Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Trump, Colin Kaepernick and the Super Bowl: Scholar David Leonard on white privilege in sports

Author of "Playing While White" on the lose-lose dynamic of black athletes, white blowback and political activism

Published February 3, 2019 7:30PM (EST)

Sports are not neutral. They are a political battlefield. This is especially true along the color line in America. These moments can consist of singular events: Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists in defiance against American injustice at the 1968 Olympics, Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali mastering the sweet science of boxing and delivering devastating blows against Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy and its assumptions about the mental, intellectual and physical inferiority of black people.

Black women are central to this story as well. Althea Gibson was the first black woman to break the color barrier in professional tennis. Decades later Venus and Serena Williams are trailblazing pioneers for their skill and dominance in women’s professional tennis.

More recently, of course, there is former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes (along with a few white ones) who have taken a knee during the national anthem to protest oppression and social injustice in post civil rights America.

There has been blowback, of course: Donald Trump won a presidential election (if only by a fluke) and remains remarkably popular among Republican and other white right-wing voters. At least in part, this reflects his strategy of condemning and threatening black athletes who dare to stand up for the value of black lives.

The politics of sports are also revealed in systemic and institutional ways. In American professional sports the vast majority of teams are owned by rich, older white men. Black and brown bodies perform on the sports field, sacrificing their mental and physical health as the raw fuel for corporate and collegiate sports franchises worth millions if not billions of dollars. Girls and women do not have the same access to sports — and the profits and privileges and opportunities that come with them — as boys and men.

Professional sports teams receive enormous subsidies and protections from local communities and taxpayers, while many of those same communities are struggling to provide basic services. The U.S. military uses the NFL and other sports as a tool for recruiting young people into its ranks. The jet and helicopter flyovers, the American flags and the frequent appearance of uniformed troops on the field are a superficial form of patriotism whose primary function is to legitimate nationalism and militarism.

Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams will be a spectacular display of the many ways that sports are political, and not an ideologically neutral or safe space.

How and why has Donald Trump targeted black athletes in his “culture war” strategy? Why has Colin Kaepernick become so despised by many white sports fans (and some black and brown ones as well)? How do black athletes — and the public response to them — represent America’s long and problematic history along the color line? How does white privilege operate in how athletes such as Tim Tebow and Tom Brady are perceived and treated? Are black athletes held to a higher and more difficult standard of civic responsibility?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with David Leonard, a professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University. He is the author of several books on race and politics in sports, including........

© Salon