The remarkable rise of race-based sports activism has been headline news since at least 2016 when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to “take a knee” during the playing of the national anthem at NFL pre-game ceremonies.

Of all the many extraordinary aspects of the struggle against racism and white supremacy that has come to be known as the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement in the United States, few are as prominent-if underappreciated and still misunderstood-as the acts of protest, organized dissent, and insistent solidarity undertaken by athletes and their allies. The lessons and broader implications of this synthesis are discussed in the conclusion. Situating this multifaceted field of protest and response in its larger social, cultural, and media contexts leads us to argue that sport presents a vehicle not only for the performance of protest (as existing theory might have it), but for the representation and dramatization of social contestation, struggle, and change more generally. We catalog these constraints to capture the larger cultural field of sport as a site of racial commentary and contestation. However, athletic activism and social messaging are also structured-and their impacts shaped-by a range of contextual factors and institutional forces as well as sport’s own unique cultural status and ideological claims. We begin by centering athlete agency and highlighting the distinctive performative, communicative, and symbolic opportunities that sport affords. The emergence of an unprecedented wave of race-based athletic activism in the last decade presents the opportunity to formulate a more critical, cultural theory of the significance and socio-political function of sport in contemporary life.

Headlines GB by Malcolm Hall