Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- One / Introduction: At the Intersection of Sports, Race, and Risk -- Two / The Midnight Innovation -- Three / An Unlikely and Revealing Consensus -- Four / A Commercial for Neoliberal Social Policy -- Five / Breakdown and Fallout: The Symbolic Politics of the 1994 Crime Bill -- Six / Remodeling Sport-Based Prevention -- Seven / Prevention in Practice: A Field Study (with Darren Wheelock) -- Eight / They Got Game: Lessons and Reflections from the Bottom Up -- Nine / Conclusion: In the Light of Midnight -- Methodological Appendix: The Notion of an Emergent Case Study -- Notes -- References -- Index.

Midnight basketball may not have been invented in Chicago, but the City of Big Shoulders--home of Michael Jordan and the Bulls--is where it first came to national prominence. And it's also where Douglas Hartmann first began to think seriously about the audacious notion that organizing young men to run around in the wee hours of the night--all trying to throw a leather ball through a metal hoop--could constitute meaningful social policy. Organized in the 1980s and '90s by dozens of American cities, late-night basketball leagues were designed for social intervention, risk reduction, and crime prevention targeted at African American youth and young men. In Midnight Basketball, Hartmann traces the history of the program and the policy transformations of the period, while exploring the racial ideologies, cultural tensions, and institutional realities that shaped the entire field of sports-based social policy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book also brings to life the actual, on-the-ground practices of midnight basketball programs and the young men that the programs intended to serve. In the process, Midnight Basketball offers a more grounded and nuanced understanding of the intricate ways sports, race, and risk intersect and interact in urban America.

Unforgettable fists -- Agents of challenge -- Of civil rights, culture fights, and abstract ideals -- Movement mobilizing -- Power plays : trials, triumphs, and polarization -- Only just begun -- Resolving the racial crisis -- The cultural politics of sport and race in the postprotest era -- Epilogue : Atlanta, 1996

This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself.

This article offers an interpretative case study of the controversy that surrounded Rush Limbaugh's comments about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb near the beginning of the 2003 National Football League season. Informed by critical race theory, the analysis argues that Limbaugh's remarks were a textbook example of how the rhetoric of Whiteness operates to assert the cultural normativity of the dominant group and legitimate its privilege. That sport leaders and commentators roundly rejected Limbaugh's comments and pushed for his removal gives the impression that the sporting establishment was unusually progressive and enlightened on these issues. However, closer reading and basic content analysis suggests that the ideas mobilized to put Limbaugh in his place—specifically those involving the supposed sanctity and colorblindness of sport—were in many ways complicit with Limbaugh's own White supremacy. Consideration of the market forces that allowed Limbaugh's hiring implicates sport even further. Lessons for Whiteness theory, White supremacy, and the relationships between them are discussed.