'Race' and Sport: Critical Race Theory

Abstract

Our capabilities in sport are often described in physical or psychological terms, ‘natural’ di erences. ! ese ‘gifts’ are often identified as the di erence between those who are likely to succeed in a given sport and those who are not. ! is discourse of superiority and inferiority in sport is not dissimilar to other debates in wider society which revolve around genetics and intelligence, and ultimately underpin imperialist ideologies (Goldberg 1993, Essed and Goldberg 2002, Omi and Winant 2002). !is a popular perception in sport that our genes and to a degree our cultural background dictate the prowess of an individual sportsman or woman. !of advantage and of course disadvantage in sport is invariably reduced to ‘harmless’ racial di erences, a deduction that suggests, however, a more sinister undercurrent: ‘race’ logic (Coakley 2001), racial discourse (Goldberg 1993), racial formations (Omi and Winant 1994), raciology (Gilroy 2000) and racialisation (Murji and Solomos 2005). In this reading I consider some key concepts for the analysis of ‘race’ and sport and later outline fi ve key tenets of Critical Race !(CRT) as an important framework to critically consider issues related to ‘race’, racism and sport. CRT is presented as a starting point for developing a critical ‘race’ consciousness and defended as a useful political standpoint for racial transformations in sport. For Armstrong and Ng (2005: 35) ‘race is the social construction, but the act and e ect of this construction (racialisation) have produced actual divisions between people’. In hard populist terms what ‘race’ often boils down to is physical di erences, and in particular physiognomy. Whereas many believe that they can tell the di erence between people born in continents and countries across the world, the ability to distinguish