Sport, Power, and Society by Robert E. Washington

Author:Robert E. Washington [Washington, Robert E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429976841
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Westwood (1990) has argued that as “a counter to racism black masculinity is called up as part of the cultures of resistance developed by black men in Britain” (p. 61). This article has shown how for a number of Black men, sport, and in particular cricket, can provide a modality through which Black cultural resistance to racism can be achieved. Sports provide an arena whereby Black men can lay claim to a masculine identity as a means of restoring a unified sense of racial identity, freed, if only momentarily, from the emasculating discourses imposed by the ideologies and practices of White racism.

However, we should be cautious not to overstate unproblematically the benefits of such sites of resistance. For one, Black women often occupy marginal positions within sports clubs such as the CCC (especially those that do not have women’s teams), which are perhaps more accurately described, as I have tried to make clear throughout, as Black men’s cricket clubs. Without acknowledging such limitations, the complex positioning of Black women, in particular, within “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal societies” (hooks, 1994) gets overlooked. Thus, any claims for such cultural practices as being in some way emancipatory must be qualified. Otherwise, as Black feminists have consistently pointed out, the requirements for Black resistance become equated with the need for Black male emancipation. The overcoming of the crisis of Black masculinity is frequently misrecognized as the panacea for the Black community as a whole, thereby silencing the voices and needs of Black women; the politics manifest within certain (conservative) Black nationalisms being the most obvious example of this.

There is also, of course, the further problem with the zero-sum notion of resistance and power, most evidenced in the competitive sports arena, which inevitably leads to a conceptualization of resistance that can only be understood via notions of domination and physical conflict. Richard Burton (1991, 1997), for instance, has provided an interesting analysis in arguing for cricket to be situated within carnivalesque aspects of Caribbean street culture. Burton suggests that the carnival’s symbolic subversion is central to how cricket is watched and played, as a more diffuse and stylized site of popular cultural resistance in challenging dominant social hierarchies.10 This should alert us to the point that such modes of resistance as have been analyzed here should not be thought of as the only positionings possible. They ultimately need to be embedded within wider struggles.

It is perhaps necessary therefore to understand and explore both the benefits that such forms can have for a number of Black men while simultaneously acknowledging the limitations of sport as a modality of resistance to racism. Only when we have more ethnographically informed analyses in a greater variety of different communities across differing locations will we be able to more fully understand the complexities of Black cultural resistance through sport and its emancipatory possibilities.

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