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 are—or ought to be—apolitical has itself never been an apolitical position. Rather, it is a veiled attempt to control which politics are acceptable in the athletic realm, a designation intricately linked to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and more. In Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s 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 it’s not their place to do so. While it’s impossible for a single book to tell the entire history of exclusion in the sporting world, Don’t Stick to Sports looks 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 complicated—of sports as a malleable world where exclusion and inclusion are rarely straight-forward.
Derek Catsam is 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 include Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America’s 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 Humanities at Rhodes University. Catsam appeared in the Emmy award winning PBS “American Experience” documentary, Freedom Riders, and on C- Span’s Book TV.

This title views best in tablet-style eReaders.
This is a set of uncorrected page proofs. It is not a finished book and is not expected to look like one. Errors in spelling, page length, format and so forth will all be corrected by the time the book is published several months from now. Photos and diagrams, which may be included in the finished book, may not be included in this format. Uncorrected proofs are primarily useful so that you, the reader, might know months before actual publication what the author and publisher are offering. If you plan to quote the text in your review, you must check it with the publicist or against the final version. Please contact reviews@rowman.com with any questions. Thank you!