Citings and Sightings

Photo by Neighborhood Centers, Inc. via flickr.com

Each year, millions of people don their running kicks and spandex and tackle 5ks, marathons, or the occasional holiday-themed trot.  But if you’ve ever been a spectator at one of these events, you’ve perhaps wondered what Runner’s World’s Jay Jennings found himself asking: Why is running so white?

That perception has become a truism, and the truism has become a joke. The popular satirical blog “Stuff White People Like,” which spawned a best-selling book, ranked marathons 27th on the original list, just behind farmer’s markets and Wes Anderson movies. More scathing was comedian Daniel Tosh, in a segment on his show, Tosh.0: “The only reason marathons are still around is so 20,000 white people can chase three black guys through the streets of Boston like the good old days.”

But how valid is the idea that running is indeed a predominantly white sport?

Well, pretty darn valid, according to Running USA’s recently released biannual National Runner Survey. Media spokesperson Ryan Lamppa stresses that its methodology is “opt-in” from 60 running organizations and clubs nationwide and “may not be a representative sample” of the actual running population. Still, the numbers, compiled between January and May 2011 from nearly 12,000 respondents, are eye-opening: “Core runners” (who tend to enter running events and train year-round) are 90 percent Caucasian, 5.1 percent Hispanic, 3.9 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and, in perhaps the most startling figure, only 1.6 percent African-American. (The sample adds up to more than 100 percent because respondents could mark more than one choice.) Those numbers are consistent with ones from other surveys, such as Runner’s World’s, and have remained low even as the number of runners has grown by 56 percent in the past decade, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. (The overall population, from the 2010 U.S. census, is 72 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent black or African-American, 5 percent Asian, and 1 percent American Indian or Alaska native.)

The next question is, of course, why?  In search of an answer, Jennings spoke with new and well-trod runners, heads of national organizations, race directors, coaches, and academics. Through these conversations, he learned that there are economic and cultural roadblocks for minority runners.

Arguably, a potential runner needs only a pair of shoes (barefoot enthusiasts will say not even that!) and a stretch of pavement, but in reality, dedicated running shoes (which RunnersWorld will tell you elsewhere are critical for injury prevention) and race entrance fees can be expensive, especially over time.  Moreover, poor neighborhoods may lack safe avenues for running.

In fact, ‘Lacking a safe place to exercise’ was the top barrier to physical activity for African-American women age 40 and older in a 2000 study published in the journal Health Psychology. In another study for the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007, Simon J. Marshall, Ph.D., the lead researcher, commented,

“People in poverty are more likely to live in neighborhoods where public recreation is unavailable or dangerous,” but he added, this does not mean that culture does not play a role.

Martin Beatty, an African-American head track and field coach at Middlebury College in Vermon, cites social pressure to participate in football and basketball as a factor resulting in low participation in cross-country.  Another interviewee told Jennings,  “Within African-American culture, if your kids don’t play football and basketball, in a lot of communities, it’s not respected.”  Low minority participation in the sport means that there are few role models, on the street or in ad-campaigns, to inspire non-white runners. And when African-Americans do participate in running, stereotypes tend to funnel them toward short-distance events.

Why does all of this matter?  Health disparities, for one, says Harvard University sociologist, David R. Williams.

[The] professor (and two-time Detroit Marathon finisher) who studies racial differences in health, told Steve Barnes on an Arkansas public-affairs television broadcast, “You cannot take individuals who have been shackled by chains and put them at the start of a line to run a marathon…and expect them, if they haven’t had any training or preparation, to be successful.” He was speaking metaphorically, but a very real fact he cited is that “96,000 African-Americans die every year prematurely from racial disparities in health.”…”All of our institutions,” he said, citing schools, churches, and others, “Need to be encouraging healthy choices.”

For several months my husband has been trying to get me to read ESPN The Magazine.  So when he said, “Hey, a sociologist is cited in here,” I thought his ploy continued.  But, as he pushed the magazine across the table, I had to admit I was intrigued.

In the article, Shaun Assael asks, “Why do fans riot?”

You’ve probably heard or read about the uprisings in Buenos Aires over soccer and in Vancouver over hockey. What amazed me weren’t the images of violence that went viral, causing the word “hooligan” to pop as a trending topic. And it wasn’t even the fact that the riots followed historic losses — a playoff defeat for River Plate that demoted Argentina’s version of the Yankees to a lower division for the first time in 110 years, and a bitter Game 7 Stanley Cup loss that left the long-suffering Canucks still searching for a title.

No, what stunned me was the realization that this kind of violence rarely happens in American pro sports. We riot after wins.

To help understand why Americans can be better losers than winners, he turned to sociologist Jerry M. Lewis, who studies outbreaks of sports violence.

…Here are the three warning signs he’s learned to spot: a) a hotly contested championship final; b) watched by lots of young men; c) in a common urban gathering spot with a history of violence.

Lewis mainly focuses on celebratory violence and believes the prevalence of many professional sports and teams in America means that Americans don’t get upset about any particular one.  This contrasts to countries where a single sport, like hockey or soccer, dwarfs all others.

Read the rest here.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics is not short on inspiring imagery for the many millions who tune in around the globe. As the host country provides the spectacle and entertainment, athletes representing their respective countries march one after the other to cheers of the crowd. With such cooperation in the name of athletic competition, the Olympics can’t help but be a large step towards worldwide transparency, peace and equality. Right?

In a recent New York Times editorial, David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, suggests otherwise. Drawing on analysis of the 1936 Berlin Games, Large explains that there is little evidence that the Olympics works to open up repressive regimes. In fact, the inspiring tales of the Olympics taming Hitler’s Nazi regime are mostly myth.

The Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

While few would argue that the Berlin Olympics transformed Nazi Germany into the ideal international partner, it is commonly said that Hitler did reduce persecution of Jewish people during that time.

But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.

Large explains that through employing deceitful tactics throughout the Olympics the Nazis learned how was easy it was to mislead the global public through superficial changes.

The article continues with Large deconstructing other pervasive myths about the value of the Berlin Games, including the well-told stories about the impact of Jesse Owens’ dominance. According to Large, the black American track-and-field athlete, did not simply force the Germans and people everywhere to rethink negative views towards black people; rather, the victory simply led to the group in power using the success to enforce negative views.

[T]he publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their “jungle inheritance,” were able to jump high and run fast.

Large’s presentation of “the truth behind the 1936 Games” effectively calls into question many of the underlying assumptions about the positive impacts of holding the Olympics and other large international sporting events in countries with questionable governance and a history of mistreating citizens. And, as Large points out,

there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

Large concludes with a critical but potentially positive suggestion:

This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically “clean” countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.

If anything positive came from the debacle that surrounded the International Association of Athletics
Federation’s attempts to ‘determine’ South African runner Caster Semenya’s sex, it is that it brought to light the crude methods that were being used to enforce the male/female binary in sports (See David Zirin and Sherry Wolf’s article in the Nation for critical coverage of the initial controversy).

Two years later the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federation, the governing body for track and field, have released a new policy to regulate athletes whose sex development is considered unusual to avoid a repeat of the nightmare that Semenya faced.

In a recent editorial in the The New York Times, Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, provides a critical read of the new policy. Dreger explains that initially the policy seems like an improvement because:

The new policy no longer allows any room for a simplistic “I know it when I see it” approach to who counts as a female athlete.

The new system relies on setting the ‘appropriate’ levels of functional testosterone a female athlete should have. However, as Dregger argues, this policy is fundamentally sexist. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone.

Yet despite the fact that testosterone belongs to women, too, the I.O.C. and the I.A.A.F. are basically saying it is really a manly thing: “You can have functional testosterone, but if you make too much, you’re out of the game because you’re not a real woman.”

Dregger explains that men are free of any equivalent biochemical policing and can take full advantage of any ‘mutation’ that gives him an advantage. In efforts to create ‘the mythical level playing field’ the committee has taken another step in a now rich history of controlling and categorizing women’s bodies. For women athletes who have more functional testosterone than is considered appropriate for a female the only option is to “submit to being made sexually ‘normal’ through hormone treatments” or they cannot compete.

While Dregger is sympathetic to the difficulties that I.O.C. and I.A.A.F. face, she finds little progress in the decision

this newly proposed biological reduction of women to a hormonally disadvantaged class of people — one medically made disadvantaged, if necessary — struck many of us as regressive from the standpoint of women’s rights. Indeed, it reminds me of those itty-bitty shorts that college women’s volleyball players must wear. They each sexualize the bodies of female athletes as a requirement of play. They each insist that a woman never be manly.

Perhaps the biggest take away point from Dregger’s article and the debates surrounding how to define and separate male from female in the sporting arena is that:

There is no perfect solution, one that is reasonably objective, universally applicable and universally satisfying.

Recent medical reports on the long-term effects of head injuries have resulted in increased concern about the medical risks of participating in football. While the N.F.L. has increasingly shown concern over the safety of its players, a solution has not been found. The safety issues came to a head this past Sunday when a number of players were injured as a result of highlight reel hits.

Michael Sokolove’s article in the New York Times examines the moral issues surrounding consuming a sport where players place themselves at such a high risk. As medical studies continue to build the link between head injuries in football and depression, suicide, and early death, Sokolove asks the timely question:

Is it morally defensible to watch a sport whose level of violence is demonstrably destructive? (The game, after all, must conform to consumer taste.) And where do we draw the line between sport and grotesque spectacle?

To provide insight into the question Sokolove turns to a series of cultural theorists and philosophers who have interest in the role of violent pursuits in society.

The writer Joyce Carol Oates has written admiringly of boxing, celebrating, among other aspects, the “incalculable and often self-destructive courage” of those who make their living in the ring. I wondered if she thought America’s football fans should have misgivings about sanctioning a game that, like boxing, leaves some of its participants neurologically impaired.

“There is invariably a good deal of hypocrisy in these judgments,” Ms. Oates responded by e-mail. “Supporting a war or even enabling warfare through passivity is clearly much more reprehensible than watching a football game or other dangerous sports like speed-car racing — but it may be that neither is an unambiguously ‘moral’ action of which one might be proud.”

Other ‘experts’ argue that the dangerous activity may serve a communal goal.

“We learn from dangerous activities,” said W. David Solomon, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame and director of its Center for Ethics and Culture. “In life, there are clearly focused goals, with real threats. The best games mirror that. We don’t need to feel bad about not turning away from a game in which serious injuries occur. There are worse things about me than that I enjoy a game that has violence in it. I don’t celebrate injuries or hope for them to happen. That would be a different issue. That’s moral perversion.”

Fellow philosopher Sean D. Kelly, the chairman of Harvard’s philosophy department, shares Solomon’s emphasis on the potential positive value of sports:

“You can experience a kind of spontaneous joy in watching someone perform an extraordinary athletic feat,” he said when we talked last week. “It’s life-affirming. It can expand our sense of what individuals are capable of.”

He believes that it is fine to watch football as long as the gravest injuries are a “side effect” of the game, rather than essential to whatever is good about the game and worth watching.

Sokolove concludes with the difficult question that football fans, as well as organizers and sponsors of the sport at all levels, must now ask themselves:

But what if that’s not the case? What if the brain injuries are so endemic — so resistant to changes in the rules and improvements in equipment — that the more we learn the more menacing the sport will seem?

In a recent thought piece titled, “Racing Safely to the Finish Line? Kids, Competitions, and Injuries,” Sociologist Hilary Levey, reflects upon the reaction to the recent death of thirteen-year-old Peter Lenz this past Sunday. Peter was killed in a motorcycle accident at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during a practice session.

Levey explains that it would be an error for the public to be caught up in the type of accident that occurred and we should instead use this tragedy as an impetus to consider the dangers of increasingly competitive youth sport.

Youth racing shouldn’t be alone in getting a closer inspection. This tragedy could have happened to any girl on a balance beam or any boy in a football tackle last Sunday. We should not be distracted by the fact that Peter was in a motorcycle race.

Despite the risk of serious injuries, like concussions, and even death, millions of kids compete in almost any activity you can imagine. Did you know that there are shooting contests for young Davy Crocketts, a racing circuit for aspiring Danica Patricks, and a youth PGA for those pursuing Tiger Woods’ swing? When did American childhood become not just hyper-organized but also hyper-competitive?

Levey shows that youth sport should be examined as the culmination of a century long trajectory of increased competitiveness.

Initially the organized activities served as a way mitigate deviant behavior by reducing the amount of unmonitored idle hours.

In 1903 New York City’s Public School Athletic League for Boys was established and contests between children, organized by adults, emerged as a way to keep the boys coming back to activities and clubs. Settlement houses and ethnic clubs followed suit and the number of these clubs grew rapidly through the 1920s.

However, the level of competitiveness continued to ramp up as the 20th century progressed. National organizations were introduced after World War II and the by the 1970s, for-profit organizations were common.

And, by the turn of the twenty-first century, a variety of year-round competitive circuits, run by paid organizers and coaches, dominated families’ evenings and weekends.

Parents tried to find the activity best suited to turn their children into national champions, even at age seven. As competitive children’s activities became increasingly organized over the twentieth century, injuries increased — especially overuse injuries and concussions. More practice time, an earlier focus on only one sport, and a higher level of intensity in games create the environment for these types of injuries.

Peter Lenz’s death is indicative of an increasingly competitive and organized American childhood. Levey argues that as a society we have the responsibility to make sure the training and safety regulations keep up with the increased pressure and risk of injury. This should include greater monitoring of safety equipment and higher standards for coaches.

While catastrophic accidents like Peter Lenz’s will happen, we can work to better protect all competitive children from more common injuries like concussions and overuse injuries. Kids want to win whatever race they are in and be the champion. Adults should make sure they all safely cross the finish line.

In June this year, a mixed martial arts (MMA) competitor died as a result of a head injury sustained during a sanctioned bout in South Carolina.  Sociologist David Mayeda, writing for online sports site BleacherReport.com, uses this tragedy as the impetus to reflect upon the intrinsic competitive nature of sport, MMA’s evolving structure, and how society regulates violence in sport.
Mayeda explains that MMA, a rapidly popularizing sport, is by its nature a violent sport.

MMA is at its core, violent. Injuries, even death, are a risk in all sports. Even in non-contact sports, such as long distance running, deaths occur on occasion (though the absolute number of long distance runners is massive in comparison to MMA). However, in most sports, there is not intent to harm. In combat sports, “the intentional use of physical force…against…another person” is required and formally sanctioned.

Even with the brutal nature of the sport, the larger leagues have been efficient at regulating and protecting fighters.

Within the United States, prominent MMA organizations such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Strikeforce have the resources and existing infrastructure to prevent, or at least minimize, the most serious, tragic levels of violence. Earlier this year UFC welterweight contender, Thiago Alves, was forced to withdraw from competition because of a discovered brain irregularity.

However, it is in the smaller and less visible levels of competition, that lack the money and regulation, where the danger lies.

None of the major MMA organizations provide smaller, regional ones with the financial backing that would allow for a more robust medical infrastructure and help prevent the most serious ramifications of sporting violence. Thus, up and coming fighters must gain experience in smaller organizations, where the risky consequences of more serious violence and injury rise.

Mayeda concludes by arguing that the injuries that occur at the smaller leagues must not be written off as collateral damage or disconnected from the popularity of the large MMA leagues that have dominated pay-per-view and made their way on to network television. It is the success at higher levels that is often at the root of the pressure to risk more for less at the lower levels – a lesson applicable to all types of sport.

Professional and semi-pro mixed martial artists – frequently seduced by the financial gains and popularity that the sport’s biggest stars enjoy – should be treated as human beings, not as collateral damage dismissed in the wake of the sport’s growth. Neither society’s thirst for violence nor a sport’s increasing popularity should be cited to justify or excuse athlete safety.

The New York Times examined what appears to be a rise in violent behavior in women’s sports:

Brittney Griner, Baylor’s 6-foot-8 freshman center, was supposed to deliver her transformative moments by slamming a basketball through the rim, not punching an opponent in the face.

Yet, Griner’s most visible performance came not while displaying her exquisite skills, but by breaking the nose of Texas Tech’s Jordan Barncastle after being slung about the lane this month. Griner received a two-game suspension but is eligible for the N.C.A.A. tournament, which began here Saturday for Baylor.

It was the latest of several highly publicized moments of violent behavior in women’s college basketball this season. A reported tripping incident led to players from Georgetown and Louisville trading punches before a game in January. A male coach and a female player from Trinity Valley Community College in Texas were arrested in a postgame episode in February after a tirade over officiating and a confrontation with the campus police at a rival college.

These incidents followed the infamous soccer confrontation last fall in which Elizabeth Lambert of New Mexico yanked a Brigham Young player down by her ponytail.

The Times turned to sports sociologists to explain whether these incidents are part of larger trend, as well as what may be causing them:

So what is going on? Experts say they cannot be precisely sure. Little research has been done on excessive behavior of elite female athletes. The N.C.A.A. did not respond to a question about whether statistics were kept but called violent acts “isolated” and said they would not be tolerated.

“Only time will tell if this is an aberration, but what I think is a clear trend, as the stakes get higher in women’s sports, you see more pressure to win,” said Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.

“This could be a natural progression to women entering into big-time college sports. You take the bad with the good; you take sold-out arenas with academic scandals. For us to think that women would enter the big time and have it be pristine and without controversy is naïve.”

Baylor Coach Kim Mulkey said that she did not believe violence had escalated in women’s basketball since her playing days at Louisiana Tech in the early 1980s, but that it was more likely to be exposed during a 24/7 news cycle.

At the same time, overall coverage of women’s sports has declined on network news and on ESPN, said Michael Messner, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Southern California who tracks television coverage.

Messner cautioned that these incidents could be less reflective of a disturbing pattern than an echoing of misbehavior that is blown out of proportion, given that it is reported against a backdrop of “almost no women’s coverage at all.”

Experts also weighed in on the potential consequences for women’s sports:

Still, advocates of women’s sports are concerned that such untoward behavior could spur opponents of Title IX, the gender-equity legislation that facilitated great participation of female athletes after its passage in 1972, to try to roll back gains that women have made.

“Is there going to be a gender backlash, where some people say, ‘We give these opportunities to girls and they’re not deserving of them?’ ” said Kristine Newhall, a doctoral candidate in women’s studies at the University of Iowa and a co-founder of the Title IX Blog.

Sports cannot be divorced from gender roles and stereotypes, Kane said. Women will probably be much more restricted in the type of aggressive behavior permitted by society, she said, noting for instance that checking is not allowed in women’s hockey.

“Physical intimidation and violence is central to the sports experience of males,” Kane said. “That is not yet the case for women. I don’t think it will become that. If it does, I hope I’m not around to see it.

Newhall argues that we shouldn’t limit our concern to violence in women’s sports:

The conversation should move beyond whether women are increasingly behaving like men to a broader examination of a college sports culture that is perhaps fostering an increase in violence and dirty tactics, said Newhall, the doctoral candidate.

“What kind of athletic department environment is being fostered that clearly indicates it’s so important that you have to yell at the refs and get into fights?” Newhall said.

“Why did a Georgetown player trip a Louisville player? That’s third-grade behavior. This is a game.”

The New York Times recently featured an op-ed by David Brooks on the role of sports in American society.  Commenting on the teachings of sociologist Eugen Rosenstock Huessy:

He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.

“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”

Brooks summarizes Michael Allen Gillespie’s take on how American sports are organized:

Throughout Western history, Gillespie argues, there have been three major athletic traditions. First, there was the Greek tradition. Greek sports were highly individualistic. There was little interest in teamwork. Instead sports were supposed to inculcate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individuals a way to achieve eternal glory.

Then, there was the Roman tradition. In ancient Rome, free men did not fight in the arena. Roman sports were a spectacle organized by the government. The free Romans watched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertainment emphasized the awesome power of the state.

Finally, there was the British tradition. In the Victorian era, elite schools used sports to form a hardened ruling class. Unlike the Greeks, the British placed tremendous emphasis on team play and sportsmanship. If a soccer team committed a foul, it would withdraw its goalie to permit the other team to score. The object was to inculcate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits that were important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.

Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks also makes the case for the role of collective effervescence that college sports provide:

Several years ago, I arrived in Madison, Wis., for a conference. It was Saturday morning, and as my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walking in the same direction. At first it was a trickle, then thousands. It looked like the gathering of a happy Midwestern cult, though, of course, it was the procession to a football game.

In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.