"Darwin's Athletes": Sports & Ethnicity (SP# 13)

Hollywood’s portrayal of sport in the African American culture varies respectfully with that of the Hoop Dreams documentary.  While media serves as the ultimate source for falsely portraying the African American culture as a whole, it is inexcusably evident that media holds a sense of negative representation of African American athletes in society. Hoop Dreams is a documentary featuring the struggle of two young inner city boys from Chicago simply battling the various challenges they faced while trying to become college basketball players for a ‘ticket out of the projects’. This seems to be a recurring story in Hollywood sport films that largely feature African American athletes. For example, The Blind Side is a newly popular film based off of the true story of a current NFL player’s life. This movie serves as a prime example of a Hollywood film that has significantly and stereotypically portrayed the life of an African American athlete. Although the story is based off of a true story, Hollywood dramatized his story and ultimately worsened his backgrounds and upbringing. Hollywood succeeded in creating the typical film about an African American athlete growing up in the projects and solely counting on success in sport as the only way out of his harmful upbringing.

Because money and power run today’s society, money and power are ultimately measured through an individual’s success. In Hollywood, an African American athlete’s success is mainly measured through their accomplishments in effort to escape the harmful areas of their upbringings.  In Hollywood films, racism is terribly evident both in effort to prevail and exemplify what racism was like in the past, and in order to show that racism still lives in society today.

While I do not believe sport is damaging or diminishing the Black American, I do believe that critical analysis of stereotypical opinions can essentially prove to be negatively representing the African American culture through sport. Sport is not preserving the myth of race. I believe that current sport is becoming blind to color. While racism was once an order of daily functionality, today, some of the most respected and famous athletes are African Americans, and their legacies are certainly not being diminished!