Race

Few issues have consumed historians of sport in the English speaking world more than that of race. Race has also been central to analyses of sport in colonial contexts, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, while more recently the literature on race in Asia and Latin America has expanded. Within sports history research in the USA, race plays a prominent role, exceeding almost any other area of focus. In Europe examinations of race have largely taken place in the postcolonial context, though historians realize that race has a complex relationship to the expansion of European empires and the colonial and postcolonial contexts that emerged as a result. Colonial ties still remain as it is common to find that the best soccer (football) players from Algeria or Morocco often wind up in France, Argentinan players are likely to develop careers in Spain or Italy while West Indians appear abroad frequently in England. As a result, old conceptions – and stereotypes – developed during the eras of colonialism and imperialism have been hard to break down. In ‘settler’ and plantation societies such as the USA, Australia, South Africa and the

British West Indies race and class were closely intertwined, which led to the development of a black underclass that took many decades to achieve equality of opportunity on the playing field. Barriers to participation in white-dominated competitions hardened in the imperial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries such that whether in the USA, Barbados or South Africa, blacks were forced to participate in their own competitions segregated from white ones. After World War II, though, these barriers to participation began to fall with Jackie

Robinson beginning the process of integrating white professional baseball in the USA in 1945 and the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team appearing in 1960 in the person of Frank Worrell. The Olympic Games opened increasingly to include athletes from all countries particularly as colonialism gave way to independence in Asia and then Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Black African runners began to achieve success beginning with Kenyan middle distance runners at the 1954 Empire Games.1 While South Africa was slower to integrate, by the 1990s competitions were open to all regardless of racial background.2