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The Problem Of Racism Is Not Specifically An American Problem

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Racism in Sports
Luke Hampton
Truman State University
7/31/2016

The problem of racism is not specifically an American problem, though Americans have made it into an important political and social issue as they have tried to find a way to eliminate racism from their society. Racism occurs whenever there is a dominant racial group that uses its position to discriminate against a minority racial group on the basis of racial characteristics. Traditionally, discrimination has been seen as a creature of prejudice, and until the late 1960s the dominant perspective among social science analysts of discrimination was that prejudice and intolerance were the causes of discriminatory actions. Other observers have focused on individual racists and have seen the problem as the individual motivated by hatred of a given "outgroup." Still others consider the issue in terms of patterns of segregation and community practices (Feagin and Feagin, 1986, 1). Certain areas of American life are seen as transcending racism, and sports has been one of these. While it is true that the admission of blacks to the ranks of college and professional sports was slow in coming, it is also clear from an examination of college and professional teams today that blacks and whites coexist and work together on teams in nearly every sport. Yet, a closer examination shows that racism has not been eliminated from the sports world any more than it has from American life in general, and racist attitudes and

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