The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports PDF
Preview The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports
THE BLACK MIGRANT ATHLETE SPORTS, MEDIA, AND SOCIETY series editor Aaron Baker, Arizona State University advisory board David L. Andrews, University of Maryland, College Park Andy Billings, University of Alabama Grant Farred, Cornell University Frank Guridy, Columbia University Rachel Joo, Middlebury College Richard King, Washington State University Daniel A. Nathan, Skidmore College Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee T HE BL AC K MIGR A N T AT HL E T E Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports MUNENE FRANJO MWANIKI University of Nebraska Press LINCOLN AND LONDON © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Portions of chapters 2– 4 previously appeared in “Reading the Career of a Kenyan Runner: The Case of Tegla Loroupe,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 47, no. 4 (August 2012): 446– 60, http://irs.sagepub.com/content/47/4/446.full. pdf+html. Final, definitive version of this paper published by sage Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © Munene Franjo Mwaniki. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944082 Set in Minion Pro by John Klopping. For Sarah CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Black African Immigration to the West 1 1. Race and Sport: Situating the Black African Athlete 27 2. Everyday Othering: Boundary Making and Maintenance 48 3. Model Minorities: Origin Stories, Hard Workers, and Humanitarians 72 4. “Bad” Blacks: Contingent Acceptance and Essentialized Blackness 97 5. Immigrant Reception: Nationalism, Identity, Politics, and Resistance 124 6. The Diasporic Athlete: Blackness and Meaning in the African Diaspora 155 7. The Sporting Migrant: Antiblack Racism and the Foreign Other 182 Appendix A: Methodology and Data- Gathering Procedures 191 Appendix B: Individuals in the Study 201 Notes 211 Bibliography 227 Index 239 PREFACE This project was born out of my personal experiences in trying to make sense of the world and my place in it. I grew up, second- generation Kenyan on my father’s side and fourth- generation Croatian on my mother’s, in a small rural town in North Carolina. According to the 2015 census the county I grew up in is around 85 percent white and 2.5 percent black/African American. The county is named after Andrew Jackson and borders the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Reservation. In 2010 the black population was around 2 percent, rounding up, and things were not any more diverse decades earlier when I was a child. All of this to say that in the early nineties the only other black person, let alone African/Kenyan, I knew was my father. My father’s family lived and still lives in Kenya, and while we visited when we had the money, I did not have consistent interaction with them until those who were my age came to the United States for college. My mother’s big Croatian American family all lived and still live in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was at least a ten-h our drive away, so I saw them only once or twice a year. Needless to say, I was rather racially and ethnically isolated from my extended family and within my rural town—b oth from anything African or Kenyan and from the very small local African American population. There were ten black students among the one thousand students in my high school. To escape this isolation—t o see and feel like I was interacting with people who looked like me— I often turned to sport. I played sports, watched them, and even loved the early video games on my Nintendo and Super Nintendo. Sport and the explo- ix
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