Hello All and welcome to our Webpage! As you will see throughout the following pages, we have collected many items that will highlight the relationship race and gender have with sports. I had originally settled on this topic due to my lifelong involvement in sports which gave me lots of background knowledge and ideas before I even started. Yuanpei later approached me to collaborate, and we were able to refine both of our ideas down to what we have now.
Our first task was to decide the topic of each page. We decided to have the first two pages cover our two main points, race and gender, and then the following three pages be examples of areas where they intersect.
On our first page we chose three items that we thought would do a good job encapsulating a wide range of interactions between race and sports. We first highlighted the unique relationship between the Florida Seminole Tribe and Florida State University athletics. Unlike many sports teams in the US, the university has the tribes permission and full support to use their name and likeness. The image of the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute was the next item we choose. We felt that this was a great, somewhat, early example of black athletes using their global platform to bring awareness and insight change. We finished up our first page with the film 42, using its release poster as our item. The film follows Jackie Robinsons journey to breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier and the unimaginable hardships and abuse he faced throughout and even once he was in the MLB.
Our second main connection to sports was the topic of our second page; gender. The first item we chose came from the 1967 Boston Marathon and is quite famous. The race director, Jock Semple, was upset that Katherine Switzer, a woman, was running in “his” marathon, resulting in the iconic image. We followed that up with a YouTube video Professor Hagan had sent me after my project proposal. The discussion in the video surrounds the differences in accommodations that men’s and women's basketball players got at their respective NCAA tournaments. Closing out the second page Yuanpei found a great report that connects well to our theme. It outlines a boatload of statistics on accessibility and leaders in sports for girls and young women in the US.
The third page is where we began to take both gender and race in sports and apply them to certain areas. On this page we decided to look at the impact outside of the US. The first item we had was another YouTube video, this time from LaLiga, a soccer league in Spain. A player is shown trying to inbound a ball, but before he can, a banana is thrown at him from the stands. Instead of reacting adversely, as this was clearly racially motivated, he calmly bends over and takes a bite. Following this are two articles that I am less familiar with since Yuanpei did this page, but the two topics he chose I was quite intrigued by at first glance.
Next, given the name of this project is media, we focused on the portrayal of minority athletes in sports for our fourth page. Our first item is an article focusing on the way that golf media talked about Tiger Woods. Woods is debatable one of the best golfers of all time and unlike the old school norm, is not white. Our next item is very close to me personally since I play ultimate here at MSU. But it is a criticism of the panel of analysts that selected a preseason top 25 entirely white players when there were players that deserved to be on the list that were not white. We closed the page with a very current topic in sports. The drama between LSU and Iowa in the NCAAW Basketball tournament made waves in the media and then again when peoples initial reactions were almost blatantly racist or racially motivated.
On our final page we decided to focus on money, the one thing that seemingly drives all sports in the US. Upon another suggestion by our wonderful professor, we focused somewhat on HBCU’s and their funding struggles. Our first item is a journal entry completely focused on the financial effects on HBCU’s competitive status with other universities. Our next item discusses USWNT and their lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation. The result of this lawsuit, as outlined in the article, is split pay for both men and women of all earnings from either team. Finally, we finish our project by talking about NIL deals, the new fad in college athletics. Our third item is an article that discussed the positive and negative effects on HBCU’s that the rise of NIL deals has brought.
In our opinion, the piece of information induced me to remember the topic of culture in our curriculum. We mentioned that culture is intersectional with diverse areas including tradition, international, policies, identity, art, customs, and academy. In addition, the reason why culture is related to them is that it not only represents people's think and behave, and is the whole way of living, from beliefs and norms, but also people have a trend to share a common cultural system organize and shape the physical and social world around them, and are in turn shaped by those ideas, behaviors, and physical field. In addition, the information is related to our curriculum because they both illuminated that gender discrimination is omnipresent nationally and culturally. A case in point, a black woman in a workplace has more possibilities to undergo discrimination than a white man because not only people might disdain her due to her colored race but also owing to her gender. Besides, under the culture of patriarchy, a group of people are concerned that women are inferior to men. For instance, in Think Marketing Magazine website, according to “ Women VS Patriarchy: Challenges They Face In Workplaces And How They’re Overcoming Them”, Think Marketing discerned that “ based on a true story, a woman had posted on social media before that some of her colleagues were discussing this matter and their opinions were that some men would actually find jobs if women stopped working. What people don’t know is that this goes under the description of being a ‘Sexist’”. As a result, the information confirmed to me that these people have the implicit denial issue, representing that people recognize the problem but they fail to act because they are emotionally uncomfortable or troubled about it. In this case, these people are aware of being a ‘Sexist’ and gain a little information about it, but they don't take any action, make no behavioral changes and remain apathetic. In conclusion, to overcome gender equality, men not only need to recognize the problem of “ sexism” under the culture of patriarchy, but also, they need to practice behavioral changes without an apathetic perspective and they need to treat the women as if women can accomplish their goals of their work well like the men.