Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The intersection of cultural racism, neo-nationalism, and globalization in contemporary U.S. North American Sport is examined via a focus on right-wing student-athletes’ responses to the NFL Players’ National Anthem Protests. Symbolic Interactionism and cultural studies is used as theoretical and methodological frameworks; two focus groups and thirty two in-depth interviews were conducted, of which eight comprise the population sample in this study. Our findings show discussions of race and racism were avoided, neglected, and guised by an exclusive forms of racialized, white privileged, nationalism. Conservative, exclusive, moral arguments root in neo-nationalistic hegemonic patriotism were also invoked. Support for, and assumptions about, U.S. corporation’s rights to sanction protests, along with the ostracization and exclusion of protesters from local U.S. markets were induced as solutions to protests. While student-athletes’ held beliefs about the freedoms and rights of all Americans to protest, in practice these beliefs faded due to cultural racism embed in neo-nationalist approaches that (Trump)ed the freedoms and rights of protesters. Student-athletes’ desires for increased national control over local markets were also invoked. We conclude with a discussion about the impact of cultural racism and neo-nationalism on global sports markets, which offers much insight into the maintenance and perpetuation of local and national control over global injustice and inequality.