“They Just Dash Us to the Side”: Race, Gender, and Negotiating Access to Basketball Spaces

Abstract

Using Black Feminist Theory and qualitative data gathered from 20 Black Canadian female U.S. athletic scholarship recipients, this article identifies race–gender barriers to accessing informal athletic spaces for athletic training such as recreation centers and public gyms. I argue that these access barriers are rooted in a sexist anti-Blackness, while also examining the resistance and navigational strategies employed by the participants such as playing back and avoidance and considering how those efforts often led to additional financial expense and psychological and navigational labor. In so doing, I elucidate how the race and gender of the participants intersected to create social and athletic experiences and opportunities that are distinct from existing dominant discourses in collegiate athlete research, which tend to center American and Black males, while often neglecting the specific and more granular experiences of Black (Canadian) female athletes.

Through the Decades: Critical Race Theory and Pathways Forward in Sport Sociology Research

“…Of the 21 articles, 10 (48%) simply mentioned CRT instead of integrating it within the framing or analysis of the studies. In other words, CRT was only discussed briefly about its relevancy in previous studies (Harrison & Coakley, 2020;Markula, 2019;Norman et al, 2022;Wilson & VanLuijk, 2019), future studies (Comeaux & Martin, 2018;George, 2023;McGuire-Adams et al, 2022), or how critics have attacked CRT and how to protect the school of thought (Kusz & Hodler, 2023;Mower, 2023;Newman, 2019). Similarly, three of the four book reviews only briefly mentioned CRT or an extension of the framework (Hodler, 2018;Olive, 2020;Posbergh, 2021).…”