Ben Carrington

SPORT, MASCULINITY, AND BLACK CULTURAL RESISTANCE:

This article develops an account of the meanings associated with sport in relation to Black masculinity, and the use of sport as a form of cultural resistance to White racism. The absences within sociology of sport theorizing in relation to race are shown before examining the historical and contemporary significance of sport within racialized societies. Drawing on participant observation and semistructured interviews, an account is given of how a Black cricket club in the north of England is used by Black men as both a form of resistance to White racism and a symbolic marker of the local Black community. Three themes are traced in this regard, namely the construction of Black sports institutions as Black spaces, the use of Black sports clubs as symbolic markers of community identity, and the role of cricket as an arena of both symbolic and real racial and masculine contestation.

Introduction: sport matters

On Saturday October 15 2011 Liverpool Football Club played Manchester United Football Club at Liverpool’s home ground, Anfield. England’s two most successful football (soccer) teams played out a closely fought 1-1 draw but the result of the game would be overshadowed by a series of verbal exchanges between two players. By the end of the year the incident and the reaction to it would come to dominate not just the sports press but Britain’s wider news media. During the second half of the game, the Manchester United defender Patrick Evra got into an altercation with Liverpool’s star striker Luis Suárez. Both during and immediately after the game Evra informed the referee that he had been racially abused by Suárez. The body that oversees professional football in England, the Football Association (FA), launched an investigation whilst Liverpool FC announced it believed Suárez was innocent of the charges and would stand by their player. A month later on November 16 2011 the FA formally charged Suárez with using abusive and insulting words and/or behaviour that included reference to Evra’s ethnic origin, colour and/or race. As a result an independent three-person Regulatory Commission was established that met from December 14 through December 2

Cricket, Culture and Identity: an Ethnographic Analysis of the Significance of Sport within Black Communities

As a number of commentators have noted (for example see Hargreaves, 1986; Williams, 1994) little is known about the social significance and meanings associated with sport within black communities in Britain, and sport’s role in the construction of black identities. The critical study of aspects of sport and ‘race’ has been neglected as the subject-matter has fallen between a number of disciplines; the sociology of sport has yet to develop a critical theorization of ‘race’; mainstream sociology, and even cultural studies, have tended to overlook sport as a cultural practice; and black cultural studies, whilst significantly advancing our understandings of many aspects of black popular culture, have also suffered from a form of cultural amnesia when it has come to the question of sport.1 Similarly, the recent ‘explosion’ (Hall, 1996a) of studies and research on aspects of cultural identity, and the related concerns with questions of hybridity, ‘difference’ and multiculturalism, within sociology and particularly within cultural studies, has tended to remain at a frustratingly theoretical and abstract level with too few grounded empirical studies. This chapter attempts, therefore, to redress some of these concerns by providing an account, based on ethnographic research, of a how a black men’s cricket club in the north of England is used as a symbolic marker in the construction of cultural identities.

Assessing the sociology of sport: On race and diaspora

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on the intersection of race and sport, Ben Carrington, reflects on the field as a whole and the notion of “diaspora” in understanding race and sport. In considering the trajectory of the sociology of sport, questions are raised about whether a coherent field has ever existed. Noting relative failures in getting “mainstream sociology” to take sport seriously, the challenges ahead are for a field that is necessarily a “multifaceted” entity, and one that ironically has never been more impactful while at its weakest institutional moment. Noting the paradox between the relative little consideration given to sport in the main sociology journals in the US and UK in contrast with the sociology of sport having successfully established self-reproducing and self-referencing spaces of critical enquiry, a key challenge for the field continues to be in its search for a “scholarly place;” it is less than clear whether the banner of “the sociology of sport” continues to resonate in the face of the neo-liberal assaults on critical scholarship within higher education. The concept of “diaspora,” surprisingly ignored in the study of sport, will be increasingly important in the future as it will enable critical race scholars to problematize the often Eurocentric and teleological underpinning of globalization theory in relation to sport; considerations of diaspora will fuel more meaningful accounts of how sport reconnects geographically dispersed groups and changes identities and subjectivities in hostile circumstances.

The Shifting Landscape of Sports Media with Dave Zirin

Sport sociologist Ben Carrington talks with the “edge of sports” reporter about nearly a decade of changing coverage.