Sport and the Construction of Racial Identities and Racial Formations

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Abstract

Sport is a proactive institution in its promotion of racial identities and racial formations. Black and White bodies are differentiated with, through, and by sport. Drawing on the theory of gender performativity, I suggest that race is similarly performative—constituted by day-in and day-out participation in racialized discourses and events. Sport is a series of such events, filled with explicitly racialized moments, as well as mundane “natural” gestures that go unnoticed and unnamed as racial, but which nonetheless contribute to racialization. These events, best understood within Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, reinforce the normative Black and White body typology, both internal and external. Additionally, I draw on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of racial formation to suggest sport spatially separates races—Black sport and White sport—and constructs a material boundary which underscores the a priori sense that Blacks and Whites are ontologically different.

Author

• Kurt Polkey, University of North Florida