Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athletes Fight against Injustice [Hardcover]

A significant examination of how athletes have fought for inclusion and equality on and off the playing field, despite calls for them to stick to sports.
The claim that sports areor ought to beapolitical has itself never been an apolitical position. Rather, it is a veiled attempt to controlwhichpolitics are acceptable in the athletic realm, a designation intricately linked to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and more.
InDon't Stick to Sports: The American Athletes Fight against Injustice, Derek Charles Catsam carefully explores this disparity. He looks at how, throughout recent sports history in the United States, minority athletes have had to fight every step of the way for their right to compete, and how they continue to fight for equity today. From African Americans and women to LGBTQ+ and religious minorities, Catsam shows how these athletes have taken a stand to address the underlying injustices in sports and society despite being told its not their place to do so.
While its impossible for a single book to tell the entire history of exclusion in the sporting world,Dont Stick to Sportslooks at key moments from the World War I era to the present to shatter the myth of sports as a meritocracy, of sports-as-equalizer, highlighting the reality as something far more complicatedof sports as a malleable world where exclusion and inclusion are rarely straight-forward.

Derek Catsamis professor of history and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin where he teaches courses on race, politics, and sports. His most recent books includeBeyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazils 2014 World CupandFlashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled Americas Anti-Apartheid Movement. Catsam has won awards, fellowships, and grants from a number of respected institutions and was named the 2016 Hugh Le May Fellow in the HumanlÃ/