Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Invincible bodies: American sport media’s racialization of Black and white college football players

2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1012690218809317

1461-7218

Siduri Haslerig, Rican Vue, Sara E. Grummert,

Media Studies and Communication

As the most watched college sport broadcast of all time, the US Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)’s College GameDay (CGD) is one source of socialization that primes US audiences to make certain associations. Through disaggregated analysis of regular- and post-season CGD pre-game and game-of-the-week broadcasts during the 2016 football season, the authors examine the coverage of players’ physicality and injuries, contrasting the portrayals of Black and white American football players. The paper documents prominent narratives that promoted Black players as relatively invulnerable, while making the case that these narratives serve to prime audiences to ascribe inhuman abilities to Black people and thereby reinforce white supremacist ideology.