Sports biographies of African American football players: the racism of colorblindness in children’s literature

Abstract

This is an exploratory study of racism in a genre of children’s literature that has been largely overlooked by research and teaching in multicultural children’s literature: sports biographies and, in particular, the biographies of African American professional football players. By examining the race bias of this genre of children’s literature, the study addressed the question: How is race represented in the biographies of African American professional football players in texts written for elementary school‐aged children? Critical race theory was used to inform the analysis of data, particularly as it relates to the relationship between the practice of race colorblindness and property as well as its promotion of storytelling by people of color as the central method of representing their biographies, for literary, cultural and legal purposes. After a textual analysis of eight popular biographies, the study found that these children’s books tend to reflect the racism of colorblindness, in which the cultural and racial experience of African American football players is dismissed and ignored. Except for several brief references to the problems faced by black quarterbacks, there is no language or explicit reference to race in the texts examined, no mention of racism, no reference to African American history or traditions, no historiography of the players’ families, and no reference to racism and the struggles of African Americans who live in the United States. Finally, non‐standard forms of African American language are ‘whited out’ of the texts. The study ends with a proposal for a new genre for this type of book: biographies of African American athletes as well as all non‐white people written from a culturally conscious perspective.

Keywords:

• children’s literature
• racism
• elementary education
• sports biography