Sports Ethnography Analysis

I recently saw the film, 42, and I found many connections with our Sociology of Sport class. First and foremost, the movie was about the baseball legend, Jackie Robinson. Jack broke the baseball color barrier and was the first African American player allowed in Major League Baseball. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers beginning in 1947. Jack was a strong, talented player, but he also had a mind of his own. He played with an attitude that would be taunting to other players. When he made it to the Montreal Royals in 1946, he had to quickly get rid of this taunting, smart attitude. He was the only black player in a time of hatred and prejudice in the United States. Although he

I would like to discuss the issue of race and ethnicity in sports. We will also explore the bigger questions. How much does race and ethnicity matter in the sports world? Are certain races dominant in certain sports? Is there a difference in how we treat players based on race and ethnicity? Does it matter? I would like to answer some of these questions and gain a better understanding of how much of a part they play.

Anglo-Saxon culture is in many ways obsessed with sport and, from the late eighteenth through to the nineteenth centuries, produced many of the formalized sports now adopted world-wide and played according to the standard rules (Holt, 1989). In the last century following a brief period of participation, black sportsmen were barred participating alongside whites e.g. Baseball in the early 1860s which led to black players resorting to create their own teams and leagues. Black sportsmen have since World War II made a remarkable impact in baseball, basketball, athletics, American football and boxing but not so much in golf and tennis (Coakley 1978, Edwards, 1973). A reason being that according to the 2012 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey the poverty rate for African Americans is 28% compared to 15% for all races which shows some races are more inclined to be part of a certain social class. Certain sports tend to be linked with middle and upper classes lifestyle both in their recruitment and their supporters.

One socioligical explanation as to why African Americans excel in athletics is because it is viewed as a way of upward social and financial mobility. Being one of the world’s largest institutions, sports generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. Specifically, the National Football League generates six billion dollars in revenue a year (Sports Industry Overview, 2009). The life of an NFL player is filled with fame, fortune and limitless opportunites, something that the majority of young children dream about. The reason we see more African Americans succeeding in sports is because they have limited resources and opportunities for upward social mobility elsewhere. With the poverty rate among African Americans so high (24.7 %) they often do not have the resources to excel in education so instead they look to sports as a way of socio-economic advancement (Bureau, Poverty, 2009). Sports sociologist Harry Edwards defines this concept of black youth using sports as a way of social mobility as “blind faith”. Edwards explains three reasons as to why black families push their

It is no doubt that African-Americans make up a majority of the population when it comes to globally known sports such as basketball and football. We often ignore that there is still racism present in games, just because there are minorities within the atmosphere. Sports as mentioned by Harrison, “is upheld as a meritocratic social arena in which other disadvantages groups can excel.” However, I argue that other disadvantaged groups find it tough, sometimes impossible, to excel in individual sports when they are constantly looked down upon or not welcomed in a sport where there’s white domination.

There has always been this possibility for “sport to provide a site to achieve the American Dream.” While this is possible yet rare, this common conception allows African Americans to believe from a young age that “sport is [their] way out of the ghetto.” Thereby, their attentions are once again focused on sports, yet media fails to mention that less than 1 of every 10,0000 succeeds at the professional level and that there is a better chance for them to be a doctor or a lawyer. When there are cases without much outside knowledge of the chances one has in the sports world versus the professional world, “black culture may add to the problem by promoting athletic success as important for its youth.” Clearly, this has a cyclical nature and is a rather repetitive problem as time is then spent on sports more than anything else.

Racial ideology continues to have an influence on the sporting world, and on the sports and recreational options for Americans. In a diverse American society, we need to be conscious of the lingering effects of racial ideology and seek to eliminate any of these remaining effects. The effects are numerous. At the professional and collegiate levels, there are differences between the way that power is distributed. Managers and coaches are almost always white, even in sports where the players are largely African-American. Ethnicity also can contribute to similar outcomes the number of foreign-born coaches in MLB, the NHL and NBA is almost nil, even as percentages of foreign-born players are steadily increasing. In addition, people are still affected at the youth level as well, as opportunities in sports and recreational are not evenly distributed. There needs to be increasing awareness of how the lingering effects of racial ideology still affect people today.

Consequently, in regards to the Canadian context, the reader may be asking, how can sport help Aboriginal youth given the dismal past of Aboriginal sport policy? As such, at this juncture, the numerous challenges Aboriginal youth face must be discussed in order to properly contextualize how sport participation can be tremendously helpful for Aboriginal communities. Accordingly, despite only encompassing 3.8% of the total Canadian populace, health and social issues are disproportionately prominent within Aboriginal communities (Ning & Wilson, 2012). Consequently, these particular challenges will be examined through the following variables: physical health, mental health, and criminal justice.

Social discrimination among athletes has been a major issue for decades, which has impacted the growth of professional athletes, all around the world. This paper will further shed emphasis on these issues and also how race and social class influence who becomes a professional athlete.

Racism and discrimination have been used as powerful weapons encouraging fear or hatred of others. Racism occurs much more than we like to admit. In sports, racism is happening more often and becoming a much bigger problem. Most agree that sports are a reflection of society. What this means is that sports often act as a small-scale version of society and thus, racial problems in sports have been, and continue to be, brushed away as nothing unique. It takes outrageous conduct for the reality of racism in sports to come to the forefront. When comparing a minority athlete to a non-minority athlete, we can see they both are victims of discrimination because of their race. However, the type of discrimination is very different, and the effects are very different. To a lot of people, the sports world is a place in which none of the normal problems of the “real” world could possibly exist. Racism has had an impact on student athletes of all ages and race, in both their personal life and outside their personal life. The racism that some American minority and non-minority student athletes face has long-running effects on the athletes’ education and career opportunities. The racial issues in sports can be addressed better when exposed and talked about.

Sports as an industry is quickly evolving into a grand, formless entity with many avenues, opportunities for scholar-practitioners, and segments that have prolonged the business of sports like never before. But, not quite in the racial area of the sports world, whether it is in the media or through personal experiences, Racism has always been a part of history, but today, it seems as if theirs have been modestly an acceptance of racism. As the industry expands a growing blend between the worlds of sports and entertainment has also formed, linking the two together, and bringing entertainment to the forefront in sports in terms of sponsorships, marketing, athlete representation, team ownership and sports law have effected. Professional American athletes should be against prejudice and racism in sports because it created prejudice and unequal right for speech and protest while amplifying prejudice in professional sports leagues such as the NBA and NFL.

In the article “Why sports history is American history” by Mark Naison, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, adapted by Newsela staff, the main idea is discrimination in sports history, and the advancements of minorities in sports (topic sentence). In paragraph 3, it says “In the first half of the 1900s, Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans were often looked on with suspicion. ”(Quote 1) This means that in America, people were already not treated fairly (explain 1). In paragraph 9, Mark wrote “During the first half of the 20th century, they were barred from participating in most professional sports.”

Native Americans are labelled as the “righteous warriors” but also as savages. This duality, in some part leads to a lack of support from many Americans for their culture and way of life. As many Native American tribes receive their funding and schooling from the government, this presents a problem. In their article, "Race, Power, and Representation in Contemporary American Sport”, authors Charles Fruehling Springwood and C. Richard King discuss the tradition in sports of making the Native American the “halftime spectacle”. Contrastingly author Yuko Kawai, in his article “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model

Just as baseball had both a cyclical and chronological history, the history of racial inequality in sports did as well. The chronological history of racial inequality in sports involved a slow progression from minorities being viewed as racially inferior to minorities being viewed as equals and in some cases even superior in some sports. The cyclical history of racial inequality involves processes of segregating and disbarring minorities to integrating teams and then back to inequality in opportunities for minorities in sports. This generational history shows the challenges that minorities faced repeatedly by challenging cultural norms throughout time. Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and many other minority athletes acted as political activists as well as athletes from the Civil War to World War II. The athletic prowess of these political activists allowed them to defy longstanding attitudes of racial inferiority and manliness in the United States. They fought against the attitudes of physical, moral, emotional, and intellectual inferiority by using their success, fame, and power in the media.

Introduction: Sport has often been viewed as an agent linked to the constructive development of individuals and as a mechanism that can foster positive social change within communities. As such, this paper intends to examine the recent expansion of sport for development (SFD) programs within Canadian Aboriginal communities by exploring the historical and concurrent structure of Aboriginal sport initiatives within Canada. Given this, the most pervasively used definition of SFD came in 2003, from the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Sport for Development and Peace, which recognized it as, “all forms of physical activity that contribute to physical fitness, mental well-being and social interaction, such as play, recreation, organized or competitive sport, and indigenous sports and games” (UN, 2003, pp. 5). In Canada, the Canadian Sport Policy, exemplified the institutionalization of this paradigm and formalized the perceived value of SFD initiatives as evidenced by the creation of a strategy specifically intended for Indigenous participation and prioritization in Canadian sport: the Aboriginal Participation Policy (Paraschak, 2012; Te Hiwi, 2014). This policy is significant because it is the primary means of guiding Sport Canada’s efforts as it works with both the Federal and Provincial levels of government to confront systemic inequities, which limit Aboriginal peoples’ participation in sport (Thibault & Harvey, 2013). Moreover, the APP was predicated upon the