National Belonging under the Friday Night Lights: Informal Citizenship Practices in the Student Section

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education in formal and non-formal contexts

Proposal

In the United States, long heralded as the land of immigrants, conceptions of ‘who belongs as a citizen’ are deliberated in academic literature and popular media alike. Evident in the rhetoric surrounding the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election, the rise of populist nationalism has again exposed this debate. Refugees and immigrants, notably those who practice Islam, are historically and contemporarily framed as the unassimilable “strangers at the door” of rapidly changing Western nation-states (Bauman, 2016). As Schuck (1998) stresses, American legal, political, and social practices affirm immigrants and refugees often “remain strangers ... objects of our vigilance, our suspicion, and perhaps even our hostility” (p. 19). Simultaneously, as Russell Hochschild (2017) wrote in her recent study of ‘Tea Party,’ and probable ‘Trump voters,’ many rural, white, blue-collar, Americans feel like “strangers in their own land” and seek to protect their traditional American values envisioned to be under attack.

According to some theorists, rural areas are celebrated as a fundamental expression of the authentic and original intention of the nation (Holston, 1999). These two stereotypical “sets of strangers” occasionally live in the same Midwestern rural communities, resulting in more blatant confrontations regarding the authentic conception of belonging. For example, in longstanding Republican-voting, homogenous, rural Midwestern communities, many Somali and Latino refugee and immigrant families have settled to work in manufacturing and processing plants. This project transpired in a town marked by a series of violent incidents, warranting a 2009 Civil Rights Division investigation into the racial harassment and disproportionate discipline of Somali-American students in the high school (Statement of Jocelyn Samuels Senior Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General Civil Rights Division, 2011). This case reached a settlement in 2011. However, with the continuous change of local demographics in this community, across the nation, and globally, it is important to analyze how youth in these rural communities may contribute to, reflect, resist, and perpetuate narratives of exclusion reflected in recent political rhetoric.

Hall (2004) argues for continued attention to the ways in which “citizen rights and responsibilities are invoked, structural inequalities challenged, and cultural identifications created” (p. 110) in public spaces. Historically, American football and other team sports have been purported as a means of assimilation into American society and an acceptable channel of social mobility for discriminated communities (Foley, 1990). Football has been found to foster hyper-aggression, competition, and the “win-at-all costs” attitude that are culturally valued characteristics of “masculine American identity” in the young, normally male, participants (Messner, 1996). The impact on the sport on the individual athlete is significant and well documented, but as Foley (1990) stresses football games are foremost a community ritual– a family reunion, religious-like gathering, and display of school spirit – rolled into a few hours under the Friday night lights.

Shirazi (2018), in his study of transnational youth in American high schools, stresses that recognition is a “gatekeeping mechanism of sociopolitical belonging” (p. 3). Building of Glenn’s (2011) work, Shirazi focuses on the discourses and positioning in classrooms of who is recognized as an ‘American.’ The discourses of recognition constitute dynamics of fixed difference that continuously exclude the “they” or “other” from conceptions of belonging. Similarly, football games are a space where differences between the community seemingly roll aside in broader support of “the boys,” yet examining who is “recognized as belonging” determine the normative boundaries of belonging in the community. The questions driving this project stem from this often-overlooked rural, Midwestern small-town football context. 1) Who is recognized as belonging in this space? 2) Are patterns of gendered, racialized, or ethnic divisions apparent in the high school American football games?

Drawing on two themes derived from a season-long ethnographic inquiry focused on the normalized and seemingly mundane acts in the bleachers of the “student section” of the football games, this research stresses conceptions of belonging and practices of citizenship are not static, but contradictorily produced and contested through everyday social processes.

First, the primarily white student section was seemingly out-of-bounds for the Somali youth in attendance at these games, as was integration with the majority white crowd that expressed great familiarity with each other. The Somali students’ actions, even though they were similar to the other students, were not recognized as normal in that space and instead described as weird by several community “gatekeepers” of recognition. This echoes Abu El Haj’s (2007) explanation that citizenship “is increasingly connected to civil, social, cultural, and political rights that afford people the possibility of participating effectively in society” (p. 296). Focusing on the everyday politics of recognition and mis-recognition at a football game reveals who belongs in the community and who does not.

Secondly, despite the physical separation of students of color, the white ‘leaders’ of the student section accentuated the desire for a more positive and inclusive environment through acts of policing the cheers of the student section. One white student in particular proclaimed that “racist and sexist jokes were unwelcome in the student section” on several occurrences. Jaffe-Walter’s 2016 ethnographic study argues how ‘liberal’ ‘inclusive’ school policies reproduce the exclusion of the “other” (Muslim youth). Similarly, a blanket policy of “no racist or sexist jokes,” ignores everyday interactions among students and may continue to marginalize those they seek to include.

This project concludes high school American football games are an informal educational space where youth – along with members of the grander rural community – come together to negotiate who is recognized as belonging to the community and the nation at large. Focusing on informal spaces of citizenship formation in an ignored, small-town American context challenges the
urban, metro-centric focus of prior youth citizenship within the context of globalization. At a time where tense debates around the conceptions of citizenship and “who counts” as an American abound nationally and locally, awareness of these youths’ experiences open up possibilities of critique and imagination of a more inclusive and dynamic future for these individuals, these rural, small-town communities, and the nation at large.

Author

• Heidi Fahning, University of Minnesota