Race, Sport and Politics

Written by one of the leading international authorities on the sociology of race and sport, this is the first book to address sport''s role in ''the making of race'', the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary multicultural societies.

Race, Sport and Politics shows how, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ''the natural black athlete'' was invented in order to make sense of and curtail the political impact and cultural achievements of black sportswomen and men. More recently, ''the black athlete'' as sign has become a highly commodified object within contemporary hyper-commercialized sports-media culture thus limiting the transformative potential of critically conscious black athleticism to re-imagine what it means to be both black and human in the twenty-first century.

Race, Sport