Darwin's Athletes: Problematizing Race in Sports

Last week, the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (yes, competitive poetry) was hosted at CU Boulder: Students from all around the country came to represent their schools by throwing down some absolutely gut-wrenchingly beautiful works of art. A majority of the students represented were African American, and one of my teammates on our (all white) team exclaimed, "I don't think there has ever been so much non-athletic racial diversity on CU's campus." While this is perhaps not the most articulate sentiment, it certainly holds some ground. People often joke that when they see an African American student on campus, the first things they wonder is what sport said student plays. Especially in Boulder, there's a certain assumption surrounding the African American population and their participation in sports.
As evidenced in the movie Hoop Dreams, many African American youths view a career in professional athletics as their main path to social mobility, though it's very likely that the actual number of African American students who view sports as their proverbial "passport from the projects" is hugely skewed by US media and the stories that sell.

The Blind Side poster art

In Hollywood, it's easy to guess the premise of a sports film as soon as your eyes land on the poster art: a brooding, handsome AThe Blind Side, the true story of Michael Oher, a homeless African American boy who is adopted into the loving, middle class caucasian arms of Sandra Bullock's character, the proverbial white person as savior. It's interesting to see how problematized the role of race is in Hollywood with regards to film in general: When casting directors are looking for someone to play their down-and-out African American protagonist, they often go with newcomers to the film scene and juxtapose their character with a big ticket celebrity (In the case of The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock and Lily Collins).
frican American man is often superimposed over the horizon, and the expression in his eyes illustrates immediately that he is poised for status as legend. The most obvious contemporary example of this overt racialized sports film is

Stories like The Blind Side get copious amounts of attention because everyone loves an underdog narrative, and really, who's more of an underdog than an impoverished African American with inexplicably fine-tuned athletic abilities. Of course, this is also a problem, because it propagates the idea of racial superiority when it comes to certain races and their participation in certain sports. Stereotypes about race (including but certainly not limited to participation in certain athletics) only serve to maintain the already obvious cycle of preconceived notions. The impacts of these notions shouldn't be written off as quickly as they are: After all, Hollywood is raking in cash based on cultural assumptions and appreciations about racialized sporting narratives.

Sports, (Wo)Men, and the Gender Order

The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) recently released an advertising campaign declaring that "Strong is Beautiful," which sounds like a progressive movement at first-- after all, it's a campaign devoted to recognizing that the women who compete in tennis at a professional level (as well as women in athletics in general-- strong women) are beautiful in a way that is rooted in their trained strength. But somehow, instead of encouraging women to get active and competitive regardless of, for example, how they look, these ads are further problematizing the role of female athletes.

"Strong is Beautiful" is a great sentiment, but the fact of the matter is that as long as the term "beautiful" is being used in advertising for women's athletics, no real progress is being made. Instead of focusing on the athletic abilities of these women, it's focusing on their physicality, as though this advertisement is making it okay for a woman to be multifaceted, like before this ad revolutionized women's athletics, strong and beautiful existed in binary opposition and it was impossible for a woman to be both. 

Model Athlete? Or Model, Athlete?
(Tyra Banks would be so proud of that smize)

Then there's the ad itself: Petra Kvlotva is swinging a tennis racquet, but in a pose that looks more like a ballerina than a professional tennis player. Her hair is curled to perfection, down and flowing, her face is perhaps more pallid and serene than the Virgin Mary, and that dress. Petra Kvlotva is pictured-- strength and beauty personified-- in a flowing red high-low number that belongs in an episode of America's Next Top Model over an advertisement that teaches girls and women that they can be pretty and athletic. The background of the ad fades from purple to orange, bathing Kvlotva in a flattering sunsetty glow. She is the very picture of beauty, looking more like a Greek Goddess awkwardly holding a tennis racquet than an athlete awkwardly forced to take a swing in an outfit that's even impractical by tennis standards. 

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In stark juxtaposition to this photo, the ATP World Tour advertisement shows three tennis greats, all men, swinging their racquets, muscles tensed, faces barred into expressions of concentration and intensity. The caption on their photo isn't an encouraging sentiment about how being strong can also be pretty, it's two words, pure and simple, all caps: BEAT THIS. The advertisement exudes athleticism--

look at their muscles, look at their workout clothes, look at the action lines superimposed over the picture so the viewer can see exactly where their swing came from, the full range of motion. They don't have to justify themselves in sport by being pretty, because they're not supposed to.

Men in sports are intense, focused, determined. Women are all of those things, too, it's just covered up by lip gloss and curled hair, plastered to sunsetty backgrounds of ads that oversexualize athleticism. The contrast between these two blatantly gendered advertisements not only propagates gendered stereotypes  within the sporting realm, but also in general. Women are culturally expected to be delicate, fragile, graceful and beautiful, whereas hegemonic masculinity mandates that men be strong and rugged and determined. If these ads don't epitomize gender in sports, I don't know what does.