Sport’s racial power is amplified precisely because its racial dynamics go unrecognized

Evidence

That so many sport discussions and debates are not consciously recognized as having broader societal causes, connections, and consequences only, in my view, accentuates sport’s racial power and importance further still. Sport, to redeploy Ralph Ellison’s classic depiction of the African American, is at once an invisible and hypervisible racial terrain. Finally there are the obvious parallels between dominant liberal democratic ideals (and their optimistic, color-blind vision of racial harmony and justice) and sport’s own culture of fairness and meritocracy. All of this is simply to insist that the interesting and important question is not whether sport is a significant racial force but what kind of a racial force is sport? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2753

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ellison’s Invisible Man and the ‘invisible and hypervisible’ paradox of racialized visibility — resonates with Du Boisian double consciousness themes in racial theory.
• SEED: Article angle: how the unexamined ‘color-blind’ ideology of sport’s meritocracy masks its reproduction of racial hierarchy — the double move of invisibility and hypervisibility.