ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the ideology of the purity of sport and the field of play as the ground for analyzing the role of contemporary sports stadia in the production of and resistance to white supremacy. The author focuses on the material structures of sport stadia as media. Specifically, the author theorizes stadia as urban media infrastructures in which media technologies and practices are deeply integrated into the stadium itself, as they are built as sites of media broadcasting spectacle, surveillance, and crowd control. The author attends to the design logics and practices through which contemporary football and baseball stadia, the two most popular sports in the US and most closely associated with American national identity, are produced as white spaces that perpetuate white supremacy. Understanding white supremacy as the material practices through which white dominance and hegemony is secured through the exclusion and premature death of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) peoples (Bonds & Inwood, 2016), the author suggests stadia are both the products of and work to institute what Lipsitz (2011) refers to as a white spatial imaginary; or, in other words, that stadia are spaces in which whiteness, white control, and dominance over Others is learned, naturalized, practiced, and resisted.
