Doug Hartmann 3/2/00
The Politics of Race and Sport

Hartmann, Douglas. 1996. "The Politics of Race and Sport: Resistance and Domination in the
1968 African American Olympic Protest Movement." Ethnic and Racial Studies
19(3):548-566.


Theory. This project is a historical study of the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement. Following the theoretical traditions of Gramsci and Hall, the author stresses the importance of ideologies, identities and cultural images as sites of struggle over social issues. He maintains the view that culturally-oriented movements expose the ways in which domination itself is deeply structured in and through culture, and argues that work involving identity, culture and popular culture is crucial to the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world.

Design. The study was designed with a two-fold purpose: first, to reconstruct the history of the protest movement and how it unfolded; and second, to trace white, mainstream media's response to it. The author did not conduct interviews or build on oral histories. Rather he researched materials found in libraries and sports archives.

Measurement. The sample essentially comprised the entire universe of what had been written about the protest movement: everything related to sport, track and field, and racial protest was read for the period under investigation. Data were collected from newspaper accounts, sports journals, track and field records, as well as the minutes of the United States Olympic Committee, NCAA, and other sports organizations.

Data Analysis. The project was interpretive; its conclusions were drawn from an analysis of qualitative rather than statistical data. Of the many arguments used for and against an Olympic boycott by African American athletes, the author tried to evaluate which ones were used the most regularly.

Interpretation. The author concludes that cultural forums and identity politics have become primary sites of the struggle for hegemony in the United States. More specifically, he makes the argument that sport plays a complicated and contradictory role in contemporary American culture.

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