What’s Left? … In the Politics of Sport?

• In Event: Left of Sports

Abstract

This paper addresses three main questions related to progressivism in and around American sports: (1) What constitutes left-leaning activism and progressive politics in sport? (2) What happened to the protest and activism in American sport of the past decade? (Or, more pointedly: where has this activism gone, or why has it gone away?) (3) What are the prospects for future activism and radical politics in and through sport in the current socio-historical context?

These reflections will be based upon research and analysis from my forthcoming book “Ballers and Backlash: Twelve Years of Activism, Populism, and Politics in American Sports.”

The paper begins with a discussion of the origins and aims of the race-based athletic activist movement of the last decade (roughly, 2012–20). Highlighted elements include the unprecedented size, scope, and longevity of the activism, its origins in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the innovative uses of sport as a platform for protest and political expression. The second section then looks at the impacts and consequences of this activism.

This analysis of outcomes insists that most of the accomplishments of racial resistance in and through sport were not material—they did not force institutional reforms—but cultural, communicative, and symbolic. In particular, I argue that, as part of the larger BLM movement, athletic activism brought renewed public attention to the struggle for racial justice and equity in the United States, and also helped reshape the public framing of and political discourse by focusing on the criminal justice system and introducing new, more structurally-oriented concepts such anti-Blackness, privilege, and systemic racism. I also discuss how institutions and leaders across the athletic establishment, including the myriad corporations of the sports/media complex, responded to this activism with a mix of caution and cooptation that mirrored Omi and Winant’s classic notion of rearticulation. Most significantly, however, I focus on the populist criticism and reactionary backlash that emerged in opposition to race-based athletic activism. Here, I document the extent to which this backlash has morphed into a counter-movement of its own, a movement—exemplified most clearly in the efforts to restrict access to interscholastic sport for transgender youth—that has been the most significant political force in American sport since 2020.

The third and concluding section will consider the prospects for left-leaning, progressive activism and radical politics in and through American sports in the current era explicitly. Here I will focus on the social, political, cultural, context within which sport and the politics of sport are constituted and operationalized. This context is defined both by what is happening in American sport (the rise of conservative social movements using sport as a platform and the uncertain responses of the athletic establishment, both US sports authorities and international entities, to these shifts) as well the broader, non-sport political context of polarization and the reactionary ethnocentrism and authoritarianism of the second Trump administration.

Author

• Doug Hartmann, University of Minnesota