Scholarly critiques argue sport reproduces rather than overcomes racial inequalities

Evidence

In stark contrast to this sport-as-positive-racial force ideology stand a plethora of empirically grounded scholarly criticisms of the racial form and function of sport. Inspired by athletic activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the primary objective and accomplishment of these works has been to demonstrate that racial inequalities and injustices are not so much challenged and overcome in and through sport as they are reproduced and reinforced there. The dominant motif is captured succinctly in the subtitle of one recent (if highly controversial) contribution to the field: “How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race” (Hoberman, 1997). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2763

Categorization

• XREF: The counter-thesis to the 91-percent-poll commonsense directly parallels the ‘trees as infrastructure’ article’s move of showing how celebrated progress narratives conceal extraction — and connects to how ‘complaints about immodesty’ shows moral panics cut both ways.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the full evidence base for this sports-critical literature — what mechanisms actually reproduce inequality in sport beyond pay gaps and limited off-field opportunities?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2763