Segregated Schooling and the Distribution of Interscholastic Team Performance in 14 Sports

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Neighborhood Experiences and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

How does school racial composition relate to the performance of school interscholastic sports teams? To answer this question, I use two theories: systemic racism and theories of race and exploitation. Data on interscholastic sports performance was scraped from MaxPreps.com, Swimcloud.org, and athletic.net and linked to federal datasets on schools and communities. Findings show that more “white” schools are “double privileged” because they outperform nonwhites schools in 12 of the 14 sports due to race and class. More “black” schools are described as “bifurcated” because they do well in a few sports and quite poorly in many others. More “Latine” schools are described as “only one” because that is the number of sports they perform better than more “nonLatine” schools. More “Indigenous” schools are also bifurcated, but not as dramatically. More “Asian” schools are described as “hidden discrimination” because they perform poorly in most sports after their social class privileges are controlled. The results are consistent with systemic racism but not theories of exploitation.

Author

• Pat Rubio Goldsmith, Texas A&M University-College Station