Positive celebratory images can reinforce racism through essentialized biological grounding

Evidence

What is complicated about this final point is that it runs counter to many of our usual social and sociological assumptions about racism and prejudice. We tend to think of these phenomena negatively, in terms of beliefs and behaviors that exclude and privilege one racial group over another. Yet the images of African Americans in sport appear to be quite positive, even flattering and celebratory. The crucial point for critical sport scholars, however, is that what seems to be positive about these images tends to be exaggerated and one-dimensional, thus stripping African-American athletes of agency and working to reinforce imagined racial traits and characteristics. One of the most familiar strains of this argument focuses on the inherent physicality of sporting practices. The claim here, articulated most recently and controversially in John Hoberman’s Darwin’s Athletes (1997), is that because of sport’s de facto association with bodies, and the mind/body dualisms at the core of Western culture, the athletic success of African American athletes serves to reinforce racist stereotypes by grounding them in essentialized, biological terms where athletic prowess is believed to be inversely associated with intellectual and/or moral depravity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2771

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s existing thread on how positive/celebratory representation can itself be a mechanism of control — echoes the ‘flattering but flattening’ logic from other racial studies reading.
• CANDY: The inversion that celebratory positive images can reinforce rather than undermine racism is a striking elevator-conversation provocation.