Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams [Hardcover]

Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager whose hoop dreams include playing in the NBA. When a private high school in Texas recruits him under the guise of an athletic scholarship, he believes he’s one step closer. Instead, he becomes entangled in a system that exploits young Black athletes through the F-1 student visa program. InBasketball Trafficking, Javier Wallace follows Tito’s journey from international tournaments and high school to his near deportation, exposing the underbelly of the basketball pipeline that stretches across borders. Wallace situates Tito’s experience within a broader framework of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and the unchecked power of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and US immigration system. Tito’s story is more than a sports story—it is an urgent account of the policing and manipulation of Black male athletic labor for institutional profit. Prompting readers to consider how the global athletic industrial complex extracts and discards Black labor, Wallace demands that readers see young Black athletes like Tito not just as bodies for entertainment but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.USJavier Wallace examines the story of how a young Black Panamanian teenager navigates basketball trafficking, labor exploitation, and immigration while trying to make it from high school to college basketball in the United States.Javier Wallace is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program of Education at Duke University.“Basketball Traffickingprovides an intimate look at the complex relationships between basketball players, coaches, parents, and mentors in the highs and lows of creating pipelines of opportunities for young Black men in Panama seeking to pursue their hoop dreams in the United States. It also powerfully sounds the alarm on the need to protect young international student athletes who, due to anti-Black citizenship and immigration policies, are too often viewed l3!