Douglas Hartmann’s research while affiliated with University of Minnesota, Duluth and other places

Out-of-school youth sport in the United States is bigger, more varied, and more impactful than ever before. In dialogue with existing scholarship, this paper uses multisite, collaborative fieldwork to identify core elements of program variation and develop a composite typology of this organizational field. The typology is based on a distinction between “sport-focused” programs and programs oriented toward nonsport social and developmental goals. Our primary insight is that programs within these domains exhibit two different organizational logics, one hierarchical, the other categorical. We also argue that variabilities of funding, social context, and reliance on public facilities are additional factors that impact the operation and effectiveness of these program types including their ability to address the racialized challenges of access, equity, and inclusion. Theorizing these differential configurations and their underlying characteristics can help parents, policymakers, practitioners (including coaches), and sports researchers engage youth sports more effectively under increasingly competitive neoliberal conditions.

Americans generally celebrate the abstract principle of diversity, but research suggests that they have a comparatively lower (1) favorability towards policies that promote diversity and (2) sense of personal closeness with others from diverse backgrounds. The current study analyzes nationally representative survey data to assess such “principle-policy gaps” and “principle-personal gaps” in Americans’ diversity attitudes. We find that these attitudinal gaps indeed exist and are substantial in the general population. We also consider how individual-level factors relate to these attitudinal gaps. Following common findings in previous research, we find that participant racial identity and political partisanship have statistically significant relationships with these attitudinal gaps. But our overall findings illustrate that principle-policy gaps and principle-personal gaps in diversity attitudes are fairly substantial and prevalent across Americans who vary by race, politics, and several other individual-level factors. We consider our findings in the current social and political context, and we discuss directions for future inquiry.

This chapter provides a genealogical and conceptual overview of how the politics of race in the USA have shaped cultural discourse and policy frameworks related to racial difference, inequality, and ethno-racial pluralism, often known as ‘multiculturalism.’ This chapter has four main sections that correspond to four distinct historical eras. The first section (i.e., 1950s–late 1960s) describes the USA in the mid-twentieth century. The second section (i.e., the 1970s through the 1990s) describes how conservative political mobilization surrounding race meant that the American political landscape backed away from some of the progress of the civil rights era and shifted toward a smaller social state and a colorblind, individualist ethos. The third section describes how this diversity approach came to be a dominant, even celebrated, discourse and policy framework in the early twenty-first century. In the fourth and final section, we consider what the present and near future hold for multiculturalism and diversity discourse, particularly as tied to today’s racialized politics, and how the two major political parties approach these concepts. Overall, the historical trajectory and contemporary state of affairs described in this chapter lead us to be skeptical that multiculturalism is necessarily resurging in the USA, despite recent electoral victories by the political Left.

Douglas Hartmann, Alex Manning, and Kyle Green on the social significance of global sport.

This article is a case study of the vision of Mexican history, identity, and culture that won the 1968 Summer Olympic Games for Mexico City. The Mexican elites’ portrayal of Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation contributing to emerging global institutions and ideals in the postcolonial era ensured the bid's success. The article's core is a close reading of the official bid and bidding process. This analysis is supplemented and sharpened by contrasting it with alternative visions of Mexican nationalism and the competing Buenos Aires bid. Guided by symbolic interactionism and theories of cultural politics, the study highlights the unique status of Mexico and Latin America in the Olympic Movement, reminds us of the role of the International Olympic Committee in constructing global order in the Cold War era, and shows the value of studying alternative and unsuccessful visions of nationalism, modernity, and global cosmopolitanism.

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. We begin by centering athlete agency and highlighting the distinctive performative, communicative, and symbolic opportunities that sport affords. 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 catalog these constraints to capture the larger cultural field of sport as a site of racial commentary and contestation. 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. The lessons and broader implications of this synthesis are discussed in the conclusion.

How do cultural norms, ideologies, and beliefs shape public opinion and media framing of race-based athletic activism? This paper uses media coverage of and commentary on the 1968 American ‘revolt of the Black athlete’ to explicate the deep cultural structures that help explain both support and opposition. The paper begins with a brief, schematic overview of the proposal for a Black Olympic boycott that was the centrepiece of 1968 organising and how it was reported by sports journalists and in the mainstream media. The second section identifies the reasons American reporters were, on the whole, so opposed to the proposed boycott: the inherent lack of support for the athletes’ racial change agenda and the far-more-familiar arguments that sports were not the proper venue for activism. The third section argues that a whole constellation of cultural norms and beliefs—about sport culture, colour-blind visions of racial justice, and liberal democratic ideals about politics and social change—coalesced to make race-based sport protest appear both unnecessary and inappropriate. The conclusion summarises the implications for understanding both public reception of and media responses to contemporary, race-based athletic activism as well as for tracking institutional changes and cultural shifts unfolding in the Black Lives Matter era.