Taking a Knee, Making a Stand: Social Justice, Trump America, and the Politics of Sport

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the role of sport protest under the current United States presidential administration. Protest has long been a feature of sporting rituals; social unrest in this realm is not new. However, at this moment, activism in sport allows us to see larger political alliances, affinities, and solidarities in a particularly useful way. I argue that the world of sport is fostering discussion, debate, and dissent that are uncommon and largely unavailable in other spaces, which, in turn, is opening up a new counterpublic. I offer two examples of challenges athletes have made to anti-Black racism, class inequality, and sexism, with one highly visible, and one less visible. And I contend that these actions are refusals that both draw on and differ from the iconic sporting refusal of the 1960s Civil Rights era–the image of the Black athlete standing alone on the victory stand–by highlighting the role of symbolic action in prompting democratic deliberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport protest
• Trump America
• racism
• gender inequality
• class stratification

Notes

1. In ‘The Critical Sociology of Race and Sport: The First Fifty Years,’ Ben Carrington argues that sport often provides an occasion to discuss topics not engaged in other areas of social life, such as racism. He writes, “In short, sport engenders national conversations about race, discrimination, opportunity, and identity that would otherwise not take place, and as such, understanding the sports-race-society nexus is of increasing importance to sociologists and other social scientists.”

2. For an excellent discussion of the relationship of counterpublics to the public sphere, see Francis Cody’s ‘Publics and Politics’ in the Annual Review of Anthropology (2011), 40, 37–52.

3. Writings on the Black athlete in the United States reach back to plantation slavery. Frederick Douglass famously lamented that ‘ball playing, wrestling, boxing, running foot races, dancing, and drinking whiskey,” helped slave owners maintain domination by pacifying captives and preventing revolutionary action. However, Douglass kept a picture of boxer Peter Jackson in his study, and according to James Weldon Johnson, Douglass once suggested that Jackson’s athletic victories helped collective struggles against racism.

4. The Palace Brawl refers to a 2004 Pacers-Pistons game in which player Ron Artest was charged with a flagrant foul, fought with players of the opposite team, and retreated to rest on the scorer’s table before being assaulted by Detroit fans and catapulting back into the stands to physically reengage the dispute.

5. Many people familiar with the NFL and its inner workings had never heard of such a manual.