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Section One: The Fundamentals
A) Keywords
Exercise 1:
Briefly (in 100 words or less) define one of the keywords in the padlet (including one that you. may have added yourself).
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Praxis: In one of Hylton’s main points for CRT he discusses ‘CRT as a tool for anti-racist praxis’. Praxis meanings, the practice of theory applied to real life, or that practice and theory cannot exist without each other. Using this term with CRT tells us that CRT will only be as successful as it is used. It needs to be acted on to create change.
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B) Representing Race
Exercise 2: Notebook Prompt
In about 50-70 words, consider Joel Bervell’s question: why do we feel the need to extrapolate the athleticism of one Black athlete to all Black people when we do not do the same for white athletes?
Try to think of examples when this happens, making sure to reflect on your own positionality.
| Bervell’s question is asked to make us think about why the treatment of racialized, or black people, are different from white people, and discuss the harm in essentializing racialized or black experiences. To make one black persons experience or athletisim represent all black peoples experiences, perpetuates the dehumanization of black people, as you are erasing each athlete or persons individual efforts in ways that we do not apply or essentialize white people.
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C) Gender, Race & Sport
Exercise 3: Notebook Prompt
What are some strategies for resistance that Rajack and Joseph identify in their article as a means of pushing back against and resisting misogynoir?
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Rajack and Josephs points for resisting misogynoir:
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Section Two: Making Connections
A) Athlete Activism
Exercise 3: Padlet Prompt
Do athletes have a responsibility to use their platform for social change? Why or why not? Please remember to record your response in both the padlet below and in your Notebook.
“Like anyone, if you feel called by your purpose to do and be a part of activism work I don’t think anything should stop you, the same way I don’t think it needs to hold back athletes. Even more, you aren’t an athlete to be a celebrity, you’re an athlete because you have an accessional talent in your sport. Activism shouldn’t be something you do if you ever feel shy about it.”
B) Athlete Activism & Feminism
Exercise 4: Complete the activities
Exercise 5: Notebook Prompt
What do the authors of the article call for as a way of challenging how mainstream sports journalism privileges neoliberal feminist concerns? (100 words max.)
| The authors of this article call for the disruption of traditional sports media and journalism, and that the historical patterns or status quo of sports media need to expand if they want to go beyond covering just neoliberal acts of feminism.
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C) Corporate social justice
Exercise 6: Padlet Poll
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In Favour:
I believe sports leagues should back their athletes and support sports activism. I think this is especially necessary in leagues like the NFL, the NBA, or the WNBA, where these leagues are sustained by black athletes who are people traditional marginalized in white supremacist institutions. If your organization makes it profit off of the entertainment or skill of black and marginalized folks, then I think organizations owe it to these players to back their calls for more support and deconstruction of oppressive systems.
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Section Three: Taking a shot
Module Assignment (submit as part of notebook and separately through Blackboard mini assignment #1 portal)
Indian Horse is a story that follows the life of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway boy whose life we witness from childhood into adulthood. Saul’s family hid him from Indian Agents so that he would not be taken to residential school. Tragedy after tragedy fall onto his family as they try to escape the colonial structures that entrap their family, and Saul ends up in St. Jerome Indian Residential School in White River.
There Saul is introduced to hockey. His talent grows exponentially and Father Leboutilier’s notices this too and makes Saul his star player. As Saul’s skills grow, hockey provides him new opportunities. At the same time these opportunities are exposing Saul to more interactions of violence from white players, coaches, and teams. This violence takes a toll of Saul and he becomes aggressive and violent back to his oppressors and this attitude results in Saul losing the opportunity to play for the Toronto Maple Leaf’s feeder team. Saul is now homeless and an alcoholic, how he was treated playing hockey ruined his life. We then get to follow Saul as he comes to the understanding that hockey was his escape in residential school from the sexual abuse he endured from Father Leboutilier, and get to witness Saul rebuild his relationship with hockey in a way that heals him from his past trauma and brings him closer to his Ojibway culture, separate from the white settlers that would attack and harm Saul.
Settlers narrativeize Saul as a dirty, aggressive, unprofessional player, and this treatment participates in Saul losing opportunities that white players of his skill would flourish in. He does not get the same chance due to how the racism he faces has shaped his life. The understand of hockey then becomes that hockey makes no room for Indigenous people or differences outside the white male settler stereotype. Using a gendered lens, if Saul were an Indigenous women, it could be suggested that this story could end up even more violent, with possibilities of this Indigenous woman murdered, especially considering that status of MMIWG in Canada currently. Overall, this story of sport is intrinsically linked to racial relations and in this story uphold racial hierarchy and violence, suggesting to us that sports never occur in a vacuum and can be the main source of racial violence.
