Answering the Question on a ‘Racial Reckoning’: Resistance and Persistence in US Sporting Representations

Abstract

Just two years ago, we published an editorial in the pages of this journal with a question embedded in the title: "In the Wake of a 'Racial Reckoning': Resistance… or Persistence in Sporting Representations?" (Hardin & Billings, 2022). That editorial was published in the shadow of the global pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by U.S. law enforcement, with a range of international studies assessing issues of race and ethnicity in the sporting context. We wondered, given the "racial reckoning" that seemed to be a groundswell moment in the U.S. --with promise for social justice in our most important institutions (including the justice system and public higher education) -whether future studies might see progress in the disparate treatment of athletes who are identified in racialized terms.We return with the answer to our question, based on the articles in this edition, written by scholars who use an array of methodological approaches to examine communication in both mediated and interpersonal contexts. Because race and ethnicity are continually (re)negotiated within societies, the warrant for revisiting key issues within these lenses is well justified. Even the opening manuscript in the issue is a reconsideration of the Black criminal stereotype that Anderson and Raney (2018) advanced in this same journal six years prior. What they find in terms of trendlines is something reverberating through the rest of the issue: Mark Twain's attributed quotation that "history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes."We note that all of the work published in this issue is grounded in the U.S. context, just two years after the promise of an "inflection point" for racial justice