Racism and Stereotypes

Arianne Hickman 05/05/11 ESS 320 Racism & Stereotypes “Sport provides a particularly public display of relations of dominance and subordination....The point of sport is to display publicly the processes of challenge and struggle between two sides alleged to begin in equal terms but determined to produce and sustain relations of dominance vis-à-vis one another. Moreover, sport as a meritocracy based on skill quietly reaffirms our national common sense; individuals who work hard and possess the right stuff will always prevail. Turned on its head, this lesson becomes even more insidious: those who are at the top must have risen to the top through fair means and thus deserve their position. In contrast, those not at the top do not possess the requisite talent for such privilege. Even the runner-up is a loser”(Wulfemeyer & Rada, 2005). Sport provides an objective measure to evaluate the performance of a player and/or a team. There are countless statistics for athletes in every sport, which are evaluated on a daily basis. Statistics show how well an athlete performs and how good of an player they truly are. As an athlete, talent is all that should matter and be looked at when making a judgment of whether they are good or not, unfortunately this does not always hold true today. Stereotyping, racism, sexism and all those negative aspects of life, which were thought to have diminished over the years, are still prominent and portrayed through the media to this day. Stereotyping is the process of imposing characteristics on people based on their perceived group membership (Harrison, 2001). Based on stereotypical beliefs, we make social assumptions and make judgments on our knowledge of the perceived traits of those that fit into social categories. Viewing groups in terms of stereotypes is the brain 's way of filling in missing information about individuals we know little about by superimposing

References: Armstrong L., Ketra (2011). ‘Lifting the Veils and Illuminating the Shadows’: Furthering the Explorations of Race and Ethnicity in Sport Management Griffin, Pat (1992). Changing the Game: Homophobia, Sexism, and Lesbians in Sport. QUEST 4, 251-265 Harrison Jr, Louis (2001) Rose, J. Debra, Christina, W. Robert (2006). A multilevel Approach to the Study of Motor Control and Learning (2nd ed) Wulfemeyer K. Tim, Rada A. James (2005). Color Coded: Racial Descriptors in Television Coverage of Intercollegiate Sports