White Power and Sport: An Introduction

Discusses the undercurrent of white power found in everyday American professional sports by way of multiple ideologies and a transcendence of traditional racist methodologies to undermine non-white athletes. Shows how these methods and mind-sets come in 3 separate forms, persistent, resurgent, and veiled. The methods, though often more subtle and reworked from older, more overt tactics, begin with traditional methods of harassment via hate mail threatening castration, brutalization, and death. This becomes more subtle in surveying attitudes such as anti-Barry Bonds sentiments in light of no criticism for Mark McGwire, a white player also believed to utilize steroids. More subtle methods of non-white hatred erupt via codified language, often borrowed from mainstream -even liberal jargon, rabid open rejection of racist motives, and a refocus from race to that of cultural and differences. A shift in operational procedures is given, namely, the heightened use of the Internet for communicative and organizational purposes, while the causation of such continual, systematic racism is given as the perceived marginalization of young white boys who perceive non-white athletes as a distinct threat to the status quo. S. Fullmer