White privilege in Canadian high school sport: investigating white coaches’ perspectives on social justice issues

ABSTRACT

Sport constitutes an important setting in which to study whiteness given ongoing issues related to power, privilege, and oppression. The purpose of the study was to examine white privilege in Canadian high school sport by investigating white coaches’ perspectives on social justice issues. A total of 463 high school coaches who self-identified as white completed an online survey. Results showed how coaches who had a greater awareness of white privilege in society had more favourable attitudes towards social justice, higher importance attributed to climate change issues, greater awareness of prejudicial attitudes against the LGBT community, and a higher propensity to engage in antiracist behaviours. Moderating effects for gender identity were also found. Moving forward, white privilege should continue to be studied in coaching to better understand how it is entangled with social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• critical consciousness
• antiracism
• climate change
• gender

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Scott Rathwell for his valuable advice during data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data is available under reasonable and justifiable request.

Ethics

Ethical approval received from the University of Ottawa’s Office of Research Ethics and Integrity, file number H-06-21-6938.

Notes

1. Consistent with guidelines from Laws (2020), white is not capitalised but Black is when referring to race/ethnicity.

2. Data were collected for the larger project with white coaches and coaches of colour. For the present study, only data from white coaches were retained; however, data from coaches of colour are used in another study.

3. We removed this participant due to insufficient sample size for the analyses and have outlined this as a social justice concern and limitation of the present study in the discussion.

4. Although terms such as equity-denied or equity-seeking are commonly used in social justice literature, we have opted to use equity-deserving, which includes (but is not limited to) Black, Indigenous, People of Colour; women; people with disabilities; LGBTQI2S+ people; people from low-resourced communities (Gurgis et al., 2022b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Partnership Development Grant (890-2020-0002) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to Martin Camiré, in partnership with School Sport Canada.