Race and other issues surrounding professional sports are the topic of a conference Oct. 28-30.
Racism and Sports: A Global View
Conference addresses race and other issues surrounding professional sports
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
DURHAM, N.C. -- The 1968 Olympics black power salute, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos held their fists high in protest, is an iconic image that marked a defining, and polarizing, moment in sports on a global stage. Harry Edwards, one of the organizers of the salute, and a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, comes to Duke this month for an Oct. 28-30 conference to discuss race and other issues surrounding professional sports.
New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, the author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and a mix of other journalists, academics and current coaches and athletes will also participate in the “Race, Sport and Power” conference, addressing recruitment, economics and other issues related to how players become professional athletes.
“The panelists will discuss the economics of sport, social inequality, how football players are recruited in Africa and the exploitative practices around the role of Africa as a supplier of players,” says Laurent Dubois, a Duke romance studies and history professor who helped organize the event.
“There is a common theme of race and racism woven through professional sports at the international level,” says Dubois, who cites Europe’s practice of luring African and South American players with big salaries as one example of sports reflecting larger patterns of global inequality.
Dubois is teaching “World Cup and World Politics” this semester and has organized a series of films about the politics surrounding the soccer industry (see “The Soccer Project” (see embedded video) also visit soccerpolitics.com). He says these discussions are important in light of the long-standing struggle that led to the announcement that the World Cup will be held in Africa for the first time next year.
Conference co-organizer William “Sandy” Darity, an economics and public policy professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, says the topic of race and sports is rich with questions related to race, athleticism and stereotypes.
“The underlying belief is that there may be some kind of genetic and racial edge that black athletes may have. People believe blacks can jump higher because of basketball,” says Darity, who notes that such assumptions can come into question in the face of facts such as the “racial mix of high jumpers and pole vaulters.”
Another controversial issue on the agenda is the use of performance-enhancing drugs in both amateur and professional sports. A Friday morning panel will explore the topic of “doping” with experts Doriane Coleman of Duke Law School, a former elite runner, and John Hoberman of the University of Texas, Austin, author of Testosterone Dreams.
“I’m sure everyone has ideas, but I’m not sure everyone has integrated those ideas. I hope people will engage the panelists and feel comfortable asking uncomfortable questions,” Darity says.
He suggests attendees come with open minds and a willingness to weigh the evidence about the relationship between race and sports across a range of disciplines.
“We are making the connection between research in the arts and humanities and in athletics,” Dubois says, noting that the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, economics and history will all be represented at the conference. “I want to give people a sense of the research that has been done and for them to come away thinking about the situation in the U.S. in a slightly different way. Sport is not just a form of leisure and recreation; it is a major social force.”
For more information and to register for the conference, visit: thenetwork.ssri.duke.edu/newsevents.php.
