ABSTRACT
American history is shaped by the fact that it was once a slave-holder society. This determined politics, economy, and legislation, and also led to the most decisive event in US history, the Civil War. The emancipation of African-Americans did not mean the end of discrimination, and even today racism is still a fact. Sport and race were always closely intertwined. When African-Americans were excluded from sport or certain sports, they formed their own organizations and events, but fought at the same time for integration into “mainstream” sport. They are under-or overrepresented in sports today, depending on the type of sport and performance level, and they were, and still are to some extent, portrayed as the “others” in the mass media. Sport played an important role in the conceptualization, discussion, and enactment of black-and whiteness; it was a means to demonstrate superiority, a struggle for capital (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word) and power in an important social field of American society.
