More than a Game: Embodied Everyday Anti-Racism among Young Filipino-Australian Street Ballers

Abstract

This paper explores marginalisation experienced in mainstream basketball by young Filipino-Australian men from Sydney's western suburbs. Sharing findings from a larger ethnographic study undertaken with Filipino immigrants in Sydney on experiences of everyday racism and resistance, this paper uses a biographical account to examine intricate connections between lives and racialising social processes. In sporting contexts, the body and its comportment provide the sites for domination and resistance. The analysis applies Bourdieu's concept of habitus to examine how broad racial formations are embodied in mainstream basketball. Furthermore, this paper examines the ways in which the playing style of ‘street ball’ is used to engage with corporeality as a mode of everyday anti-racism.

Keywords:

• Racism
• Anti-racism
• Sport
• Habitus
• Filipino Migrants

Her research explores migration and multiculturalism, anti-racism, and race and ethnicity in everyday life,

Her research explores migration and multiculturalism, anti-racism, and race and ethnicity in everyday life,

Notes

[1] My examination of Filipino-Australian basketball is part of a larger project studying the Filipino community in Sydney. The research was funded by a Macquarie Research Excellence Scholarship between 2007 and 2012 at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. It was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee in 2008. Focusing on life history narratives, 45 in-depth interviews totalling approximately 135 hours were carried out with Filipino migrants living across metropolitan Sydney. Many of these interviews continued as email and phone exchanges over the course of four years. This method was also supported by ethnographic observation at community events and places where Filipinos frequent for work and leisure, providing the opportunity for countless informal conversations. I also analysed online Filipino-Australian community forums and print media.

[2] Specific names of places and respondents have been changed.

[3] Whilst issues discussed here speak to broader concerns experienced by Filipino-Australian men, my analysis is particular to young Filipino street ballers. I acknowledge that other concerns among Asian immigrant men exist such as those experienced by older migrant men. See Hibbins (2003, 2005). I also interviewed young Filipinos who do not participate in basketball and distance themselves from hyper-masculine stereotypes of Filipino men that emerge from the context explored in this paper. While outside of this paper's scope of the analysis, such alternative experiences are also important to investigate.

[4] See Knowles (1999), Velayutham and Wise (2005) and Wise and Velayutham (2008) for their use of auto/biographical accounts in examining broader social processes.

[5] Boxing is also popular in the Philippines (Espana-Maram 2006). Especially since the overwhelming success of international boxer Manny Pacquiao over the last decade, it closely matches the national status of basketball.

[6] The increased participation of young African-Australians in grass roots basketball is the topic of my current research. The active recruitment of these young men to development leagues, local and abroad, shows signs of the racialisation of black athletic prowess studied in the Australian context among Indigenous Australians (Coram 2007; McNeill 2008; Hallinan and Judd 2009) and in the USA with African-American males (Louis 2005; Brooks 2009) and in UK among and Afro-Caribbean men (Back et al. 1998; Johal 2001; Carrington 2010).

[7] The term ‘Asian’ is a complex term (Lo 2006). It can encompass a range of groups depending on the application of geographical, cultural, historical and linguistic definitions in different societies. In official Australian classifications, this generally includes North-East Asia, South-East Asia and South Asia. However, in everyday Australian discourse, South Asia is generally excluded in everyday understandings of ‘Asian’.

[8] Filipino diaspora studies are predominated by the experience of Filipina migrants, attributed to the feminisation of international migration that is significantly comprised of Filipina women. For work on Filipina-Australians see Cuneen and Stubbs (2003) and on Filipina migrants elsewhere see Parrenas (2001) and Pratt (1996).

[9] During Bon's youth, Blacktown did not have a representative team due to financial limitations. Today, it has developed junior representative teams and there is positive development at these levels in terms of Filipino talent.

[10] Despite rewarding black men in sport ‘black swagger’ continues to be problematised in professional sporting realms and ordinary black males remain socially and politically powerless (Louis 2005; Wang 2012).

[11] For Filipino tribal tattooing traditions, see Salvador-Amores (2002).

[12] Textbook players are also ‘creative’ and use these same sensory judgements. However, for street ballers, the body and mind is primarily tooled around improvisation from which ‘knowledge’ about ‘what the moment calls for’ is developed and constantly harnessed.