The politics of race and sport: Resistance and domination in the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement

Using the case of the African American Olympic protest movement that grew out of the crisis of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s, this article is an attempt to argue that work involving identity, culture and popular culture is crucial to the study of race and ethnicity in the contemporary world. A reconstruction of this movement demonstrates, first of all, how a cultural arena like sport can make it possible for otherwise powerless racial and ethnic minorities to draw attention to their cause. Of course, as with most insurgent movements, such initiatives ultimately (and often very quickly) come up against structural impediments that work to reject or absorb their challenge and reinforce the hegemony of the established regime. But the precise nature of the structural constraints operating in this particular case provides profound insight into the construction of social order in liberal democratic settings and the threat posed by cultural politics to this order. More specifically, I argue that athletic protest was overwhelmingly condemned and rejected because it threatened to rupture the homologies between sport culture and liberal democratic ideology that otherwise legitimated a fundamentally individualist, assimilationist vision of racial justice and civil rights in the United States. In more general theoretical terms, then, culturally-oriented movements expose the ways in which domination itself is deeply structured in and through culture. The article concludes by suggesting that this, especially in an age when capital and power have discovered techniques to insulate themselves against traditional, materialist forms of resistance, is why cultural forums and identity politics have become primary sites of the struggle for hegemony.