Doug Hartmann 3/2/00
The Politics of Race and Sport
Overview
Q: First can you give us a one or two-minute summary of your research, and the main questions?
A: The project is a historical study of the 1968 African-American Olympic protest movement. This is the movement usually most associated with two African-American athletes, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, giving a clenched-fist salute on the victory stand in Mexico City in 1968. And the project really is a case study that focuses on this particular moment because it was the first and still the most significant and only episode in American history where African-American athletes used sport as a form to promote a broader racial agenda.
Research Questions
Q: Before we go on to talk about how you analyzed the data, could you give us a little detail about the events of the protest, what were the main symbols, what were the issues that they said were issues?
A: Well, it started a year before the 1968 games. The idea started as a call for African-American Olympic athletes to boycott the United States Olympic team that would go to Mexico City. It was first proposed a year before the games, in the fall of 1967, when Tommy Smith and his teammate Lee Evans, who were athletes at San Jose State College, who were also students in sociology professor named Harry Edwards, his class on race relations. And after that class they kind of had a different understanding of the problems of race relations and saw that they had a potential, because of their prominence as athletes, to use their involvement in sport to kind of call wider attention to the problems of race relations. So they proposed the boycott in the fall of 1967. Immediately, even though it was just the two of them speaking, it got national attention from the mainstream media and a round of condemnation and protest. They organized a conference then, that took place on Thanksgiving of 1967 of prominent collegiate and Olympic athletes that took place in Los Angeles. Depending on the estimate, somewhere between 60 and 120 people attended. Again another round of media attention to the idea of a boycott, the athletes that were in it voted in fact to take the idea of a boycott and try to make it happen. At that time, it got really intensely debated and contested among the white critics, white journalists who covered it. At the same time, though, they got support from a number of prominent African-American civil rights activists: Louie Lomack, a nationally syndicated columnist, Martin Luther King, Jr., on the kind of moderate civil rights side, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and the more radical black power edge of the movement. But they all came out in support of the boycott idea. Then what unfolded was less a coherent movement about a boycott than a whole series of protests on different college campuses around the country, which were some related to the Olympic boycott, others which weren't, which were more about the inequalities and injustices and racism that athletes felt like they were experiencing in the world of sport. And this is important. Because one of the things that is really interesting is that Smith and Evans and their teammates proposed the idea of the boycott not because they had a concern about racial inequality in sport, they didn't speak to that at all, in fact they were quite careful to make it clear that their boycott idea wasn't about inequality in sport, it was rather about inequality in the society as a whole, and they merely used their involvement in sport to convey that message. But what happened in the process of the movement was a lot of athletes who weren't Olympic prospects, but were athletes around the country at colleges and universities mainly, they came to start to criticize the sports world itself for having residual, perpetual inequalities that still were in place. So you get a lot of athletes start to come into the movement, but they have a much different agenda, an agenda of taking on the racist coaches, the racist recruiting practices, practices where athletes would be allowed to play only particular positions, or encouraged to play only particular positions on teams. So really you had almost two separate movements that took place at the same time. One was the movement by high caliber Olympic athletes to use their involvement in sports to call attention to racial injustices in the society as a whole. The other was a movement by the more large masses of athletes to protest against sport itself for having residual racial inequalities. What's interesting is that the mainstream media never really picks up on this tension, and they kind of conflate those two movements which kind of empowers both. It both makes the world of sport seem particularly vulnerable to charges of racial inequality and it also calls a lot more attention to the way that sport can be a site for contesting racial inequalities more broadly. That's what happens in the year before; the boycott itself eventually falls apart. It turns out that most athletes weren't willing to boycott the games; they wanted to go to the Olympics and compete. And what happens then, right before the games, is that the athletes that do qualify for the team and do go to Mexico City decide to adopt a more symbolic route, which is to say they decide to come up with ways to use their participation in the games symbolically, just to call attention to the problems of racial injustice. So some athletes decide to wear black hats, or black socks, others wear different kinds of African garb while they're at the Olympics. Smith and Carlos, in the end, come up with the dramatic victory stance salute, but that was something that almost happened on the spur of the moment, came out of this commitment to using their involvement in the games to symbolically call attention to their issues. But it wasn't a planned thing, it was part of the larger decision not to boycott but to do what we could at the games to call attention to racial injustice in the U.S.
Q: Immediately after their dramatic stand, what did they say the issues were?
A: The main statements that both of them made were about racial inequality in the United States. Neither one of them said much about racial inequality in sport; it was more about what was wrong in the U.S. with respect to race relations. They were clear, though, they didn't want to be portrayed, especially Smith who made the more prominent statements, as a radical. They didn't have any specific political agenda in the sense of they didn't have policies that they were advocating, they didn't in fact, even though they used the clenched-fists they were careful not to describe it as a black power salute. All they did was they said is they wanted to call attention to the situation, the problems, of African-Americans in the United States.
Q: But didn't they mention apartheid too?
A: Not specifically. Not in their initial comments. In fact they were quite a bit more positive. They talked about the pride in black America, the unity of black Americans, and the poverty and inequality the black Americans continued to face. That's especially Smith. Now Carlos may have used the notion, the term of "apartheid," he tended to use stronger terms. But he wasn't as prominent a spokesman for the protest. He hadn't been involved for as long as Smith and Smith was much more kind of central because he was the first one to speak and he spoke to Howard Cosell on national television. So his words were in many ways the defining ones. And he wasn't, he was very careful to not be too radical in his statements. What's interesting though is that the way that the media interpreted that, and the white commentators. And actually it wasn't just the white media but it was also a lot of the black journalists who really saw the victory demonstration itself and all their statements were interpreted in quite radical, extremist ways.
Q: Let me ask one more question about the two protesters. What happened to the protesters after this event?
A: They returned to the United States. Actually I should back up a second. Within two days after the protest, they had their Visas and their Olympic identity cards revoked. So they had to return to the United States. They couldn't stay in Olympic village; they couldn't stay out of the country. So they were forced to come back to the states and it was an action taken on the part of the United States Olympic committee under pressure from the International Olympic committee which threatened to—I don't think they would've followed through on the threat—but threatened to remove the entire American team if action wasn't taken against these two athletes. So they were strongly censured, but a lot of people have said that they had their medals taken from them. That was not the case. They kept their medals but they were stripped of any ability to participate in the Olympics any time thereafter, and to my knowledge that ban still remains in effect today. They've never been brought back into the Olympic fold. So they came back to the United States. When they got back, they were treated as heroes really, in a lot of black communities. So they received warm receptions at black colleges in other kind of venues. They had big crowds that were kind of supportive of them on college campuses. But that was quite dramatically not the case in mainstream culture. They were treated quite harshly in the media, branded as extremists, radicals, the language that was used to describe them was much worse even than a lot of the Black Power, Black Panther radicals. It was the same exact language that these were guys who were not patriotic, who threatened the fabric of American society, that wanted to tear down everything that was good about the United States. So this is the legacy that they really experienced. They had a very difficult time getting jobs in the years after that. It was kind of a burden that they carried for many years, which is why they're so reluctant to talk about it even today. Both of them feel like they've suffered a lot because of that, that treatment, and even though now Americans tend to celebrate their protest and see it as a real example of civil rights heroism, there's still a legacy of real, very real inequalities and discriminatory acts that they faced when they came back to the states.
Q: What theory or theories drove your interest in this case study, and what were the major design decisions that you made to implement the case study?
A: Well, it started actually the history project, this project has a long and winding road that goes back to when I was an undergraduate history major and I was interested in issues of race and the Civil Rights movement and interested in sport. And I saw this image on television of these two athletes, and I thought this is a place where those interests came together. So a lot of the design was just kind of choosing this particular episode and this moment. The project—though I always thought sociologically about these things—the project then came to be about explaining how this protest grew out of the late phases of the Civil Rights movement, especially as athletes got frustrated with the limitations of individualist, kind of meritocratic visions of civil rights and wanted to do, attack more structural inequalities, that this was really the inspiration for using sport as a means to call attention to racial inequalities. So I was trying to explain that and then use their experience and the way that they were treated as a way to see the limitations in American culture of making racial changes. And if there's a theoretical framework, or theory behind that, it probably has a lot to do, I usually think of myself kind of in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci and then through Stuart Hall where you were really looking at the importance of ideologies and identities and cultural images as a site of struggle around all different kinds of social issues, but especially issues of race.
Q: Did you consider any other events to focus on for your research?
A: Early on I was really interested in the integration in major league baseball with Jackie Robinson, other figures like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis; a kind of earlier generation of African-American athletes who have long been celebrated as kind of breaking down racial barriers in sport. But that story's been told a lot, and I really came to focus on '68 because it was the first moment when African-American athletes really broke from the Jackie Robinson, Jessie Owens and Joe Lewis model of just being good athletes, and being good athletes was a step of racial progress. The athletes in 1968 were fully established athletes, they made it in the mainstream of American athletics, in International athletics, and what they realized for the first time was that athletic success alone was no longer in itself a contribution to the African-American movement for justice. In fact, what they really recognized was that not only was it not progress but that their success was starting in some ways to almost legitimate or at least hide the inequalities that a lot of other black Americans continued to face. So it really drew me to '68. This was a moment; a real kind of epochal moment, a seminal moment, a watershed moment where something really had changed in the way that African-American athletes understood their relationship to sport, and their role in the larger movement for racial progress.
Q: I assume that you weren't there in person at the 1968 Olympics…
A: Right! I was one year old!
Design Sampling
Q: …So what documents did you use, how did you decide which documents to use, did you use everything or did you sample?
A: My initial idea was to go and do basically oral histories and do interviews with the main actors, and to reconstruct the history of the event. That failed quite miserably quite quickly because these athletes are very controversial figures and they are very prominent so that at the time that I was doing my research some of them hadn't spoken for 20 years about the issue and they refused—they wouldn't talk to me or anybody else about it. Since then they've talked, but when they've talked it's only been to places like HBO and Sports Illustrated where they've gotten paid tons of money. So the initial idea to do oral histories, to reconstruct the movement completely fell apart within the first few phone calls that I made. So what I did was I turned, the sampling strategy, was to use, was to go to the archives, go to newspaper accounts, sports journals, track and field records, and to try to reconstruct the history of this event through those documents. So I spent a lot of time in libraries, in sports archives, kind of second-hand collecting documents that spoke to the incidents in 1968. And I found a lot about that because it was such a tumultuous moment in the sporting world at the time, that there was a lot of conversations and discussions among sports figures, both publicly and in their own printed materials and then also in the minutes of their meetings, the minutes of the United States Olympics Committee, the NCAA, other sports organizations talked about what was going on quite extensively. So that's what I used to reconstruct the history of that event and how it unfolded. The other part of that though is that I also came to be interested not just in how the movement unfolded, not just about the events that produced the protests, but also in white, mainstream media's response to these events. So there I actually did develop what I think was a fairly systematic sampling strategy in terms of looking at particular newspapers, particular media sources as indicators of what the public response to these athletes' protests were all about. Specifically, I did full searches and complete readings of a set of newspapers: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune, which were all major national newspapers which also gave a lot of coverage to international and Olympic sporting events. So I did full samples, I read the entire documents for anything related to sport, track and field, and racial protest for about a year and a half of the period. I also sampled then several other newspaper sources: The San Jose Spartan, which was the student newspaper of the college that Smith and Carlos attended, which had a lot of, which continued to cover their exploits from the year before, and the San Jose Mercury, which was the regional newspaper in the area that they were living which gave a pretty good coverage of them as well. So that was just again to get details on the one hand, but then also to really focus in on how the mainstream media, typical Americans were understanding what these athletes were up to. The one other part of that then was that I made as comprehensive of a sampling as I could about all the national magazine articles that spoke in any way to the racial protests in sport. So I have pretty exhaustive searches, whether it was Newsweek, US News, Time, other sources like The Nation, or more conservative journals. Anywhere this was mentioned, I collected hundreds of documents anytime there was a mention.
Measurement & Data Collection
Q: And reading these documents, how did you deal with the problem of reliability and validity?
A: Well, in terms of the national magazine articles, I tried to make it as comprehensive a sample as possible, it almost became where I didn't consider it a sample, I considered it the whole universe of what had been said about this, so then what I did was I really went through and categorized: what are the main themes, main arguments they're used for or against to boycott, how often do these themes appear, how many times are particular arguments offered, so I did kind of rough counts of those kinds of things. Though a lot of the analysis is not statistical or numerical at all. What I really did was try to figure out how the different arguments that you saw, and there were about four or five main strands of arguments that I could find that were offered against the protest, against the idea of using sport as a form for racial protest. I then tried to figure out how those fit together, so it was more of an interpretive project, to see the ways that arguments would be linked together, the ways that single journalists or single critics would use particular arguments in clusters. And that's really what I was interested in, not just what the arguments were but how they fit together, to kind of work as a collective argument to oppose the idea of using sport for racial protest.
Q: Did you try to evaluate whether some of these arguments were more accurate?
A: I tried to evaluate which ones were used more regularly, and some of them clearly were used more regularly, the idea that sport isn't a place for protest, is one that was very familiar, that a lot of journalists used, that sport's not political, so we shouldn't protest there. That was probably the most obvious, the most typical one. But what I tried to do was look underneath of that, and see what was the logic or the cultural assumptions that allowed that article, that argument, to be so popular. And one of the things that was really interesting to me was what counted for protest. Because if you think about it, what Jesse Owens and Joe Lewis did in their athletic exploits was a certain kind of protest, it was a certain kind of using sport to call attention to the inaccuracy of racial stereotypes. But that didn't get defined as protest. I then got really interested in how you would define what protest was. But that wasn't something that they usually talked about very much. It was more you had to really kind of read between the lines of the documents and be able to interpret the meanings behind the overt arguments that were used.
Q: So you didn't have a problem, where the reporters, the writers, were saying different things about the facts of the event? It was just a difference in interpretation?
A: No, that's right. It wasn't a lot of factual ambiguities. And the main reason is because the protest itself was really kind of ironically a media event. There actually wasn't a lot of formal sit-ins or actual boycotts. It was more the idea of the protest that got the attention, and once that idea was floated, once that idea was proposed by the athletes, there weren't a whole lot of events that followed from there. So then it was really a discussion even just of the concept. So there wasn't events to be debated. There was a little bit of ambiguity about how many athletes were actually going to participate in these events. And one of the things that I found that was really interesting was that the media actually didn't question that as much as they could have, and it turns out that it was really just a handful of athletes, it was really prominent athletes, Smith and Carlos weren't the only ones, basketball star from UCLA Lew Alcindor who we now recognize as Kareem Abdul-Jabar was another one who came out and supported the boycott. There was only a handful, maybe a dozen, two-dozen athletes who were seriously behind the idea. What was interesting though is that the media didn't do much to question that, the mainstream media. They took the idea of the boycott quite seriously on its own terms, and didn't debate a lot of the details. They were more interested in the general notion.
Data Analysis
Q: What would you say are the most important implications of your findings?
A: The most important, at a theoretical level, when I talk about this, both in the paper and in the things I've written since then, is the way that it complicates our understanding of sports' role in the movement for African-American justice in the United States. Up until 1968, sport was always seen as an unambiguously positive, progressive force for African-Americans. The 1968 moment and movement kind of pushes that ideology to its limits, so that we see the limits of how far African-Americans can use sport, how far they can push sport toward an agenda of racial progress. So what I do then with that is try to make an argument about the complicated and often contradictory role that sport plays in American culture today. Though the ideology that sport is a positive progressive force for race in the United States is one that's still extremely powerful, it's the dominant ideology that most Americans, sports fans or not, have about sports in the United States. And I try to use the 1968 case as a way to make an argument that there are very positive things that sport provides for African-Americans, in terms of being a resource for racial change, even a concrete avenue for mobility for individual African-Americans. But that it's also a kind of contradictory and complicated side, that it in some ways it perpetuates stereotypes of racial difference that go along with the positive things, that the progress that could be pushed in sport came up against real limits in 1968. In my study, what I'm particularly interested in is I try to argue that sport really works for racial advancement, as long as it's a vision of racial advancement that's really an individualist civil rights kind of idea that emphasizes the opportunities that are made available to individual African-Americans. And it starts to get limited, sport does, to the extent that African-American athletes and activists use sport to call attention to structural, collective inequalities. That that's where the metaphor of sport, as a symbol for racial progress begins to break down. Because the metaphor's power is really a power that rests on an individualist, meritocratic kind of vision, about opportunities, but not about structural, collective inequalities.
Q: Can you apply that to the present day? There are still inequalities, from what I understand, in sports, in highly competitive sports. Why is there not a racial protest movement today, and would it be effective if there were?
A: Well, on the first part of that, I think that the general idea that sport is a complicated, which is to say both positive and contradictory site for racial inequalities and identities. I think that really does hold today. So that if you look at the images around star athletes, someone like Michael Jordan, you see a lot of very positive, progressive imagery. But there's an undercurrent of that that continues to reinforce certain stereotypes about African-Americans, stereotypes about what it means to be black. So that's part of I think the way that this directly applies today, is that it is still contradictory, the role that sport plays, both in terms of, again, presenting positive images and a positive force for change, but also that it's not unambiguously good. The question about why there isn't racial protest today is a complicated one, and it's in some ways very surprising to people when I say that well '68 was really the only moment when there was a significant, collective movement among athletes for using sport as a site for protest. And I think that is true, but there are isolated incidents, there are individual athletes who try to make statements about racial inequalities. And what's interesting is to look at their experience and how quick both the institutions of sport and the mainstream media sources are to kind of come down on those individuals, to isolate them and to marginalize them. People like the former Chicago Bull Craig Hodges was one, who when he was playing on the Bulls, tried to say a little bit about racial inequalities in Chicago and suffered really severe consequences because of it. People, more famous athletes, Michael Jordan would be one of them, have some political ideas about these things. But because of their ties to the sporting establishment, their ties to advertisers and commercial institutions have very little space to be able to even express those concerns, much less create a movement around them. It's one of the ironies of looking back to that movement, is how individualist a lot of athletes are, even the athletes in 1968 have very personal reasons for getting involved in the movement, and athletes as a whole haven't had a more kind of collective vision of themselves and of the role that they might play, with respect to larger questions of race and racial injustice in the U.S.
Q: From my introductory sociology textbook, I read the data that the structural constraints on the ability of African-Americans to get the best positions on football and baseball teams in the U.S. is still rather limiting, and yet what you're saying is that the institutions are so strong, the images of the successful athletes so great, that it's impossible for this to change through some kind of protest movement.
A: I wouldn't say it's impossible. But it hasn't happened. I'm not necessarily saying it's unlikely in the future, but I'm trying to explain, I'm trying to think about why it hasn't happened up until now. And so that's what I think about, in terms of the rigidity and the stability of the institutions. I don't say that that means this isn't ever going to happen again, but it does seem unlikely. I think maybe another thing that's important is that despite the patterns of inequality that still remain in sport, one of the important things to remember is that as an institution, the opportunities available to African-Americans are still dramatically greater than in almost any other institution in American life. So even though it might mean that the levels of ownership are really low, problematically low, that there's still opportunities for African-Americans in sport that aren't in other arenas, and so it's kind of this double-edged sword that African-Americans involved in sport face, in that you kind of can't bite the hand that feeds you, especially when that hand is one of the best opportunities, the best avenues, for success that you've got. One of the contradictions, or the other things to keep in mind is that a lot of the athletes that are involved in the sport world come from some of the worst settings, some of the most impoverished backgrounds, and so they really have tremendous mobility and success that has been allowed because of their involvement in sport, so it's difficult for them both personally but also institutionally to be too critical of that. I think the other thing is, that an episode like '68 really is a cautionary tale, because while it's easy to look back at that and see it as this kind of heroic moment where these two athletes stood up and used their prominence as a result of their Olympic participation to call attention to racial inequalities. It wasn't a pretty story after they did that. Smith and Carlos have suffered terrible indignities, terrible inequalities, have suffered that ever since. I can't even think of examples of athletes who stood up and protested and not suffered because of it. Suffered in terms of endorsement opportunities, suffered in terms of what happens to them in their lives after sports.
Interpretation & Dissemination
Q: Who is the audience for your research? I know you published an article in ethnic studies' journal and are publishing a book on this. Who do you see the audience is to be?
A: That's a complicated question. There's an audience of people who study sport and I speak to that audience in terms of the importance of race, in institutions of sport. There's an audience of people who study race and ethnicity, and for them, and especially in the case of the article I published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, it's to argue about the importance of popular cultural forms like sport, for formations of racial inequality and racial identities. That sport is a site that's very important to understand if we're to really understand the significance of race in the United States. And so in a big sense, when this becomes a book project, I try to speak to those two different audiences, audiences about sport and culture, audiences about race at the same time, and to argue that what's really important is to understand the way that race is really a cultural formation in the United States, and the role that sport plays in forming the structures, especially the cultural structures, the ideological structures, that are in place, that make race a meaningful and consequential category in the U.S.
Q: Have you observed any impact from your research yet?
A: Not a lot, you mean impact outside of the academy?
Q: No, not necessarily outside of the academy.
A: Well, I think that inside the scholarly world, in the last decade or so, not so much in sociology but in other disciplines, there has been the emergence of an attention to the relationships between race and culture in the United States; and seeing how race and culture fit together; and seeing the cultural and ideological aspects of racial formations in the United States. And I'm not like a major person in that by any means, but I think that the work that I do is connected with that. Outside of the academics, I don't think there has been a lot. I can say that there was an HBO special that was produced on Smith and Carlos that was called something like "Fists of Freedom." And they didn't cite me or anything like that, but there was newspaper articles that they highlighted in their presentation that I think they must have read the article that I wrote because the only reason, the only place I've ever seen them published, I've never seen anybody call attention to them, is in the stuff that I've written. They're pretty obscure articles, by sports writers in newspapers that you wouldn't sample, like it wouldn't be the New York Times or the L.A. Times, like local papers. And it was kind of interesting that they kind of call attention to those, there's some articles that use rather extreme language. I'd like to think those were because of the article that I wrote.
Q: Are you doing any additional research in this area, any follow-up work?
A: The direct outgrowth of the '68 Olympic project is that I started a study of the consequences of this protest in American sports culture in the decade after the protest. To put it more concretely, I looked at the forms and responses that sports leaders took, based on the charges of racial discrimination and inequality that athletes made in the 1960s. So it was really to understand the reforms that came out of the protest that took place in the decade after the protest in the 1970s. This… maybe to say it another way… The role… now I've lost my train of thought… OK. If the first part of the study was about the 1968 protest movement, in the years after I've done that, what I've been interested in is the impacts that this movement had on the sports, on the institutions of sport in the United States, in the years afterwards. So that I was really interested on the racial reforms that mainstream sporting organizations undertook because of the charges of inequality that were levied in the late 1960s and early 70s. So I've really tried to figure out what responses and reactions the sports world had in terms of dealing with racial inequality in the 70s and the 80s. A larger part of that argument is then about the symbolic importance of sport as a symbol for race relations in the United States. So what I have tried to argue is that it was very important for the sports world to deal with the perception and the charges of racial inequality that had been waged in 1968, because they undermined the claim that race was a leader in civil rights and in racial progress for the United States. So I really tried to look at not only what the sports world did to reform itself, but how important that was in American culture more broadly, because of the important symbolic place that sport has as a symbol of race, racial progress in the United States. Maybe I can make it a little more concrete by talking about, by mentioning that the second part of the study ends in 1984, with the Los Angeles Olympic games. And what I'm particularly interested in there is the way that president Reagan used the 1984 Olympic games in his election campaign as a symbol of all the progress that the United States had made with respect to race relations in the years since the civil rights movement. And what I try to argue is that Reagan wouldn't have been able to use the Olympics as a symbol of racial progress if the sports world itself hadn't initiated significant reforms and changes to address the charges of racial inequality that had been made in the earlier period. So that's the project that grew directly out of the first phase, the studying of the civil rights protests in 1968. Since then I've also gotten involved, in terms of studying the symbolic importance of sport in American culture, in a project that looks at midnight basketball leagues in the United States. These are the leagues that a lot of metropolitan areas adopted to address the problems of crime and gang behavior and drug use among young African-American males. The leagues are organized so they take place late at night, usually between 10:00 and 2 a.m. and it's designed to get these at-risk populations, these young men, into the gym during high-crime hours, so that they have positive activities. As they're doing this, what I've been interested in, though, is the symbolic role that these leagues play in American political culture. Specifically, I've undertaken a study of the importance of the midnight basketball leagues in the 1994 crime bill debates. And what I've found so far is that these leagues, which are really small programs, in the crime bill debates they're about $40 million of programs, which may sound like a lot, except that the crime bill itself was about a $33 billion bill. And what I found was that these leagues occupied a significant amount of discussion and debate in the negotiations over the bill. And so what I argued that that's about is the symbolic importance that sport, in the form of midnight basketball here, plays with respect to our ideas about African-Americans and especially the threat that certain groups of African-Americans pose to social order broadly conceived.
Q: For this study, are you just looking at documents, or are you playing basketball at midnight?
A: Well there's a little bit of, I don't really play basketball at midnight. I do some ethnography where I've observed these leagues and tried to understand how they happen. So there's an ethnographic part where I'm still continuing to work that out, but a lot of it is the documents. Though the analysis of those documents, it's a different kind of analysis than I did with the 1968 project, which was more of a historical case study, more interpretative analysis. With the midnight basketball documents, I've tried to do a more rigid, systematic content analysis, to really quantify the role the midnight basketball played in those political debates and the impact it had. So actually doing kind of citation counts and detailed, trying to kind of give it some kind of a model of how midnight basketball was related to other arguments that were made about the bill.
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