ABSTRACT
Sport, as a social institution, emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to a shifting constellation of class and gender dynamics. Not only did sport make a crucial contribution to the ideological naturalization of men's superiority over women, popular belief held that working-class men and men of color could not possibly compete successfully with "gentlemen". Despite the recent proliferation of men's studies programs and the resultant publications based on this growing academic interest in masculinity, research on how ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status affect the development of masculinity remains limited. Black males have responded in various ways to this constricted structure of opportunity. Institutional racism and a constricted structure of opportunity do not cause all black males to exhibit antisocial behaviors, nor do these problems succeed in erasing black men's expressions of creativity. Sport has become one of the major stages upon which black males express their creativity.
