activism

New & Noteworthy

• It Takes More than Just Concern to Participate in Climate Action by Luna Iman spotlights new research on the most motivated mindsets to tackle climate change.

From the Archives

• This week, the Department of Justice took down thousands of recently released documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that contained identifiable information about nearly 100 victims. Survivors issued a statement calling the release of their identities “outrageous,” saying they should not be “named, scrutinized, and retraumatized”. This 2018 Discovery from Amber Joy Powell unpacks how perceptions of risk often keep victims of sexual assault from reporting what happened.
• This February marks the 100th year since the earliest observances of Black History Month. Amidst federal dismantling of Black history exhibits and an anti-DEI climate, this 2017 piece by Neeraj Rajasekar underscores the importance of calling attention to the history of race and racism in the United States.”

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Council on Contemporary Families

• CCF reposted a brief by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan on when aspiring to perfect parenthood becomes counterproductive.

New & Noteworthy

This week’s Clippings by Mallory Harrington includes:

• Herbert Gans: The influential urban sociologist and public intellectual passed away at 97; remembered for The Urban Villagers, The Levittowners, The War Against the Poor, and Deciding What’s News, as well as for his anti-war activism, press-freedom advocacy, and push for publicly accessible sociology—coverage appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC News.
• Laurie Essig: In a Ms. Magazine interview and the “Feminism, Fascism, and the Future” podcast, Essig linked authoritarianism in the U.S. and Russia to anxious masculinities, warning that “gender ideology” rhetoric masks fears of failed masculinity and urging the creation of mutual-aid “parallel societies.”
• Stephanie L. Canizales: In Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, Canizales exposes how unaccompanied undocumented youth in California are exploited in low-wage jobs and politicized as scapegoats, lamenting that when they aren’t useful for agendas “the population is completely forgotten” (UC Berkeley News).
• Craig Considine and Landon Schnabel: Argue Pope Francis widened the Church’s global reach while enacting careful reforms—outreach to the Global South and blessings for same-sex couples—demonstrating how ancient institutions can “bend without breaking” (Rice & Cornell news outlets).

Our latest Discovery by Eleanor Nickel covers research by David Jonathan Knight on African American and Afro-Latino men who spend their formative years cycling through U.S. prisons, and how growing up behind bars fuses identity to confinement, turning adulthood milestones into carceral experiences that constrain life chances long after release.

From the Archives

It has been twenty years since the first video “Me at the Zoo” was uploaded to YouTube. Since then, the site has become the second most visited site in the world behind Google. It is also on track to become the largest media company by revenue in 2025, beating out Disney. YouTube is also first for the amount of TV viewership time. Check out this archive 2017 piece on the evolution of YouTube in relation to “Legacy Media”.

The Trump administration floated a set of proposals this week aimed at boosting the U.S. birthrate—ideas that include things like a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers after delivery and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with six or more children. The proposals highlight a familiar political tension: encouraging childbirth without meaningfully supporting families. This piece from our archives looks at the challenges contemporary mothers face—underscoring how policy often overlooks the realities of parenting.

Backstage with TSP

The Spring 2025 academic semester is coming to a close. The TSP board is now shifting to “summer hours” and will be posting less frequently to accommodate schedules, but, no need to fear. We will continue to bring you the latest and greatest social science to a device near you! Make sure to follow us on X, Bluesky, and Facebook to stay updated.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Council on Contemporary Families

• Landon Schnabel covers their research on how many young adults walk away from their parents’ churches—especially when rigid doctrines clash with inclusive values like LGBTQ+ equality—yet keep or reinvent a personal, DIY spirituality.

First Publics

• JoAnna Boudreaux shares why she centers small-group discussions, creative projects, and personal feedback to foster belonging—demonstrating that human connection can elevate learning as much as content coverage. Read her piece, “Can We Still Come to Class If We Want To?”.

In case you were otherwise occupied, on Christmas Day the Associated Press named the “NFL National Anthem Protests” the top sports story of 2017. In a year of many huge sport stories both on and off the field, the AP said the story was the “runaway winner” for its staff. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve studied sports-based social activism for a long time, but I’ve never had more media calls and requests for interviews in my career than these past few months.

The single biggest reason for the story, I’m pretty sure, involves our President’s seemingly unprompted and unusually profane attacks in September on football players who had engaged in demonstrations and the NFL. For better or for worse, Trump’s attention provoked a tidal wave of unprecedented gestures of protest and support across the league (and across both racial lines as well as those of management and ownerships) that gave the story its scale, scope, and intrigue. But there’s much more to say about it than that, much more.  I’ve been tracking this all fall as part of my own research project on the “new era” of African American athletic activism we are currently witnessing, and I am going to pull some of that together in a commentary with my sport and politics collaborator Kyle Green.  We are hoping to run that piece in the lead-up to the Super Bowl here in the Twin Cities at the end of January, so stay tuned!

There are two points I’d like to address here, by way of year-end retrospective: “kneeling” and “remembrance.” On kneeling, why do athletes feel the need to protest?

“Why do they do it?” is far and away the most common question I get from journalists and regular folks alike. Underlying this inquiry is the sense (a) that these demonstrations are disrespectful and (b) that professional athletes are super-rich, superstars who should be so satisfied with their lives and salaries and fame that they’d have no reason to complain or be angry, much less act out in public. At best, they see African American athlete activists as spoiled complainers, more interested in politics, making news, and making money than anything else. For many Americans, athletic protests are as incomprehensible as they are inappropriate.

Based on the athletes I’ve talked to and my earlier research on black athletic activism in the 1960s, I see the issue quite differently. Many athletes, perhaps most, are actually fairly apolitical—more interested in practicing and performing at a high level than anything else. For most, this protest and politics thing has been thrust on them by larger events and commitments. In a society that continues to be plagued by disproportionate police brutality, persistent racial gaps, and overt bigotry and bias, they feel compelled to do or say something. Sometimes it is in support of communities of color—their communities—who continue to face persistent racism and discrimination. Sometimes it is quite personal, stemming from their own ongoing individual experiences with racism and discrimination. And almost always it is quite principled and reasoned, with a clear understanding of the costs and consequences (which are far more real and extensive than most of us realize). Athlete activists don’t take their activities lightly or think of them as disrespectful or anti-American. Quite the contrary, they understand activism as consistent with the higher moral standards, ideals, and aspirations of both American democracy and sport culture.

But there is something else here too: It is also the fact that many African American athletes feel like if they don’t speak out, don’t say or do something, then they and their athletic success will be used to justify or rationalize the racial status quo —to make it seem like everything is okay. This was a major motivator for the African American athletes who participated in protests in the year leading up to the 1968 Olympic Games. As high jumper Gene Johnson explained in support of the “Olympic Project for Human Rights:”

“The United States exalts its Olympic star athletes as representatives of a democratic and free society, when millions of Negro and other minority citizens are excluded from decent housing and meaningful employment” (Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 2003, p. 84).

Or, as the OPHR organizing pamphlet put it: “We must no longer allow this country to use black individuals of whatever level to rationalize its treatment of the black masses.” 

So, that’s kneeling, now for remembrance. A few weeks back I was interviewed by a Time reporter for a special 50th anniversary retrospective issue on the tumultuous year of 1968. Among other things, the reporter asked me what my research on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration taught me about the meanings and implications of the protests of Colin Kaepernick and his NFL brethren. “How will we remember what is going on today, 50 years from now,” she wanted to know?

Social scientists like me, I told her, are loath to make predictions. However this topic is one where I was willing to make an exception. I’m pretty confident that one day in the not-to-distant near future, Kaepernick and company will be remembered far more positively across the American populace than is currently the case. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, once the specifics of this moment and the larger racial politics that are unfolding are behind us, these athlete activists come to be revered as courageous, admirable, or even heroic—certainly ahead of their time. If you’re interested, my little quote to this effect can now be found in print on page 92 of the latest issue of Time (dated Dec. 25/Jan. 1) as well as online here.

Such historical re-remembering is a familiar pattern in American culture. It happened to our collective conceptions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali. Perhaps most pertinent to this discussion are the memories that surround the perpetrators of one of the most iconic sports demonstrations of all time, Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 clenched first, victory stand demonstration at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Today, most Americans celebrate Smith and Carlos as heroes of the Civil Rights Movement; back in 1968, they were seen as villains, traitors, and worse.

History and memory—what happened and how we think about what happened—are two different things. All too often, the way we remember and romanticize images, individuals, and events comes at the cost of forgetting all of the actual social issues and context that gave rise to them in the first place. As this year draws to a close and we begin to look to the future, let us not lose sight of the racial disparities and social injustices at the root of the biggest sports story of 2017.

When even Michael Jordan—that erstwhile poster child of the transcendent, apolitical, super-star athlete—jumps into the fray, you know something is up. I am referring, of course, to the public announcement Jordan made Monday. Saying he could “no longer stay silent,” legendary #23 pledged to donate $1 million each to a charity for community-police relations and to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Jordan said, “We need to find solutions that ensure people of color receive fair and equal treatment AND that police officers—who put their lives on the line every day to protect us all—are respected and supported.”Athletic advocacy can play an important role in bringing issues of social injustice to broader public visibility and debate.

But Jordan is not the main story here, at least not when viewed in sociological perspective. The main story, the bigger story, is about all of the athletes and sports organizations who have been speaking out about social issues in one way or the other over the course of the past few months: NBA star and American Olympian Carmelo Anthony urging athletes to quit worrying about their endorsement deals and speak out on police killings; tennis player Serena Williams offering support and then a clenched fist salute on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon; the testimonials of Anthony and fellow NBA stars Chris Paul, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade at the ESPYs; WNBA players and teams, led by the Minnesota Lynx, dressing in support of Black Lives Matter and against police shootings; the NBA moving next year’s annual All-Star game out of North Carolina because of that state’s LGBTQ politics. My hometown paper, The Star Tribune, ran a whole page story in last Sunday’s sports section about a host of athletes taking social justice stands or actions in Minnesota alone.

Let there be no doubt: we live in a new era of athlete awareness and advocacy, unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 1960s.

I believe the roots of this new movement can be traced to LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates tweeting out a picture of themselves in hoodies, with heads bowed in support of Trayvon Martin, a few years back (see also). Others recall when the entire Phoenix Suns team wore jerseys in solidarity with Latinos who felt threatened by proposed anti-immigration legislation in Arizona. Since then, we’ve seen NBA players like Chris Paul threatening to boycott the NBA All-Star Game unless something done to disavow the blatant racism of then-owner Donald Sterling; St. Louis Rams football players entering the field in the “hands up” gesture of Ferguson protestors; and, perhaps most amazingly, the University of Missouri football team using the threat of a boycott to force the removal of their university’s president.

As a scholar who’s done a good bit of work on sport and race and social unrest and social protest over the years—including a book on the 1968 African American athletic protest movement, the activism associated most famously with Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration in Mexico City—I’ve been asked a lot of questions and invited to make a lot of presentations on athlete activism over the past year. So, as all of this has been unfolding, I’ve begun work on a paper situating the most recent activism and advocacy in the context of the protests of the Civil Rights era. Below, a few of the points I’m building the paper around:

1. Athlete Awareness. While public advocacy may be new, social awareness among athletes is not. Athletes, especially elite professional and Olympic athletes, have long been far more educated, intelligent, and aware than prevailing if outdated “dumb-jock” stereotypes allow. The problem, in my view, has not been lack of social awareness and understanding, but barriers to public expression. Anthony has referenced highly lucrative endorsement deals (sometimes offering more renumeration to players than their actual sporting endeavors do), but formal and informal league rules, organizational pressures, and norms about the public roles of athletes all also apply. If there is a new consciousness, in my view, it involves a revitalized understanding of the powerful platform that sports provides athletes who are so inclined to voice their opinions.
2. Larger Context and Connections. Those athletes who have chosen to use their status as public figures to speak out on social issues are not just speaking off the cuff, nor are they isolated malcontents. These public expressions are deliberate and reflective, responding to social issues such as police brutality and profiling or hateful gender or sexuality policies outside of the world of sport, in concert with other public leaders, and more often than not in close communication with other activists and organizers. Perhaps the best and clearest example of this was at the University of Missouri last fall: football players launched their boycott after working with campus leaders on ways to show their support for student on a hunger strike in protest of racial conditions and treatment on campus.Those athletes who have chosen to use their status as public figures to speak out on social issues are not just speaking off the cuff, nor are they isolated malcontents. These public expressions are deliberate and reflective, made in concert with public leaders, activists, and organizers.

3. Black Athletes as Leaders. It almost goes without saying that African American athletes have been the most prominent and powerful figures in this emerging movement (I think all but one of the athletes profiled by the Star Tribune were persons of color)—except that in our perverse “colorblind” culture, we often dodge the opportunity to name race explicitly and talk about it openly. This conversation is important for far more reasons than I can discuss here; it speaks to the unique racial composition of the American sports world, the prominent role of African American athletes in our culture, the centrality of race and racism in American society, and the larger role of sport in the construction, reproduction, and contestation of existing racial hierarchies. At the most basic levels, though, we can consider how sport is both impacted by and a driving force in the larger racial unrest in contemporary America—including the recognition of persistent patterns of racial injustice, emergent movements of resistance and opposition (such as Black Lives Matter), and the countervailing, reactionary movements of containment, denial, and resentment. The role of white athletes will be interesting as today’s movements unfold. At the University of Missouri, white players and coaches supported black activists, and, in the WNBA, star Minnesota Lynx point guard Lindsay Whalen and head coach Cheryl Reeves, both white, lent their support to protesting players. Whether white athletics and athletic leaders continue to step up and assume responsibility remains to be seen. For what it is worth, I’m impressed though not at all surprised the female athletes–including a huge swath of the WBNA–have been such powerful public voices in recent weeks.

Will this advocacy and activism change anything?

The initial answer is not always encouraging. If my study of the 1968 Olympic protests taught me anything, it is that sport protests usually do not change anyone’s mind or political position. Though we tend to heroize Smith and Carlos these days (as we did with the recently deceased Muhammad Ali), the truth is that these athlete advocates were seen as villains and traitors by mainstream Americans in the 1960s. If anything, their actions inspired a good deal of backlash and resentment, probably hardening some lines of conflict and division. Some of that reaction is already unfolding now.

But this doesn’t mean that nothing at all came of athlete activism in the past or today. One of the things that athletic protests and demonstrations can accomplish is forcing Americans who are or were not otherwise interested in such issues to look up from their otherwise comfortable, apolitical lives and pay attention to the social issues around them. So athletic advocacy can, in fact, play an important role in bringing issues of social injustice—police bias and brutality, policies toward LGBTQ Americans—to broader public visibility and debate. I believe it’s already happening.

And all of the money and attention we lavish on athletes and athletics in this country does put athletes in a unique and, on occasion, powerful material position. Witness the events at the University of Missouri: here, we saw athlete activists and their allies using the power afforded to them by virtue of how the institution and the public rely upon them for their athletic performances to force concrete, organizational change. This was amazing, revealing, and essentially unprecedented.

One final point on social and cultural change. When harkening back to 1968, I constantly find myself remembering and trying to remind others that Smith and Carlos not only didn’t change many people’s minds about race problems and civil rights, they didn’t change American norms about the relationships between sport and social change. If fact, they and their allies (as well as their opponents) were caught within prevailing conceptions of sport as a somewhat special, sacred, or apolitical cultural space. To wit: while some saw athlete activists in the 1960s as heroes or villains, public opinion polls showed that most everybody agreed that sport wasn’t a place for politics or, by extension, protest. The two sides simply disagreed on what counted as protest and politics. Those who sided with Smith and Carlos saw them as standing up for what was good, right, and morally just—in the idealistic way that high-minded sport supporters have long celebrated sport; the majority who were against them saw them and their actions as disruptions outside the social status quo.While some saw athlete activists in the 1960s as heroes or villains, public opinion polls conducted showed that most everybody agreed that sport wasn’t a place for politics.

What is at stake here is not just whether we agree with the particular causes of athlete activists. What is also at stake is how we understand sport and athletes in society, especially when it comes to issues of racial justice and social change. Will the cultural stereotypes about athletes change? Can we begin to see sport as something more than an arena for entertainment and release, or some kind of apolitical sacred space? If social change is hard, sometimes cultural change is even harder—so on those questions, I remain cautious and curious.

Okay, I’ll make this quick since it’s a bit dated. After I wrote that little post about Saturday Night Live’s “Beyonce is Black” spoof a couple of weeks back, I had a number of students and friends wanting to know what I actually thought about her Superbowl performance (well, her part in the Coldplay performance featuring Beyonce and Bruno Mars). I’m no music critic (or big Beyonce fan, for that matter) so I hadn’t really taken the bait. However, I did spend some time reading what other people were saying—both about the performance and about the backlash it seems Beyonce experienced.

One piece that really caught my attention was by the Salon blogger Lasha. She was struck by the very different reception that Beyonce experienced than the one that met rapper Kendrick Lamar after his racially pointed and politically charged performance at the Grammys just days later. According to Lasha, it was one more instance of the unfair, sexist policing of African American women’s political expression.

Lasha’s point about the marginalization of black women’s radicalism is well-taken. I also think there is some additional social context worth considering. For one, there are expectations and previous record. I think part of the thing with Beyonce is that her Superbowl performance was perhaps her first “socially conscious art.” This surprised folks—it defied their expectations of the “Single Ladies” singer, upsetting those who didn’t see it coming or didn’t understand where she was coming from (witness my previous post on the SNL spoof).

Even more important, in my view, is the actual social context of the performances: the music industry versus the sportsworld. We Americans have come to expect and accept social consciousness and political radicalism in the music context. We not only do not expect such expression in sports, we actually oppose it. Not all cultural arenas are unique, and there are many things about the world of sport that make it uniquely powerful and complicated. As I written on many occasions—for example, in the piece Kyle Green and I did on this site about politics and sport being strange bedfellows—there are deep cultural norms about sport that make any kind of social statement in the realm of sport extremely complicated and typically controversial, especially where race is involved.

I won’t try to rehearse all of the ways this works, much less how racial movements and politics are implicated (there’s a lot on this in my book on the 1968 African American Olympic protests, if you are interested). But when it comes to statements of protest, unrest, and activism, Americans tend to see sport as somehow unique or special—either because we see sport as somehow sacred or sacrosanct (that is, above politics) or because don’t want our entertainment complicated or sullied by the realities of the non-sport world. So while sexism is clearly at play, there’s at least one other important thing going on—the idealization of sport on its highest, most holy day in America: Super Bowl Sunday.

Have you been following all of the news about Southern fast-food giant Chick-fil-A lately? First, there was the company’s leader coming out against Barack Obama’s support of same-sex marriage; then, last week, Mike Huckabee (former Arkansas governor and current Fox News host) called for a national Chick-fil-A appreciation day (which apparently led to an unprecedented day of sales and profits, including a particularly high-profile meal purchased by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin). Last weekend in the New York Times, UCLA sociologist Edward Walker wrote a provocative op-ed to put all this into historical and sociological context.

The alliance between business corporations and moral leaders isn’t brand new. Indeed, Walker begins by harkening back to the unholy alliances between Baptists and bootleggers in the days of Prohibition. However, the relationships do seem to be becoming more typical and pronounced. Examples range from Harrah’s (the casino chain) organizing their vendors and employees into a coalition to promote for-profit colleges with Students for Academic Choice, described by Walker as “a seemingly grass-roots organization led by students promoting the benefits of ‘postsecondary career-oriented institutions.'”

As Walker explains:

Today, business interests are involved in many efforts to partner with citizen advocacy groups as a corporate tool beyond conventional lobbying. They hire consultants to help them to organize. I estimate, based on my studies of “grass-roots lobbying firms” since the early 1970s, that this subspecialty of corporate lobbying is now a $1 billion-a-year industry.

One billion dollars. That’s not chump change. Walker goes on to suggest that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use “grass-roots-mobilization consultants,” some of which are “independent agencies founded by former political campaign professionals,” others being branches of huge public relations firms. He notes, “Businesses hire these consultants most often when facing protest or controversy, and highly regulated industries appear to be some of the heaviest users of their services.”

This is not just about politics or public relations. “As business has become more politically mobilized and as the field of citizen advocacy organizations has expanded since the 1970s,” Walker explains, “corporations and industry groups have become much more active in financing pro-corporate activists.”

In a time when companies are particularly sensitive to protest groups, threats of boycott and accusations of corporate irresponsibility, corporations need grass-roots support, or at the least the appearance of it, to defend their reputations and ability to make profits.

If Walker highlights the economic side of these corporate practices in this piece, however, there is clearly a huge political aspect as well. In fact, in this election season what may be most interesting and consequential is precisely how politics and economics merge, the lines between them blurring and disappearing. Indeed, in talking with other researchers and practitioners about these developments, I heard a lot about the relationship between buying habits and political views. Apparently, they are so highly correlated that political operatives are now using consumer characteristics strategically to target campaigns and tap potential voters.  They do so, it is worth noting, using tools data and methods from the scholarly social sciences—standard Census demographic data and GIS packages—but what they have that academic analysts do not have access to is the market data supplied by private, for-profit firms.

There’s obviously a lot more to be said about all this. For more about Walker’s views, especially those on “Industry-Driven Activism,” listen to the podcast that our great TSP team did with him in July 2010.

Here in Minneapolis, Earth Day and the Invisible Children campaign to “Cover the Night” clashed just a bit, as we found our own Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden damaged in the name of raising awareness about Joseph Kony and the ongoing atrocities in Uganda. For a lot of people here and elsewhere, the name Kony has certainly become more “famous” with Invisible Children’s recent efforts, but the context has been lacking. Beyond a flashy video and exhortations to do something now—even if it’s causing a lot of expensive damage to public art—many are left without any real idea of what’s happening in Uganda, how Ugandans themselves are working to solve the crisis, and how effective campaigns like Invisible Children and even the individual efforts of well-meaning Americans can really be. Our own Shannon Golden recently interviewed the U of M’s Amy Finnegan, who wrote her dissertation on Invisible Children, about these vexing questions, and now Finnegan has launched a website with other scholars in order to help give a broader view and perspective on Kony, Uganda, and activism. Dr. Finnegan writes:

In response to Kony2012, Making Sense of Kony has some excellent information to contextualize and begin further dialogue on the LRA, northern Uganda and the surrounding region, militarization in Africa, and the role of advocacy. Please check it out and pass it on!

Thanks to Dr. Finnegan for continuing the role of public sociology by taking on such a big, tangled issue and working to help us all understand it better. For those of you who are academics, you’ll also find helpful teaching resources on the new site.