COMMENTARY ARTICLE Never just a game: The language of sport on and off the court

摘要

In this issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, the lead article by John Van Sterkenburg provides a crucial intervention that points to the global role of sport as a pedagogy of race, citizenship and colorblind racism. Challenging the ways the sport media is 'reinforcing racial/ethnic categories and boundaries,' and the manner that 'such daily reconstructions of race and ethnicity strengthen the significance of racial/ethnic categorizations in processes of differentiation among people in modern western societies,' this paper offers an important intervention. Highlighting how the sports media, fans and even policy documents invoke 'racializing language' within Dutch soccer discourses, John Van Sterkenburg elucidates the descriptors and the larger social implications of associating racial otherness with athleticism, physicality and natural ability as opposed to whiteness that is ubiquitously imagined as the bastion of hard work, intelligence and disciplinarity.