Race-centered Discourse: Room 6
Racial Identity and Adult Recreational Hockey Players
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bohsiu Wu
Previous studies on racial identity and sports have shed significant light on how African Americans forge and negotiate their racial identity, both individually and collectively. Black athletes develop a unique and prideful racial identity in an industry dominated by white elites who control the reward and opportunity structures in various sports. Whether this unique experience is shared by other racial minorities is not yet examined thoroughly. In-depth interviews are being conducted with 13 non-white recreational adult ice hockey players with a range of skills and experiences in northern California. Specific focus is on whether and how participants develop a double consciousness. Preliminary findings reveal that a double consciousness is not a universal experience among amateur ice hockey players. However, the emergence of a double consciousness is correlated with players’ non-conformity to both the norms unique in ice hockey and racial stereotypes in society.
How Black Female Athletes from the Greater Toronto Area Navigate Social, Athletic, and Academic Spaces to Get US Athletic Scholarships
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rhonda George
Scholarly research indicates that Black Canadian male students often use competitive sports to negotiate inequitable schooling environments and define athletic success as obtaining U.S. athletic scholarships. These Black male student-athletes also receive more social and economic supports and opportunities at all levels, which boosts athletic performance, but often at the cost of eventual poor social, economic and educational outcomes. Obscured from the narrative are the specific experiences of Black Canadian female student-athletes also engaging with sport in these ways, but with less social and economic supports and opportunities than their male counterparts. How do they navigate their athletic and academic goals? How do race, class, and gender shape their social, educational and athletic experiences? Are they successful or unsuccessful in their objectives and in which ways? Using Critical Race Theory as a conceptual frame and drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with Black Canadian female U.S. athletic scholarship recipients from the Greater Toronto Area, this paper theorizes how these athletes operate within the racialized, gendered and classed context of competitive sport. My findings explore the specific ways that these women define “making it”, the pathways to American institutions forged by these women, and the informal networks of support that facilitated their athletic and academic successes. My research contributes to a body of knowledge that currently neglects Black Canadian female athletes by elucidating how the axis of gender, intersecting with class and race, creates distinct social, athletic, and educational experiences and opportunities from those that currently dominate the Black male-centered discourse.
Challenging Monopoly: Black Labor Organizing during the NBA's "Dark Ages"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Theresa Runstedtler
This paper examines the work of African American National Basketball Association (NBA) players in organizing the increasingly powerful National Basketball Players Association and testifying in front of senate and congressional committees to counter the power of team owners and league officials in the 1970s. In looking at their antitrust case against the merger of the American Basketball Association (ABA) and the NBA, and their other efforts to increase player autonomy and mobility, I illustrates how black players led the fight for more control over their labor and brought changes to the aesthetics and rules of the game, as they became the demographic majority in the league. This struggle for control played out in the form of numerous, so-called “crises” in professional basketball, over not just the merger, but also the allegedly violent and criminal behavior of the players both on and off the court. Black players pushed back against the popular notion that the league was in crisis as they worked to gain more power over the game.
