison, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. Campaigns such as the sporting boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the Olympic protest by black American athletes are discussed, as is the Algerian revolution, racism in European football (soccer), and the contradictions of nominally amateur collegiate sports in the contemporary United States. Reference is likewise made to the relationship between race and class and gender inequities and struggles.