Pro Football And The Proliferation Of Protest

Pro Football and the Proliferation of Protest: Anthem Kneeling and Standing in a Divided America examines the take-a-knee NFL protests, a trend that has led to deep political divisiveness in America. The author explores this phenomenon by incorporating analysis of media coverage, impact on attitudes and behaviors, and racial, religious, gendered, and political perspectives. The analysis allows readers to recognize both positive and negative prejudice and to proscribe possible solutions for political divisiveness. Protesting, anthems, ceremonies, and media coverage all demonstrate that this issue is a communication issue. This book examines the voices on both sides of the kneeling controversy in order to uncover the points at which one side is communicating and the other side refuses to listen. The studies in this volume look at the protest through four lenses: historically, through media coverage , through impact on public behaviors and attitudes, and from racial, religious, gendered, and political identification perspectives. The contributors worked in conjunction with one another, incorporating different viewpoints into each chapter as they were completed. All studies were conducted under the guidance of the book’s editor to separate the work effectively and to end in a set of voices that complement each other and allow for overall conclusions and recommendations. This book is useful for a wide range of scholars including race, religion, political studies, gender studies, and communication studies.

This is the first book to explore the full significance of sport fans and fandom from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, across different sports, communities and levels of engagement. It gives a comprehensive overview of the undeniable economic and cultural influence of sport industries for which fans are the driving force. The book examines different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of fans, including typologies of fandom, and presents cutting-edge discussion across broad thematic areas such as performance and identity, the business of fandom, and fandom and media. It considers the experiences of diverse and marginalized fan groups, with an emphasis on intersectional analysis, and shines new light on key contemporary themes such as fan activism, violence and deviance, mobility and migration, and the transformative effects of digital and social media. This volume includes chapters by many of the leading scholars responsible for having laid the foundation for sport fan research as well as early-career scholars who examine the newest developments in media technologies, legalized betting, gaming, and fantasy sports. Including perspectives from disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, management, economics, and media studies, this book is essential reading for anybody interested in the study of sport and wider society or fans and subcultures more broadly.

When we talk about patriotism in America, we tend to mean one form: the version captured in shared celebrations like the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. But as Ben Railton argues, that celebratory patriotism is just one of four distinct forms: celebratory, the communal expression of an idealized America; mythic, the creation of national myths that exclude certain communities; active, acts of service and sacrifice for the nation; and critical, arguments for how the nation has fallen short of its ideals that seek to move us toward that more perfect union. In Of Thee I Sing, Railton defines those four forms of American patriotism, using the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as examples of each type, and traces them across our histories. Doing so allows us to reframe seemingly familiar histories such as the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Greatest Generation, as well as texts such as the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. And it helps us rediscover forgotten histories and figures, from Revolutionary War Loyalists and the World War I Espionage and Sedition Acts to active patriots like Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor and the suffragist Silent Sentinels to critical patriotic authors like William Apess and James Baldwin. Tracing the contested history of American patriotism also helps us better understand many of our 21st century debates: from Donald Trump’s divisive deployment of celebratory and mythic forms of patriotism to the backlash to the critical patriotisms expressed by Colin Kaepernick and the 1619 Project. Only by engaging with the multiple forms of American patriotism, past and present, can we begin to move forward toward a more perfect union that we all can celebrate.

This book illustrates how community and connection have changed over time and how they are currently thriving in the online world. Brooke Dunbar-Treadwell offers support and examples from research, society, and pop culture to address how online spaces can bring us a sense of community if we choose connection.

A sweeping history of transformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation. In Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described racism as "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," a totalizing social theory that could only be confronted with an equally massive response, by "restructuring the whole of American society." A Wider Type of Freedom provides a survey of the truly transformative visions of racial justice in the United States, an often-hidden history that has produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework. A Wider Type of Freedom brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. Daniel Martinez HoSang taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. From the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and the struggle to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, he reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking "equal rights" within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.

The 1960s were a tumultuous period in U.S. history and the sporting world was not immune to the decade's upturn of tradition. As war in Southeast Asia, civil unrest at home and political assassinations rocked the nation, professional football struggled to attract fans. While some players fought for civil rights and others fought overseas, the ideological divides behind the protests and riots in the streets spilled into the locker rooms, and athletes increasingly brought their political beliefs into the sports world. This history describes how a decade of social upheaval affected life on the gridiron, and the personalities and events that shaped the game. The debut of the Super Bowl, soon to become a fixture of American culture, marked a professional sport on the rise. Increasingly lucrative television contracts and innovations in the filming and broadcasting of games expanded pro football's audiences. An authoritarian old guard, best represented by the revered Vince Lombardi, began to give way as star players like Joe Namath commanded new levels of pay and power. And at last, all teams fielded African American players, belatedly beginning the correction of the sport's greatest wrong.

This volume provides a concise but authoritative overview of the NFL national anthem protests and the fierce debates they have sparked about patriotism, constitutional rights, military service, police brutality, and social justice. This book in the 21st Century Turning Points series is a one-stop resource for understanding the people and events changing America today. This volume is devoted to the NFL national anthem protests, which have triggered both fierce condemnation and spirited defenses since August 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the anthem to bring attention to the issues of social injustice and police brutality. NFL National Anthem Protests not only surveys the events that led to Kaepernick's decision but also traces the fallout from that choice—the decision by other players to join him, the angry response from some NFL fans and President Trump himself, and the frantic efforts of the league to keep the controversy from consuming the NFL. The book also uses those events and responses as a vehicle for deeper examinations of all of the issues they have raised, including the nature of peaceful protest, the place of the flag in American life, the constitutional parameters of free speech, and the facts about police brutality and racial discrimination in America.

Recent years have been among the most challenging in NFL history, culminating in the 2020-21 coronavirus and social justice issues. Yet a complete understanding of where the NFL is today begins with a five-year period that was the most transformative for the league. From 1957 to 1962, the NFL saw: the advent of unionization, with a landmark Supreme Court decision; the legendary 1958 title game, the first to go into sudden death overtime; a challenge from the American Football League that would have important consequences for decades; the introduction of computerization and statistical analysis; the first steps towards globalization; and the hiring of legends Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, who both contributed to the league's growing mythology. This book describes in detail the key events that helped shape the modern NFL, and why this period was so momentous to the league and its fans.