Chasing Snakes: Whiteness, White Privilege, and Sport

This chapter explores White privilege in sport which has had global implications for a long time. To understand why White privilege remains so powerful and hard to relinquish, it is important to understand historical frameworks of global power and processes that began in the imperial/colonial era whereby Western (and by implication White) body culture practices were inscribed onto colonized (and by implication black) bodies, simultaneously replacing and subverting local physical cultural practices. We examine these in various contexts in order to unpack how Whiteness and White privilege have shaped sporting discourses globally.