Feature: Sport and Human Rights
No.48
September 2006
 
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Activist Athletes and Human Rights: Some Preliminary Research Notes
Peter Kaufman

 

Abstract
Although we generally do not think of athletes as being engaged in the struggle to end human rights abuses, there are numerous examples in the history of sports of athletes using the playing field for political purposes. Across the globe, athletes have joined in the struggle to end such atrocities as racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnic cleansing, war, ableism, environmental destruction and labor abuses. Although most athletes steer clear of political issues and try to remain objective or indifferent, those who do venture into the realm of political discourse make an interesting case study. In an effort to better understand why some athletes feel compelled to mesh the role of athlete with the role of social activist, I have been collecting interviews and gathering media accounts of athletes who engage in social and political activism while in their role as athlete. What follows is a brief discussion of some preliminary findings.

Activist Athletes and Human Rights: Some Preliminary Research Notes
One of the most enduring images in sports within the past one hundred years is that of United States sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal dias for the 200 meter sprint at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, Mexico. Gold-medal winner Smith and bronze-medal winner Carlos stood barefoot on the podium with their fists raised in the infamous Black Power salute. As later recounted by Smith, their gesture was a well-planned symbolic statement: “My raised right hand stood for the power in Black America. Carlos’s raised left hand stood for the unity of Black America. Together they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for Black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for Black poverty in racist America. The totality of our efforts was the regaining of Black dignity” (Edwards, 1969).
Smith and Carlos were involved with the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). OPHR was formed by sociologist Harry Edwards to encourage Black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in protest of the injustices that Blacks experienced in the United States. When the boycott fell through, athletes decided upon their own personal protests of which Smith and Carlos’ is by far the most well known.
Although the symbolic, non-violent protest of Smith and Carlos is one of the most famous examples of athletic activism, it is by no means the only one. Sports history is filled with examples of athletes using the playing field as a medium to publicize violations in human rights. Issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnic cleansing, war, ableism, environmental destruction and labor abuses have been touted by athletes across the globe in an effort to have such abuses eradicated. While most athletes do not engage in social and political activism, it is interesting to consider why some athletes do feel compelled to mesh the role of athlete with the role of social activist. In an effort to address this issue, I have been collecting interviews and gathering media accounts of athletes who engage in social and political activism while in their role as athlete. This article will offer some preliminary findings of my research.
Sport sociologist Stanley Eitzen (1999) suggests that individuals who engage in sport are no more likely to develop positive social values such as good citizenship than their non-athletic peers. However, some athletes have been able to “walk in the shoes of others” and recognize that they are not, nor should they be, unaffected by the suffering of strangers. For Kevin McMahon, a two-time U.S. Olympian and national champion in the hammer throw, this attitude of connectedness with others became particularly salient when he realized he was benefiting directly from the unjust working conditions of Third World laborers. For McMahon, the issue was the sweatshop labor that produced the clothes he used to wear so proudly. One day while driving home from practice he was listening to a radio program and the host was doing a show about human rights violations in the Central American sweatshops that manufacture NBA jerseys. In an interview, he shared how he was particularly bothered by the report when he realized these “people are doing honest work and they’re being exploited.” He then began to think about his own involvement in this situation: “And then it really hit home that, wait a minute, I might not be an NBA basketball player, but I do have a form in my life when I walk out with logos all over me and it made me really look at that for the very first time.” The more he thought about it, the more powerful the issue became, and in his interview he continued:
It was a real difficult time for my conscience because I previously had no qualms wearing Reebok or Adidas or whatever. I’m an athlete, so it was cool that that’s what you were wearing. And it was free. Why wouldn’t you wear it? But it nearly sickened me to think that for those however many years I was advertising for these people. That I was promoting their stuff. That I, in my ignorance, had possibly caused harm to these people that are just being exploited. And I think there was that sense of guilt and that sense of responsibility. If you just look at the countries that they’ve [the sportswear companies] hopped from one to the other, it’s a who’s who of countries that really desperately need jobs, desperately need money and they take advantage of that. And it’s great that they give them jobs but they could treat them more like human beings.

In sociological terms, McMahon was being reflexive–he was recognizing the inherent biases in his own actions and, subsequently, how these actions were detrimental to the lives of others. Major League Baseball’s Carlos Delgado provides a similar example. In 2004, Delgado was an All Star baseball player for the Toronto Blue Jays when he protested the United States invasion of Iraq by not standing for the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh inning of every baseball game. Delgado’s decision to be one of the only professional athletes in a major North American sport to protest the war in Iraq is “rooted in his native Puerto Rico, where for six decades the US Navy tested myriad weapons by bombing the small island of Vieques off the country’s eastern coast” (Pollak, 2004, p. 12). After one of these bombs killed a civilian in 1999, Delgado got involved in the protest movement to stop the United States Navy bombings on Vieques (which was finally ended in May 2003). For Delgado, the decision to become an activist not only grew out of his social relationships but also his cultural milieu. Like Kevin McMahon, Carlos Delgado does not see his role as an athlete as being mutually exclusive from his role as activist. In fact, both athletes used their connection to sport to bolster and justify their argument for becoming an activist and fighting against what they perceive to be abuses in human rights.
One of the most famous protests against human rights abuses occurred when Muhammad Ali refused induction into the United States Army during the Vietnam War. At the time, Ali was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world but his deep religious beliefs gave him the conviction to refuse the draft and protest the human rights abuses occurring in Southeast Asia. In defending his decision not to be inducted, Ali stated eloquently:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years (quoted in Marqusee, 1999, pp. 214-5).

That there are indeed athletes who become activists is somewhat fascinating especially given the culture of sports, particularly in the United States. The phenomena of the activist athletes, no matter how small their number, begs the question of how and why they became activists. Why anyone becomes an activists and attempts to “make history” (Flacks 1988) is a question that has intrigued sociologists, particularly those who study social movements and social change (McAdam 1986, 1988; Snow, Zurcher & Ekland-Olson, 1986). Much of this work employed ideas from network analysis to explain the process through which an individual assumes the personal and social identity of an activist. In this framework, it is not so much the character traits of individuals but rather, the social interactions in which they find themselves. Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994) point out that social behavior does not arise from individuals’ norms and attributes nor does it arise from the categories in which people find themselves (or place themselves); rather, social behavior arises from their involvement in structured social relations: “One can never simply appeal to such attributes as class membership or class consciousness, political party affiliation, age, gender, social status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, sexual orientation, psychological predispositions, and so on, in order to explain why people behave the way they do” (pp. 1414-5). Instead, we need to focus on their patterns of relationships.
The importance of social relationships for cultivating an activist’s identity is clearly evident in the athletes I have interviewed. When asked to recount how they developed their activist consciousness, many of these athletes point to family members, coaches and friends as their guiding influence. For example, consider the case of Toni Smith, the young woman from the United States who found herself in a firestorm of world-wide media attention when she turned her back to the flag before her Manhattanville College basketball games. For Toni, the structured social relations that led her to activism can be traced to her family and her peers:
“Both my grandmothers were very active. On one side she was very active in forming unions and workers’ rights. My grandmother on the other side was also kind of fighting for the same things during that time. And my mother and my parents are very active in the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, also unionizing people and workers’ rights. So I remember going to marches and events when I was younger although I didn’t fully know the significance. Like I remember going to a lot of anti apartheid movements and UFT [United Federation of Teachers] marches and stuff. [In college] I became very, very aware my first semesters. I also met a few people who were in my classes who were already very politically active and I went to events with them. And that combined with my family who has always been political, and I think they were kind of waiting for me to bust out of my shell or be political or show some signs of promise”.

Although many activist athletes seem to fit the model put forth by the network theorists that activism arises out of the interactional context in which one finds oneself, there is still something distinctive about their situation. Unlike most other activists whose actions not only emanate from their social relations but also transpire within the company of these social relations, the activist athlete is often acting alone. The group that influenced and inspired their actions is usually (and literally) sitting on the sidelines. Most activists have the luxury, if we can call it that, of exerting their agency in the supportive community of others. For such activists, like the Freedom Riders that McAdam (1988) studied, social relationships not only cultivated their activist orientation but such relationships also served as the socially interactive content and context through which their actions occurred. However, the activist athlete must be prepared to stand alone and bear the brunt of the attention. Although activist athletes may have a network of supporters, these supporters are usually not fellow athletes and are therefore relegated to a backstage location. When an athlete makes a political statement on the playing field, she or he is often unaccompanied during the protest and consequently the reactions to the activism are aimed directly at the athlete. This “spotlight effect” may be a significant detriment to athletic activism and is one of the reasons why so few athletes assume the role of activist.

Conclusion
The athletes I am studying have engaged in social action to address human rights abuses across the globe. Hopefully, other athletes will heed their stories and follow their examples. Critics of activist athletes often argue that athletes should play not pontificate and that the playing field is no place for political protests. But how are athletes different than business people, doctors and office workers? And how is the playing field any different than the board room, the office or the town square? No single group should be excluded from engaging in thoughtful political and social discourse nor should any group have a monopoly on such issues. This point was suggested to me in an interview with Bradley Saul, a former professional cyclist and founder of Organic Athletes, an organization dedicated to using sport to foster social change: “As citizens, we have an obligation to be informed. [And] one does have an obligation to be aware of injustices and to do something about them in whatever capacity. And if you’re an athlete well then you can do it through the tools you have as an athlete.”
Sport in contemporary society has tremendous national and international consequences. Socially, politically, economically and culturally, it is hard to identify another social institution (with the exception of religion) that has such a wide scope of influence. In this context, athletes should not only be allowed to express themselves, they should be encouraged to do so. As members of the global community, we should expect athletes to be informed, concerned and proactive. Moreover, we should not be so naive to believe that sport and politics do not mix. Once asked to speak about the intersection of religion and politics, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means” (Gandhi, 1957). I think we can learn from this insight and say the same about athletics: Those who say that sport has nothing to do with politics do not know what sport means.

References
Eitzen, S. D. (1999). Fair and foul: Beyond the myths and paradoxes of sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Edwards, H. (1969). The revolt of the black athlete. New York: Free Press.
Emirbayer, M. & Goodwin, J. (1994). Network analysis, culture, and the problem of agency. American Journal of Sociology, 99, 1411-1454.
Flacks, R. (1988). Making history: The American left and the American mind. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gandhi, M. (1957). An autobiography. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marqusee, M. (1999). Redemption song: Muhammad Ali and the spirit of the sixties. New York, NY: Verso.
McAdam, D. (1986). Recruitment to high risk activism: The case of freedom summer. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 64-90.
McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom summer. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pollak, R. (2004). Patriot at the bat. The Nation, September 13, 2004.
Snow, D. A., L. A. Zurcher, Jr., & S. Ekland-Olson. (1980). Social networks and social movements: A microstructural approach to differential recruitment.” American Sociological Review, 45,787-801.


Contact:
Dr. Peter Kaufman
State University of New York at New Paltz
New Paltz, New York
USA
kaufmanp@newpaltz.edu





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