Evidenced by a robust recognition of the substantial groundwork laid by the formative and mainstream critical perspectives on racism in America, Bonilla-Silva contends that the study of racism should be taken from a vantage point offering deep understandings of historically specific racism operating and reproduced within racialized social systems.
1. Racial phenomena are normalized artifacts of society’s racial structure where by racism is embedded in the structural organization and structural operations of a society;
2. Racism exercises a dimension of psychology, but it is acutely organized around a materially consequential reality;
3. The nature of racism changes over time as a byproduct of racial contestation in a racialized social system;
4. Racism possess a character of judicious rationality where by racial actors demonstrate various forms of support and resistance of racial order to the benefit of their self-interests;
5. The framework of racialization allows analyses of all racial actors to explain overt, covert and normative racial behaviors;
6. Racism and racial phenomena reproductions, although socio-historically contextualized, are historically distinct of a complex contemporary foundation, not simply in reference to a remnant of the past (Bonilla-Silva, 2001, pp. 25–36).
These pillars of a racialized social systems theory are not intended to exhaustively explain racial phenomena across American society. But, rather, analyses drawn from this theoretical framework are intended to rouse deep, nuanced considerations of how race shapes contemporarily founded social systems structurally normalized by racism.
Looking back on the intellectual heritage of critical thought regarding race and racism is a necessary step toward conceiving remedies of racism in the present and of its transformation in the future. While not an exhaustive review, this review of racial theory illuminates a sequence of thought that has led to a framework of racialized social systems theory. This theory, in concert with several conceptual lenses that I will discuss momentarily, purposefully sets the stage of this book to pursue a critical discussion of the dynamic nature of the racialized social systems that envelope black athletes in the present. The various ways in which we have comprehended race and racism have greatly influenced the ways of thinking about how racial phenomena have situated and shaped the realities of black athletes. In parallel of the intellectual journey of critical race theories emerging from the post-civil rights movement era, sport scholars with particular interests in black athletes have utilized certain racial frameworks to develop understandings of the plights, conditions, and realities experienced by this subset population.
The Exemplar
Our fascinations and imaginations of race relations, as a society, is indivisibly entwined with the historic materialization and continuous recreations of the black athlete. As far back as the nineteenth century and a part of each generation of society since, the black athlete has played a principal role is the ways in which we have comprehended racial phenomena and the continuum of laborious efforts toward racial progress. The strivings of black athletes of the twentieth century provided a focal point for the amalgamation of hope, critical analysis of the conditions that constrained a generation’s possibilities, and a consciousness to disrupt and transform ideologies, policies, and practices that sustained inequity. So, without question, America throughout the twentieth century to the present, in all its ideological posturing, institutional arrangements, policies and practices, has and continues to be often animated by an intimate, yet dynamic relationship with the black athlete.
Sport is widely viewed as the exemplar societal institution, even figuratively approaching a sacred space in the American consciousness, as a model for racial harmony. This perception, nearly cemented into mainstream beliefs, is fueled by vast acceptances of sport as an enduring institution of society championing racial integration and furthering variable degrees of racial progress for which we experience today in contrast to an era pre-Civil Rights Act and certainly a time prior to the historic Brown vs. Board decision. As the nation journeyed into a post-civil rights era, the late 1960s ushered in a tactical shift in social activism and analyses of race relations. The growth of critical racial frames astutely interrogating the acclaimed accomplishments of the civil rights movement transpired in parallel and mutually unexclusive to grassroots social activism that contested a predominate narrative purporting sport culture as an emblematic institution of racial harmony. In concert with outpours of grassroots social activism happening all across society from lunch counters to the church pulpit, protests of racial inequities emerged front and center of the public eye on the podium of sport culture, both literally and figuratively. In this context, the most iconic image of a stance of resistance seen in sport was the silent, gloved fist protest atop the medals podium in Mexico City by Tommie Smith and John Carlos. This period of social activism by black athletes has been coined as the unprecedented “revolt of the black athlete” by sports sociologist Harry Edwards (Edwards, 1969).
The 1968 Mexico City protest by Smith and Carlos, as profound and meaningfully jolting as a moment for social justice could possibly be, was but only one of several efforts to contest the pervasiveness of the racial ideology, racial oppression, and gross inequality entrenched in an American post-civil rights era. The year of 1968 marked the “year of awakening,” as described by sports historian David Wiggins, which encompassed a gamut of events that collectively challenged the social, cultural, and political norms and mores of society. From Muhammad Ali’s widely publicized political battles with the U.S. government and the governing bodies of boxing—to the crowd of boos drowning the Detroit Tiger’s baseball stadium after a blue’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner performed by José Feliciano, a blind Puerto Rican guitarist—to challenging the long-standing free agency clause in major league baseball—to the dozens of university campus protests by black athletes, the arena of sport was rife with determinations of social activism (Wiggins, 1988).
The fertility of social activism leveraging the social and political platforms of sport culture in this early period of post-civil rights was matched with mounting critiques that extended scholarly attentions to develop intimate understandings of racial phenomena and injustices. The body of critical scholarship, such as the seminal work of Harry Edwards, aimed to confront and critique fervent narratives asserting that sport occurs in a vacuum untouched by the cultural forces of society or void of an ability to meaningfully influence the interwoven and surrounding cultural climate of society (e.g. Edwards, 1969). Since this time, a growing body of sport scholars, from across disciplines of sociology, education, cultural studies, history, management, and psychology, have advanced nuanced understandings of the relationships between sport culture, the breadth and depth of racial phenomena and the consequences of black participation in sport. The extent of research and literature on black athlete involvement in sport has fiercely debunked the social myth, albeit deeply embedded belief within society, that sport is an unequivocal level playing field for all and unscathed by the fluidity of the past and present political climate. Despite the litany of evidence to demystify the superficially superordinate positive characteristics of sport concerning race relations, these imaginations of sport continue to prevail in the perversions of a mainstream social imaginary.
Anguishes Far Subtler, Yet Far More Complicated
The racial typography of American sport culture in the twenty-first century, particularly evident among