UNIT 5: The Role of Race and Gender Identity in Sports

UNIT 5: The Role of Race and Gender Identity in Sports

NOTES: Racism and Sport: Exploring the Past Expanding Possibilities for the Future

-Racism is a belief that one race in superior or inferior to another.  Racial separatism is a belief that races should remain segregated. Race is important to study because it is involved in memory categorization and it affects the sociopolitical structure of society and history.

-Institutional racism reflects patterns of negative and oppressive behaviors, laws, and societal factors that affect identifiable groups based on race or ethnicity.

Racism and sexism are tightly woven into societal fabric to the extent that we accept these things as a society making us all racists and sexists on some level.

-Understanding degrees of societal discrimination could help in visualizing a totally inclusive society. 

-Racism was a norm in sports over the years, sports teams were segregated and blacks athletes weren’t allowed the same resources or literally “even playing fields” to white players. Negro League Baseball started in the late 1880’s as a result of white teams not allowing blacks to participate.

-Jackie Robinson was the first black man to join the all white Dodgers in 1947 but faced disgusting bigotry for most of his life.  We became an equal rights activists and helped in breaking down color boundaries for black athletes.  Althea Gibson was the first black woman to win Wimbledon and despite her success she also faced discrimination for her participation.

-Although segregation is no longer legal, racism is still rampant in major league sports.  Patrick Ewing, Papakouli Diop, P.K. Subban, and Dani Alves are athletes that have faced harassment from sports American and European sports fans while on the playing fields.

-There has been a nasty pattern of college basketball teams exploiting black players without offered adequate educational counseling to ensure they succeed in life post college sports since not everyone will make it to the majors.

-The Washington Redskins and the Indians sports teams continue to use Native American imagery to sell their brands at the expense of a culture they know nothing about and they don’t care about stereotyping or exploiting.

-A huge issue in men’s professional sports is the fact that white men control team ownership, coaching, and other positions continuing a cycle of white privilege.

-Intersectionality is a term that described the navigation of the complex intermingling of gender, class, race, and sociopolitical life.

-It is important to note that racism can be combated in sports by making players and fans more aware, by teams taking a string stance against it, by carrying our international campaigns against it, and including more ethnic minority players in sports.

FINAL THOUGHT:

- Racism, sexism, and issues of gender equality are intimately intertwined in a complicated web that affects sport, public policy, social construction, and pervasive discrimination based on prejudice.

Scholarly Research Analysis Protocol

Instructions: While reading the assigned text, answer the questions below in the space provided. 

Please use direct excerpts from the text whenever possible in your responses.

What structural features define this text as falling within the genre of scholarly/ academic writing? (Create a bulleted list.)

-The piece utilizes primary source documents in the form of interviews, radio shows, sports and sport broadcasts to outline overt cases of discrimination and derogatory language used against women of color.

What is the argument statement of this text?  (Write one sentence.)

In this paper we use sport to encourage ‘white’ people to deconstruct the privileged lens

through which they construct and view ‘black’ people. (491)

Identify the jargon of this text. [Jargon is specialized terminology characteristic of a particular discipline or area of theory.]  (Use bullets.)

-pornographic eroticism

-representations

-sport

-race

-social stereotype

-African American women

-sexist regime

-derogatory

What are five statements that the author uses to support the argument statement? Use only direct excerpts; frame them with quotation marks, and note the page number.

1) Journalists’ fixation with Serena’s diet, weight, fitness, and appearance then shifted into

categories of ‘pornographic eroticism’ and ‘sexual grotesquerie’. Her breasts and bottom

were fetishized via headlines such as, ‘Size up Serena Williams at your own risk’ (Stevens,

2006), ‘Serena out to kick butt’ (Epstein, 2006), and ‘Easybeat? Fat chance’ (Crawford,

2006a), and photographs of her allegedly abnormal gluteal muscles and weight. (498)

2) Hyper-muscularity as both a new social phenomenon and a denigrating stereotype is

especially evident in sport, which has embodied in the past the ‘natural’ superiority of men

in contrast to the ‘otherness’ of female athletes as objects of ridicule, weakness, inferiority,

decoration, passivity, and as erotically desirable yet transgressive, but which is now

searching for new ways to disparage the powerful and therefore ‘uppity’ African American sportswomen. (492)

3) A common strategy for reasserting masculine hegemony in sport is

via ‘pornographic eroticism’, in which sexuality is constructed as the ‘primary character-

istic of the person represented’ (Heywood, 1998). Heywood distinguishes ‘pornographic

eroticism’ from ‘athletic eroticism’, in which sexuality is ‘one dimension of human

experience, as a quality that emerges from the self-possession, autonomy, and strength so

evident in the body of a female athlete’. (492)

4) The unremitting construction of black women as primitive, transgressive, and ‘wild’ ensures that black women’s bodies remain the focus of white analyses of black capacities, which are easily watched, desired, and possessed but also pathologized. (494)

5) ‘Pornographic eroticism’ is particularly prominent in media coverage of women’s tennis,

where many players’ physiques and performances are the objects of a constant gaze and are

monitored for ‘excess’ (Harris & Clayton 2002; Kennedy, 2001; Miller, McKay & Martin,.

1999; Stevenson, 2002). (495)

What values or views were represented in the message? (Write no more than three sentences.)

This article does a great job explaining the current position of white privilege and understanding the ways in which white people view people of color in sports culture and beyond.  The countless examples of white men and women criticizing, analyzing, and tearing apart black women’s bodies are deplorable.  The important message in all of this is for white people in particular to understand how powerful race and gender are and to always keep in mind the institutional properties of these issues.  Many people don’t realize they’ve said something racist or sexist when they are saying because those aspects of discrimination have become such an integral part of their lives.  Pieces like this should be mandatory for middle school and high school kids to read in school so they can have a more well rounded understanding of the intersection of race, sex, class, and gender.

LEARNING MODULE:

STEP 1:

“How progressive a person seems to be on the surface bears little or no relation to how prejudiced he or she is on an unconscious level – so that a bleeding heart liberal might harbor just as may biases as a neo-Nazi skinhead”. (53)

“Something similar happened when she showed subjects a list of people who might be criminals: without knowing they were doing so, participants picked out an overwhelming number of African American names.”. (54)

“Images of women as sexobjects, footage of African American criminals on the six o’ clock news—“this is knowledge we cannot escape” explains Banaji.  “We didn’t choose to know it, but it still affects our behavior” (55)

“One thing is certain: We can’t claim that we’ve eradicated prejudice just because it’s outright expression has waned”. (56)

“The study of culture may someday tell us where the seed of prejudice originated: for now, the study of the unconscious shows us just how deeply they’re planted”. (56)

WRITTEN PIECE:

Annie Murphy Paul’s piece “Where Bias Begins: The Truth About” is an eye opening analysis of research done on stereotyping throughout humanity regardless of upbringing in culture.  We have all been conditioned by our surrounding, by the people who raised us, by our schools to help us interpret the world.  Since day one, each of us absorbed countless advertisements that tell us what to by, who to be friends with, what job to have.  Most of all, the advertisements and larger institutional entities like mainstream media have taught us prejudice.  Fox News makes their money by scaring older white folks into thinking feminists are taking over the world.  No one likes to think they are a racist, but like Murphy Paul’s article explains “One thing is certain: We can’t claim that we’ve eradicated prejudice just because it’s outright expression has waned”(56).  Today we live is what people think is a post racial society when the reality is that the stereotypes are more covert then ever before and are sin some ways scarier than we could have ever imagined.

STEP 2:

Janell Ross’s piece “When Gender Discrimination and Racism Collide” provides a details description of one of many cases of violence against women of color at a higher education institution.  The concepts of race, sex, gender, and class are all pervasive and institutionalized on a very deep level, as heard when a white frat member referred to a black sorority member as a “fat black bitch” in the UCONN case.  There are layers of hate there.  All of these forms of bigotry and sexism are intertwined and go hand in hand as we discussed earlier in this unit when talking about intersectionality.

STEP 3:

- A common theme in this slide show of pictures is the theme of women being “lascivious by nature”.

- Many of the women in the images are scene sprawled on the floor in very animalistic way.

- There appears to be an absolute obsession with large butts in most of these images and it’s interesting how the slide show pairs many of the modern butt images with older derogatory and racist cartoons of African women eroticized for the tribal and exotic appeal.

-The slide show features many images of black women totally naked and on the ground as if they were pushed there in a submissive position.

-Many of the other nude photographs show black women on top of other inanimate objects like fruit, which associates them with those fruit allowing viewers to fully objectify the model.

-The last video of the white man talking about the sexualization of black women to the black man is particularly damaging because there is tragic stereotype of young African women that denotes curves and puberty with innate sexuality. 

-There is also a perspective from many of these photos that appears to be pleasing the male gaze in that there is a destructive assumption that women’s bodies are to be dominated by men.

-One of the most troubling parts of these images is that black women are caught in strange position of constantly being sexualized, especially if they are photographed naked, which could provide a breeding ground for insecurity and lack of self-confidence about one’s body.

-The depiction of black women without clothes and in provocative positions unfortunately is tied to a sickening stereotype that black women are loose, lack modesty, and are constantly seductive.

-This depiction of women throughout this video is a perfect example of the Jezebel troupe.

STEP 4:

After analyzing the Tidesport’s “2015 Racial and Gender Report Card: Major League Baseball” and other article on the site, it’s apparent that there are many positive changes happening in hiring practices of in the sporting world but there are often issues that force steps back as well.  For example, Dr. Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport was quoted saying, “Although            the total percentage of            players            of color has steadily            risen over the years, there has been a concern in Major League Baseball about the relatively small            and declining percentage of African-American            players”.  It is vital that organizations like Tidesport exist to constantly be able to report on these issues, as they are happening in order to provide real and consistent change.  Some of the facts are disturbing such as “In 2015 there            were four people of color serving as general managers            in MLB including two Latinos,            one African-American and one Asian-American. There were three at the start of the            2014 and three            in the 2013 season.  The largest number of GMs of color was five in 2009 and 2010”.  I think if these facts were  announced more publically so the viewers of mainstream sports really knew these numbers, people would be more vocal about wanting change.

STEP 5:

1)      The image of Serena William on the Body Issue of ESPN is one that says quite a bit.  The image is of a naked Serena Williams in a pose that covers her breasts and gentalia, a shoot that one can assume was called something like “classy nudity”.  In many ways the image is stunning, her dark and shinny body in contrast with the white background is artistic in a way.  I wonder what her intentions were with doing a shoot like this.  Maybe Williams feels confident about her body and felt like she wanted to do something edgy and glamorous.  There is no question that she has become a sex symbol in the sporting world.   Yet, I can’t help but think about McKay’s piece about Williams in that “her breasts and bottom were fetishized via headlines such as, ‘Size up Serena Williams at your own risk’(498).  Perhaps this is Williams’ way of saying “Screw the media, I will do whatever I want with my body whenever I want”.

2)      It’s surprising to me that Sports Illustrated would put a young black woman on the cover of their magazine considering the publication pays more attention to sexually objectifying women in there swimsuit issue then anything else.  Seeing Mo’Ne Davis on this cover is pretty epic and possibly signals a large movement in the most recent paradigm shift.  Not only is she on the cover, but she looks powerful and strong.  The photo captures Davis mid throw with a look of intention and confidence although not a look that would be classified at “feminine”. The “pornographic eroticism” referred to in McKay’s piece appear to be absent here and the image is empowering and shows a respect for Davis’s athletic excellence.

3)      The image of the Serena and Venus Williams on the cover of the New York Times Magazine is commanding.  The image is the two sisters in a black and white photo made all the more visually stimulating by the contrast with the white background.  The women are holding hands, a gesture that appears to solidify the familial bond the two share, a compelling image that says something like “We are two powerful women that made it to this point in our careers together and that’s pretty awesome”.  Both women are in athletic attire that shows off their muscles and fitness and the look on their faces are pure confidence and dominance.  This image seems to spit in the face of the “white male-centred viewpoint that is normative in mainstream media” that McKay disassembles in his piece.  The image reads to me as proud and forthright with a lot of style and class.