ABSTRACT
The shadows of slavery and its aftermath long distorted the study of sport’s connection to race and ethnicity in the USA. Scholars, public intellectuals, and the public discussed race’s nexus with sport almost exclusively as a binary matter involving African-Americans and Caucasians. Painting with a broad brush, they treated segregation as lamentable and integration as redemptive, but neither segregation’s upside nor integration’s downside were broached. The sons and grandsons of mid-nineteenth-century immigrants from Ireland were lauded for rising to the upper ranks of boxing and baseball, and Irish-American athletic accomplishments were considered as evidence of their successful Americanization. Sport was a terribly underdeveloped field of study in the USA until the 1970s. While European scholars were in the vanguard of those investigating the social and historical importance of sport, American academics lagged behind. US imperial expansion in the Pacific forced other groups of people to become part of the nation’s sporting story.
