Fighting Spirits: The Racial Politics of Sports Mascots

This article explores the racial politics of sports mascots through a comparative account of the uses of Indianness at Florida State University and the centrality of Confederate symbols at the University of Mississippi. It avoids the temptation of romanticizing resistance as well as easy, if not impulsive, condemnations. Instead, employing a neo-Gramscian and poststructural framework, it seeks to complicate prevailing understandings of sports mascots. It details the contours of imperial Whiteness and the competing efforts to reformulate Euro-American identity emergent in its wake. At the same time, it theorizes the awkward alliances often forged between subalterns and institutions with racially charged sports mascots.