Sports Pages #13

Sport can have a large influence on the culture of African Americans. Some African Americans come to rely on their athletic talents to get them an education. Black players can get into feeder and private schools they might not otherwise, due entirely to social and economic factors, have the opportunity to attend. For instance, I went to a private college prep high school in the suburbs of Chicago and there were a number of black student-athletes who took the bus from the inner city every day. They were probably recruited for their athletic talent and economic need.

The Blind Side is a movie which, to some extent, accurately portrays the experience many black professional athletes endure in their road to stardom. Many black players come from disadvantaged backgrounds, having little opportunity and less money. But it can just take one scout, just like in Hoop Dreams, to believe in a players talent and give them an opportunity to shine. But not all players are perfectly built for their position and enjoy good health and make it all the way. Hoop Dreams shows this reality--that injuries and family issues can and often do throw a wrench in a players hopes and dreams, and despite their hardest effort and insurmountable motivation they can't make it big.

While sport has allowed many African Americans to enjoy prosperity and recognition, it is likely that for the rest of black Americans, the 99.99995%, sport only furthers stereotypes and preserves the myth of race as biologically and significantly different. The prevalence of blacks in some sports and whites in other sports contributes the the false idea that there is some biological difference in athletic ability and intelligence, which is not entirely true (while genetics determines race, there is no single "race gene") This leads to people thinking that there is some inherent difference between races--that some should be valued for certain traits more than others, when the truth is that traits are largely randomly distributed among all races.

"You Throw Like a Girl": Sports, (Wo)men & the Gender Order

In a commercial for Adidas sportswear, Derrick Rose is shown battling with Spanish bullfighters in a foreign looking arena. Basketball in hand, he charges the fighters' red capes as if he's a bull but instead of aggressively trying to gore the matadors, he puts on the moves and jukes them. After he makes the last matador look silly, he speeds towards a conveniently placed basketball net and dunks the ball in slow-mo fashion. Cheers erupt and flowers are thrown.

 

 The first gendered aspect I noticed about this advertisement is that Derrick Rose is being directly compared to an animal. Bulls are very strong and very large, they can be very aggressive and intimidating, and they can easily maim another human being. Those traits, therefore, are valued today in sport as being preferable to other types of strength such as discipline, intelligence or sensitivity.

This comparison of a player to a bull, in this commercial, only takes into account what we perceive to be the traits associated with bulls that we also like to see in players. We like to see toughness, grit and resistance to pain. But there are other aspects of bulls that we wouldn't want to associate with players, and this ad tries to keep those traits from coming to mind. For instance, we fatten bulls to slaughter them so they're tasty. The difference between this ad and real bullfighting is that the bull is killed for the entertainment of the audience at the end. Am I to assume Derrick Rose is to be maimed following his epic dunk?

Another way this commercial is gendered is through the roles males and females play. There are no women in the ring, on the field. The picadors on horseback and the matadors with their capes are all white men (there's a racialized aspect, too, in that they're versus a black man). It's not until a shot is shown of the crowd jumping on their feet that a woman is shown. And it doesn't even show her face. All we see is her shoulder and breast and some hair as she jumps up and roses fill the air.

This commercial reinforces gendered stereotypes and roles through its depiction of Rose as a bull and of women as only spectators. Although the content of the ad itself doesn't explicitly state this, one can analyze these messages from looking more closely at the roles of all involved and at thinking about what isn't shown and what's not on screen.