Don't Stick to Sports

The American Athlete’s Fight against Injustice

Derek Charles Catsam

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538144725
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A significant examination of how athletes have fought for inclusion and equality on and off the playing field, despite calls for them to "stick to sports."
The claim that sports are—or ought to be—apolitical has itself never been an apolitical position. Rather, it is a veiled attempt to control which politics are acceptable in the athletic realm, a designation intricately linked to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and more.
In Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete's Fight against Injustice, Derek Charles Catsam carefully explores this disparity. He looks at how, throughout recent sports history in the United States, minority athletes have had to fight every step of the way for their right to compete, and how they continue to fight for equity today. From African Americans and women to LGBTQ+ and religious minorities, Catsam shows how these athletes have taken a stand to address the underlying injustices in sports and society despite being told it's not their place to do so.
While it's impossible for a single book to tell the entire history of exclusion in the sporting world, Don't Stick to Sports looks at key moments from the World War I era to the present to shatter the myth of sports as a meritocracy, of sports-as-equalizer, highlighting the reality as something far more complicated—of sports as a malleable world where exclusion and inclusion are rarely straight-forward.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “The Highest Point of the Game’s Enthusiasm ”: The National Anthem, Patriotism, and the 1918 World Series
• Chapter 2: Of “Dead Sparrows” and “Muscle Molls”: Gender Expectations and Women’s Sport
• Chapter 3: Jackie Robinson, the Army, and Sam Huston College: The Dilemma of the Black Athlete in 1940s America
• Chapter 4: A Tale of Two Cities: The Integration of Professional Sports in Boston and Cleveland
• Chapter 5: The 1960s and the Limits of “Integration” in American College Sports
• Chapter 6: Oh Say Can You See?: Rebellion, Anger, and Contested Americanisms
• Chapter 7: Raised Fists, Black Shorts, and a Fallen Queen: Race, Politics, and Sex-pectations in Track and Field
• Chapter 8: Gaps between Ideals and Reality: Exclusion and Modern Sport
• Conclusion: Taking a Knee: Sport and Politics in Twenty-First-Century America
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author