Jonathan Howe, Temple University

In an effort to avoid stereotypes about Black male athletes, such as being labeled a “dumb jock,” Spike, a college football player, says he wore athletic clothes to class as little as possible.

“I mean, granted, I’m a 6-foot-4, 240-pound Black kid on campus, so it’s kind of hard to get away from that,” he said. “But I didn’t want any, you know, significant confirmation that I was an athlete. So, I just wore like a collared shirt, jeans and nice shoes every day.”

Trey, a baseball player, refrained from speaking up or sharing personal information – even with his teammates.

He said he was often “outnumbered in opinion” as he was one of two Black athletes on a team of 40, which led to him “not even wanting to speak up” about issues that may cause conflict with others. “I’m a Black student-athlete and, like, that already makes me have to carry myself a different way,” he said.

I’m a professor of sport management who researches the experiences of Black male college athletes. During the 2020-21 academic year, I interviewed 16 Black male college athletes at Division I colleges across the U.S. I wanted to know how they changed their behavior to navigate stereotypes about them.

I also asked participants, who competed in numerous sports – including football, baseball, cheer, diving, and track and field – to record audio diaries about the topic as part of the study.

I found that these college athletes, at times, went out of their way to change how they present themselves to others in order to avoid anti-Black racism and “dumb jock” stereotypes on campus. At other times, they pushed back against these stereotypes as a form of resistance.

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‘I don’t bring up that I am a student-athlete’

Self-presentation refers to how someone acts or behaves during social interactions in order to influence how others perceive them. For example, a person may change how they speak, or their word choices, depending on who is around them.

The Black male college athletes in my study altered their presentation in a number of ways, including their dress or clothing and their speech. They also limited how much information they shared, and at times they hid details about their identity.

Marc, another football player, reflected on how being a Black male college athlete affected how he spoke – both the frequency and delivery – during class. “You have to be, like, more engaged,” he said. “You got to assert yourself more and you got to be more analytic about things.”

These adjustments were not restricted to academic environments. Marc was also careful about what information he shared in various athletic settings, too. “You do not really talk about personal stuff or anything like that,” he said.

Participants did not want their vulnerabilities used against them by their coaches or academic advisers.

Another strategy Black male college athletes used was hiding details about their identity – most often their athletic identity. Tyler, a track athlete, noted, “I try to make sure I don’t bring up that I am a student-athlete. I’m just trying to build my identity away from the sport.”

Black students, white campuses

Black men represent about 6% of total college students in U.S. four-year public institutions. Yet at Division I schools, the highest level of college athletic competition, they represent roughly 45% of football players and 51% of men’s basketball players.

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Overall, Black men represent 12% of all Division I college athletes, excluding historically Black colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, at Power Five schools, where college football is a big-time business, as many as 1 in 6 Black male students are athletes, compared with 1 in 50 white students.

The vast majority of Division I schools are predominantly white institutions. Their athletic departments, including coaching staffs and administrators, are overwhelmingly white. For example, 78% of Division I athletic directors, 81% of head coaches, 68% of assistant coaches and 90% of head athletic trainers are white.

Similar to their athletic experience, these athletes do not see many other Black people across campus. Faculty on these campuses are 93% non-Black.

Racism and discrimination

It is well documented that Black male college athletes experience racism and discrimination while attending these predominantly white schools. This includes, for example, unequal enforcement of school policies and less access to educational opportunities.

They are discriminated against for being Black, for being Black males and for being athletes. Although touted for their physical prowess, Black male athletes are often labeled “dumb jocks” – their intelligence somehow discredited by their physical stature.

They are sometimes seen by students, faculty, staff and even fans as lacking the intellectual ability and motivation to succeed academically. They are characterized as illegitimate students who undermine the academic mission of the university and receive special treatment.

One study found that professors and academic counselors had lower academic expectations of Black college athletes compared with their white counterparts and that these athletes lacked autonomy in making academic decisions. Academic counselors often selected their courses, as opposed to the athletes registering themselves, which made the athletes feel powerless.

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Another study found that faculty members were more likely to attribute Black male college athletes’ success to policies, such as affirmative action, instead of their merits, as they did for white athletes.

Resisting societal pressure

Not all the athletes altered their behavior or appearance to avoid anti-Black stereotypes. Keyvon, a football player, expressed that he presents himself authentically in predominantly white spaces as a way to “apply pressure” and force people to get comfortable with his Blackness.

Being a big-time college athlete indeed presents privileges, such as a pseudo-celebrity status, which at times can shield Black male college athletes from the impact of stereotypes and anti-Blackness. However, this is often the case solely when Black males perform well in their sport.

Sport performance should not determine how people treat Black male college athletes. Nor should Black male college athletes be placed in a box when it comes to how they present themselves, or risk anti-Black discrimination if they express themselves authentically. Ultimately, Black male college athletes will present themselves in a manner they deem appropriate – whether that aligns with what society expects or not.

Jonathan Howe, Assistant Professor of Sport Management, Temple University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University

During the era of slavery in the Americas, enslaved men, women and children also enjoyed the holidays. Slave owners usually gave them bigger portions of food, gifted them alcohol and provided extra days of rest.

Those gestures, however, were not made out of generosity.

As abolitionist, orator and diplomat Frederick Douglass explained, slave owners were trying to keep enslaved people under control by plying them with better meals and more downtime, in the hopes of preventing escapes and rebellions.

Most of the time, it worked.

But as I discuss in my recent book, “Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery,” many enslaved people were onto their owners and used this brief period of respite to plan escapes and start revolts.

Feasting, frolicking and fiddling

Most enslaved people in the Americas adhered to the Christian calendar – and celebrated Christmas – since either Catholicism or Protestantism predominated, from Birmingham, Alabama, to Brazil.

Consider the example of Solomon Northup, whose tragic story became widely known in the film “12 Years A Slave.” Northup was born free in the state of New York but was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana in 1841.

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In his narrative, Northup explained that his owner and their neighbors gave their slaves between three and six days off during the holidays. He described this period as “carnival season with the children of bondage,” a time for “feasting, frolicking, and fiddling.”

According to Northup, each year a slave owner in central Louisiana’s Bayou Boeuf offered a Christmas dinner attended by as many as 500 enslaved people from neighboring plantations. After spending the entire year consuming meager meals, this marked a rare opportunity to indulge in several kinds of meats, vegetables, fruits, pies and tarts.

There’s evidence of holiday celebrations since the early days of slavery in the Americas. In the British colony of Jamaica, a Christmas masquerade called Jonkonnu has taken place since the 17th century. One 19th-century artist depicted the celebration, painting four enslaved men playing musical instruments, including a container covered with animal skin, along with an instrument made from an animal’s jawbone.

In the 1861 narrative of her life in slavery, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs described a similar masquerade in North Carolina.

“Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus,” she wrote. “Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction.”

On Christmas Day, she continued, nearly 100 enslaved men paraded through the plantation wearing colorful costumes with cows’ tails fastened to their backs and horns decorating their heads. They went door to door, asking for donations to buy food, drinks and gifts. They sang, danced and played musical instruments they had fashioned themselves – drums made of sheepskin, metal triangles and an instrument fashioned from the jawbone of a horse, mule or donkey.

It’s the most wonderful time to escape

Yet beneath the revelry, there was an undercurrent of angst during the holidays for enslaved men, women and children.

In the American South, enslavers often sold or hired out their slaves in the first days of the year to pay their debts. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, many enslaved men, women and children were consumed with worry over the possibility of being separated from their loved ones.

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At the same time, slave owners and their overseers were often distracted – if not drunk – during the holidays. It was a prime opportunity to plan an escape.

John Andrew Jackson was owned by a Quaker family of planters in South Carolina. After being separated from his wife and child, he planned to escape during the Christmas holiday of 1846. He managed to flee to Charleston. From there, he went north and eventually reached New Brunswick in Canada. Sadly, he was never able to reunite with his enslaved relatives.

Even Harriet Tubman took advantage of the holiday respite. Five years after she successfully escaped from the Maryland plantation where she was enslaved, she returned on Christmas Day in 1854 to save her three brothers from a life of bondage.

‘Tis the season for rebellion

Across the Americas, the holiday break also offered a good opportunity to plot rebellions.

In 1811, enslaved and free people of color planned a series of revolts in Cuba, in what became known as the Aponte Rebellion. The scheming and preparations took place between Christmas Day and the Day of Kings, a Jan. 6 Catholic holiday commemorating the three magi who visited the infant Jesus. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, free people of color and enslaved people joined forces to try to end slavery on the island.

In April, the Cuban government eventually smashed the rebellion.

In Jamaica, enslaved people followed suit. Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Baptist lay deacon, called a general strike on Christmas Day 1831 to demand wages and better working conditions for the enslaved population.

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Two nights later, a group of enslaved people set fire to a trash house at an estate in Montego Bay. The fire spread, and what was supposed to be a strike instead snowballed into a violent insurrection. The Christmas Rebellion – or Baptist War, as it became known – was the largest slave revolt in Jamaica’s history. For nearly two months, thousands of slaves battled British forces until they were eventually subdued. Sharpe was hanged in Montego Bay on May 23, 1832.

After news of the Christmas Rebellion and its violent repression reached Britain, antislavery activists ramped up their calls to ban slavery. The following year, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which prohibited slavery in the British Empire.

Yes, the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day offered a chance to feast or plot rebellions.

But more importantly, it served as a rare window of opportunity for enslaved men, women and children to reclaim their humanity.

Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Molly Yanity, University of Rhode Island

The “Caitlin Clark effect,” or the impact on women’s basketball from a ponytailed rookie phenomenon from America’s heartland, is real: The 2024 WNBA season shattered viewership, attendance and merchandise sales records.

Clark, however, didn’t get a chance to compete for a league title.

The Connecticut Sun eliminated Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, in the first round of the playoffs with a two-game sweep, ending her record rookie-of-the-year campaign.

And it may be just the latest chapter in a complicated saga steeped in race.

During the first game of the series, the fingers of Sun guard DiJonai Carrington hit Clark in the eye as Carrington followed through on a block attempt of a Clark shot.

During the next day’s media availability, USA Today columnist Christine Brennan recorded and posted an exchange between herself and Carrington.

In the brief clip, the veteran sports writer asks Carrington, who is Black, if she purposely hit Clark in the eye during the previous night’s game. Though Carrington insisted she didn’t intentionally hit Clark, Brennan persisted, asking the guard if she and a teammate had laughed about the incident. The questions sparked social media outrage, statements from the players union and the league, media personalities weighing in and more.

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Hit the pause button here.

As a longtime sports writer who has covered the WNBA – and as a journalism scholar who studies women’s sports and fandom – I’ll concede that Brennan’s line of questioning seems, on its face, like business as usual in sports journalism.

After all, haven’t most baseball fans seen a scribe ask a pitcher if he intentionally beaned a batter?

But Brennan’s questions were not asked in a vacuum. The emergence of a young, white superstar from the heartland has caused many new WNBA fans to pick sides that fall along racial lines. Brennan’s critics claim she was pushing a line of questioning that has dogged Black athletes for decades: that they are aggressive and undisciplined.

Because of that, her defense of her questions – and her unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities – has left this professor disappointed in one of her journalistic heroes.

Brennan and much of the mainstream sports media, particularly those who cover professional women’s basketball, still seem to have a racial blind spot.

The emergence of a Black, queer league

When the WNBA launched in 1997 in the wake of the success of the 1996 Olympic gold-medal-winning U.S. women’s basketball team, it did so under the watch of the NBA.

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The NBA set out to market its new product, in part, to a white, heterosexual fan base.

The plan didn’t take hold.

While the league experienced fits and starts in attendance and TV ratings over its lifetime, the demographic makeup of its players is undeniable: The WNBA is, by and large, a Black, queer league.

In 2020, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association reported that 83% of its members were people of color, with 67% self-reporting as “Black/African-American.” While gender and sexual identity hasn’t been officially reported, a “substantial proportion,” the WNBPA reported, identify as LBGTQ+.

In 2020, the league’s diversity was celebrated as players competed in a “bubble” in Bradenton, Florida, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They protested racial injustice, helped unseat a U.S. senator who also owned Atlanta’s WNBA franchise, and urged voters to oust former President Donald Trump from the White House.

Racial tensions bubble to the surface

In the middle of it all, the WNBA has more eyeballs on it than ever before. And, without mincing words, the fan base has “gotten whiter” since Clark’s debut this past summer, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out in July. Those white viewers of college women’s basketball have emphatically turned their attention to the pro game, in large part due to Clark’s popularity at the University of Iowa.

Money is also pouring into the league through a lucrative media rights deal and new sponsorship partners.

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While the rising tide following Clark’s transition to the WNBA is certainly lifting all boats, it is also bringing detritus to the surface in the form of racist jeers from the stands and on social media.

After the Sun dispatched the Fever, All-WNBA forward Alyssa Thomas, who seldom speaks beyond soundbites, said in a postgame news conference: “I think in my 11-year career I’ve never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base. … I’ve never been called the things that I’ve been called on social media, and there’s no place for it.”

Echoes of Bird and Magic

In “Manufacturing Consent,” a seminal work about the U.S. news business, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that media in capitalist environments do not exist to impartially report the news, but to reinforce dominant narratives of the time, even if they are false. Most journalists, they theorized, work to support the status quo.

In sports, you sometimes see that come to light through what media scholars call “the stereotypical narrative” – a style of reporting and writing that relies on old tropes.

Scholars who study sports media have found that reporters routinely fall back on racial stereotypes. For example, coverage of Black quarterbacks in the NFL as less intelligent and more innately gifted would go on to hinder the progress of Black quarterbacks.

In Brennan’s coverage of the Carrington-Clark incident, there appear to be echoes of the way the media covered Los Angeles Lakers point guard Magic Johnson and Boston Celtics forward Larry Bird in the 1980s.

The battles between two of the sport’s greatest players – one Black, the other white – was a windfall for the NBA, lifting the league into financial sustainability.

But to many reporters who leaned on the dominant narrative of the time, the two stars also served as stand-ins for the racial tensions of the post-civil rights era. During the 1980s, Bird and Magic didn’t simply hoop; they were the “embodiments of their races and living symbols of how blacks and whites lived in America,” as scholars Patrick Ferrucci and Earnest Perry wrote.

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The media gatekeepers of the Magic-Bird era often relied on racial stereotypes that ultimately distorted both athletes.

For example, early in their careers, Bird and Johnson received different journalistic treatment. In Ferrucci and Perry’s article, they explain how coverage of Bird “fit the dominant narrative of the time perfectly … exhibiting a hardworking and intelligent game that succeeded despite a lack of athletic prowess.” When the “flashy” Lakers and Johnson won, they wrote, it was because of “superior skill.”

When they lost to Bird’s Celtics, they were “outworked.”

Framing matters

Let’s go back to Brennan.

Few have done more for young women in the sports media industry than Brennan. In time, energy and money, she has mentored and supported young women trying to break into the field. She has used her platform to expand the coverage of women’s sports.

Brennan defended herself in a lengthy interview on the podcast “Good Game with Sarah Spain”:

“I think [critics are] missing the fact of what I’m trying to do, what I am doing, what I understand clearly as a journalist, asking questions and putting things out there so that athletes can then have an opportunity to answer issues that are being discussed or out there.”

I don’t think Brennan asking Carrington about the foul was problematic. Persisting with the narrative was.

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Leaning into racial stereotypes is not simply about the language used anymore. Brennan’s video of her persistent line of questioning pitted Carrington against Clark. It could be argued that it used the stereotype of the overly physical, aggressive Black athlete, as well.

At best, Brennan has a blind spot to the strain racism is putting on Black athletes today – particularly in the WNBA. At worst, she is digging in on that tired trope.

A blind spot can be addressed and seen. An unacknowledged racist narrative, however, will persist.

Molly Yanity, Professor and Director of Sports media and Communication, University of Rhode Island

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.

https://stmdailynews.com/the-bridge

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