Race and ethics: Importance in Sports

Introduction

Opinions about and attitudes towards the constructs of race and ethnicity in contemporary Western society are not only influenced by institutions such as those of academic institutions, politics, education, family or paid labor, but also by the sports. Popular forms of sports culture, varying from news broadcasts and talk shows to soap operas and music videos, can be highly influential in structuring ideas about race and ethnicity. Entman contended that the sports 'call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements' (1993: 55). The sports create dominant interpretations of reality that appeal to a desired or anticipated audience. According to Hall (1995, 1997), the sports are not only a powerful source of dominant ideas about race and ethnicity, but should also be considered as sites of constantly shifting meanings and struggles over meaning. This is evident in the way that the sports celebrate successful African-Americans like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, while also confirming and reinforcing racist stereotypes. This stereotypical and one-dimensional framing of racial and ethnic groups by the media is not confined to the US context. Ter Wal et al., in an analysis of the representation of ethnicity in European Union (EU) and

Race and ethics: Importance in Sports

Because the coverage given to sport reaches so many people at the same time and provides readily accessible ideas about race and ethnicity, research has been conducted to explore the content of the ideas that it presents. In order to capture the meanings given to race and ethnicity in sport, researchers have typically subjected large volumes of sports commentary to verbal content analysis. Sport researchers using such verbal content analyses for the study of race and ethnicity have investigated how, if at all, sports commentary differs across race and ethnicity of athletes. One of the first available sport studies using this method was conducted by Rainville and McCormick in 1977, who hypothesized that the race of the players influenced US sport commentary. Their results indicated that football commentators gave white players more play-related praise and represented them in a more positive light than black players (Alexander, 184).

The classic study by Rainville and McCormick (1977) has been extended and replicated by other researchers using content analyses that focused on racial or ethnic biases in large volumes of sports commentary. The results of these studies have shown that, although overt and easily recognizable racist messages have largely disappeared from sport broadcasts, more covert ethnic and racial biases still occur. The most common stereotypes embedded in such broadcasts are those of the naturally gifted, strong, black male athlete, and the intelligent and hard-working, white male athlete. Such stereotypes are not racially or ethnically neutral since people attach inferior and superior values to them. The positive sports messages describing black men as extremely talented in sports cannot, for example, be considered only as adoration of the black 'other' (Leonard, 2004). They construct a mind-body dualism, in which black male athletes are explicitly associated with ...