By Kate Aguilar This is one of two new posts today exploring race in the NFL. This article explores race, culture, and Blackness, looking at narratives surrounding Cam Newton. Andrew McGregor’s piece looks at Whiteness, considering Peyton Manning as a Great White Hopes. Read in tandem, we hope they offer context that helps frame the narratives surrounding…
By Edward J. Gray, Guest Contributor On January 16th, 2010, Alabama head football coach Nick Saban made a promise to the Crimson Tide faithful. Coming off the heels of the Tide’s first national championship in nearly twenty years, a 37-21 win over the University of Texas Longhorns, Saban proclaimed that “this is not the end,…
Thomas, Damion L. Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 232 pp. $60.00 cloth. Reviewed by Andrew D. Linden In Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics, Damion L. Thomas analyzes the US government’s use of African American athletes as tools in the ideological battle between American…
Lamb, Chris, ed. From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 648 pp. $35.00 paperback. Reviewed by Kate Aguilar On January 7, 2016, ESPN radio host Dan Le Batard interviewed hip hop artist, author, and public speaker Chuck D, former leader of the rap group…
Henne, Kathryn E. Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $90 clothback. $28.95 paperback, web PDF, and epub. Reviewed by Cat Ariail In my last blog post, I used the story of Carlota Gooden to introduce the possibility of athletic…
By Kate Aguilar In the 2014 documentary Champs, director Bert Marcus interviews boxing legends Evander Holyfield, Bernard Hopkins, and Mike Tyson, providing an intimate look at how race, class, gender, and place converge in the making of a boxing superstar. The film begins with a voiceover from Philadelphia native Bernard Hopkins’ trainer, Naazim Richardson. Hopkins successfully…
By Cat Ariail At the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago, Illinois, Carlota Gooden, a twenty-two year-old Panamanian sprinter descended from Barbadian canal workers, won two silver medals and a bronze. Her performances in the 100-meter sprint, 4×100-meter relay, and 60-meter dash entered her name in the official records of international track, a permanent inscription that…
by Craig Forrest, Guest Contributor Football played a crucial role, it appears, in the most recent student protests at the University of Missouri. Over the past few months, several incidents of racial taunting have been reported by African-American students on campus. The president of the Missouri Students’ Association described being called a “nigger” by passengers…
By Alexander Hyres In February, the Big Ten Conference held a lengthy discussion with faculty, administrators, and student-athletes about how to “keep education central to the mission of college sports.” Whether education has actually been the central to mission of college sports in the last one-hundred years is questionable; however, the discussion did produce a proposal…
By Kate Aguilar The second thing people who understood Miami had in common was the realization that the real and the fake, the dream and the nightmare, the hope and the despair, were inseparable- that, in Miami, the good always came wrapped up in the bad. ~T. D. Allman, Miami: City of the Future (1987) On August…
Sport in American History 