Abstract
Michael Butterworth’s lead article in the August-October special issue of Communication & Sport raised important insights about unity within sport. This reply argues that those insights were encumbered by a blind spot: Where Butterworth critiqued examples of unity that minimized the agonistic spirit of sport, he gave free pass to calls for unity on behalf of social justice. My reply works through examples of dissent from protests that marked the sporting landscape following the murder of George Floyd. Specifically, I consider the case of Rachel Hill, an attacker for the Chicago Red Stars of the Women’s National Soccer League, who elected to stand during the national anthem while her entire team kneeled in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Hill’s “tinted dissent” poses difficult questions for Butterworth’s theorizing about the merits of rivalry and sporting agonism: Thinking beyond the national anthem, how might Hill’s decision to stand, and the backlash she endured, reveal a troubling totalizing logic within calls for social justice? Can our scholarship make space for dispositions that strive to understand, and not solely critique, the strange dynamics of power that pervade sport? How should instances of dissenting athlete-activism be judged?
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