Playing without Power: Black Male NCAA Student‐Athletes Living with Structural Racism

Abstract

AbstractBlack male football players are stigmatized as being aggressive and violent in news media and on campus. The violent behavior of Black athletes is often explained as a result of masculinity “gone awry.” This article examines NCAA Black male athletes’ experiences with structural violence on a university campus in order to complicate this trope. Through ethnographic research with student‐athletes, it offers insights into how Black men experience and respond to daily encounters with racism in a predominantly White university. I show how Black male student‐athletes harbor significant anger, frustration, and sadness where they are aware of their treatment as bodies and not people. This can be seen in how they are expected to meet high standards of physical performance while being marginalized in the university, including lack of access to proper sleep and nutrition, contingent funding, and precarious student status. In addition, these athletes are paraded around the university as specimens of Black prowess, which also impacts their self‐esteem and feelings of power. I argue that we must understand Black male student‐athletes’ behavior through their lived experiences within the structural violence of the university setting. Violent behaviors can thus be read through the context of desires to exert power in relation to their daily lived experiences with racism and structural violence in college sports.