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Black Collegiate Athletes
and the Neoliberal State
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Imaginations of the institution of sport in the twenty-first century have persuaded many to believe it to be the archetype of social progress upon the mountaintop of post-racial American dreams. For a nation that, historically, has looked with faith and optimism to sport as inspiration to navigate race relations and revise race rules, the endemic social inequities across race seem to many as an increasing certainty fortified by and inside the structure of American society. Despite shifts in racial beliefs and accesses and opportunities for black lives in the post-civil rights era of the American dream, we have yet to achieve a society that treats and values our humanities equally. Today, race remains a captor of our imaginations of the dream playing out in our systems of ideology and practices of inequity across all facets of society. Once again, sport is at the fore of the debate about race and particularly how it manifests in the shaping of our lives and dreams of a better—just—nation.
Today, in the twenty-first century, the relationship between predominate narratives and the complex realities that constitute the multiplicity of black experiences accentuates the paradoxical veracity of our society’s existence. For so long, forces of oppression in its many forms, all to maintain and protect a dream, have sought to damage, degrade, and deny the humanity of black persons while simultaneously instituting hope in a dream to overcome black subjugation. The objectives in such endemic oppression have aimed at manufacturing a social stratification of identities, culture, education, communities, and values to matter as determined by a market that elevates, and so far, as justifies dreams drawn on either sides of the modern color line. This book explores two key threads related to black intercollegiate student athletes. I examine how black athletes make sense of participating in intercollegiate athletics within institutions of higher education and how their experiences are indicative of the paradoxes of a dream kindled by neoliberal principles of logic.
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