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.