ABSTRACT
This study highlights the comparative visibilities of African-American male athletes in the major professional ranks of football, baseball, basketball and boxing and those in films depicting these sports from 1930 to 2009. Inferences are drawn from the proportional contrasts of black film appearances to athletic achievements within each sport over time, between different sports at the same time, and between different sports across different times. Based on findings from our data of over 700 sport films, we found the proportions of appearances of American blacks in elite professional sports to their presence in sport films to be hugely unequal from 1930 to 1980, and only recently to have become similar. The largest differences between elite athletic presence and sport film appearances exist when black gains were greatest in elite professional sports. We suggest that while the quantitative parity of blacks in sports and sport films has now been nearly achieved, a qualitative inequity in the characterizations of blacks in sport films still exists.
