ABSTRACT
Recently I was invited to contribute to the Routledge Handbook of Theory in Sport Management (Hylton, 2016). Soon after writing the chapter I was informed of the passing of the international scholar Professor Margaret Talbot OBE with whom I shared many instructive hours as, first, her undergraduate student and then colleague at Leeds Beckett University. The editors were keen to explore how theory should be seen as a critical element in the advancement of sport management and that theory is the basis for our scholarship, teaching, and engagement. As I have been busy in using Critical Race Theory (CRT) since the late 1990s I was asked to reflect upon and write about it in relation to a paper that I wrote in 2005, ‘Race, Sport and Leisure: Lessons from Critical Race Theory’ (Hylton, 2005). In the chapter I offer an overview of CRT as a framework, my influences in adopting it, and examine developments that have emerged from its use. However, what I omitted to state in the handbook due to the usual constraints of space and readership was the direct influence of Margaret Talbot as a mentor since the 1980s. Routledge have kindly given permission for me to reproduce the chapter in their handbook and this is what I outline below. As a black undergraduate student with no black counterparts or black lecturers, the dominant epistemologies in sport, leisure, and PE did not empower its readers to focus on the lived experience of black people. Even within Margaret’s feminist work she would be the first to agree with other scholars that black women were also excluded in their mainstream antipatriarchy missives (Birrell, 1989; hooks, 1990; Scraton, 2001; Weekes and Mirza, 1997). As activist scholars we must make space for transformation, however this can be achieved. Margaret’s insight made space for me to change how I viewed the sovereignty of established knowledge by offering advice on the marginal status of research on ‘race’ in the sport, leisure, and PE literatures; her advice to me was: ‘If you don’t do research in this area [“race”] then no one else will.’ As a result of Margaret’s influence I am (re)presenting this chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Theory and Theory Development in Sport Management because in it I reflect upon
my use of Critical Race Theory, encountered as a result of being encouraged by Margaret Talbot, and subsequent scholars, to be critical, reflexive, and compassionate. In 2005 Michael Banton wrote a retrospective on 55 years of research in sociology (Banton, 2005). In particular his work focused on ethnic and racial studies. Widely regarded as one of the leading international sociologists, his reflections on his approaches to the sociology of ‘race’ and ethnic relations was published in the same year that I was challenging academics in the sociology of sport and leisure to engage in a more inclusive and critical exposition of racialised phenomena (Hylton, 2005). Some of the questions that I was asking included: (1) At what point will those in the field recognise that a narrow academic focus will leave them with charges of repetition and theoretical myopia? (2) Do academics in the field recognise that even critical theories with a social justice focus can ignore ‘race’? (3) Are academics in the field willing to incorporate other marginalised ideas and voices to address these imbalances? In regards to the academy my ire was focused on how sport and leisure studies, a necessarily multidisciplinary field, marginalised specific issues of ‘race’ and racism. My paper written on Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Leisure Studies (Hylton, 2005) consisted of three sections, concluding with a call to sport and leisure theorists and policymakers to centralise ‘race’, racism, and race equality in their everyday considerations (p. 94). The first part of the article explored the shared racial justice agenda of CRT and other areas of ethnic and racial studies. The paper unpacked the fundamentals of CRT’s precepts as a useful introductory point for readers new to the framework. As a device to emphasise how a critical ‘race’-centred approach can strengthen social theorising the paper then moved on to the second section that mapped out the flawed analogous developments of critical theory in sport and leisure sociology and the North American-based critical legal studies as both were inconsistent in their treatment of ‘race’ in their analyses. In the final part of the paper CRT is advanced as ‘a worthy theoretical framework from which to interrogate issues of “race”, and to refocus the theoretical lens onto anti-oppressive theory, race equality, and related areas in sport and leisure studies’ (Hylton, 2005: 82). I haven’t shifted from this position, although I wish to make the point firmly that in attempting to develop theoretically informed interventions one is bound to make mistakes (Banton, 2005). I also wish to make a few brief related points: (a) CRT is not a theory but a framework, which I outline in this chapter, and elsewhere, through the use of precepts or tenets (Hylton, 2009, 2012); (b) though ‘race’ and racism are central CRT has a larger anti-essentialist focus to contest other forms of subordination; (c) CRT uses the term ‘race’ that incorporates discourses of ethnicity and urges all to use racialised terminology politically, pragmatically, and with caution.
