Racialised Labour in Intercollegiate/NCAA Sports

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Racial Capitalism, Employment, Organizations

Abstract

Initially student-governed recreational games, intercollegiate sport has since progressed into a major corporate entertainment enterprise centred on American football and basketball, disproportionately representative of Black athletes. Paradoxically, this billion-dollar intercollegiate athletics enterprise is comprised of not-for-profit colleges/universities and governed by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), a not-for-profit organisation. Furthermore, the revenues generated remain concentrated in the NCAA and the athletics departments of the top-performing universities. The NCAA has held firm to the ideology of the “amateur student-athlete,” which they constructed, to legitimise their control over athletes and their financial practices. The structural arrangements constraining and exploiting college athletes are both economically oppressive and historically racialised. As such, a racial capitalism lens will undergird this study’s analysis of intercollegiate sport. Racial capitalism is a system in which the means and relations of production are racialised in order to organise and legitimise exploitation. This study will centre W. E. B. Du Bois’ theoretical perspective on racial and colonial capitalism as a key understanding of global racialised modernity. Furthermore, by applying Du Bois’ critical and reconstructionist analytical lens, this study aims to challenge dominant, controlling conceptions of Black athletes and newly interpret their roles and experiences within intercollegiate sports as a system of racial capitalism. Given the significance of conflict, contestation and control in systems of racial capitalism, this study will comprise a discourse analysis of data derived from online news and social media coverage of social interactions representative of conflict and contestation in select contexts of intercollegiate sports. In this new phase of intercollegiate athletics, i.e. the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) phase, where athletes can newly financially benefit from their labour, clarity on the historical development of commercialisation in intercollegiate sports is important in order to critique and understand ongoing events in this post-NIL phase.

Author

• Sheron L. Mark, University of Louisville