Ethnicity, Sport, Identity

Book excerpt: The struggle for status within sport is a microcosm of the struggle for rights, freedom and recognition within society. Injustices within sport often reflect larger injustices in society as a whole. In South Africa, for example, sport has been crucial in advancing the rights and liberty of oppressed groups. The geographical and chronological range of the essays in Ethnicity, Sport, Identity reveal the global role of sport in this advance. The collection examines cases of discrimination directed at individuals or groups, resulting in their exclusion from full participation in sport and their consequent struggle for inclusion. It shows how ethnic and national identity are sources of social cohesion and political assertion within sport, and it illustrates the manner in which sport has served to project ethnicity in various, often contradictory ways. It depicts sport as an agent of conservatism and radicalism, superiority and subordination, confidence and lack of confidence, and as a source of disenfranchisement and enfranchisement. That sport has been, and continues to be, a potent means of both ethnic restriction and release can no longer be ignored.