The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports

270 Pages·2017·2.02 MB·English

by  Munene Franjo Mwaniki

THE BLACK MIGRANT ATHLETE
SPORTS, MEDIA, AND SOCIETY
series editor
Aaron Baker, Arizona State University
advisory board
David L. Andrews, University of Maryland, College Park
Andy Billings, University of Alabama
Grant Farred, Cornell University
Frank Guridy, Columbia University
Rachel Joo, Middlebury College
Richard King, Washington State University
Daniel A. Nathan, Skidmore College
Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee
T HE BL AC K
MIGR A N T
AT HL E T E
Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports
MUNENE FRANJO MWANIKI
University of Nebraska Press
LINCOLN AND LONDON
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Portions of chapters 2– 4 previously appeared in “Reading
the Career of a Kenyan Runner: The Case of Tegla Loroupe,”
International Review for the Sociology of Sport 47, no. 4 (August
2012): 446– 60, http://irs.sagepub.com/content/47/4/446.full.
pdf+html. Final, definitive version of this paper published by
sage Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © Munene Franjo
Mwaniki.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944082
Set in Minion Pro by John Klopping.
For Sarah

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Black African Immigration to the West 1
1. Race and Sport: Situating the Black African Athlete 27
2. Everyday Othering: Boundary Making and Maintenance 48
3. Model Minorities: Origin Stories, Hard Workers, and
Humanitarians 72
4. “Bad” Blacks: Contingent Acceptance and Essentialized
Blackness 97
5. Immigrant Reception: Nationalism, Identity, Politics, and
Resistance 124
6. The Diasporic Athlete: Blackness and Meaning in the African
Diaspora 155
7. The Sporting Migrant: Antiblack Racism and the Foreign
Other 182
Appendix A: Methodology and Data- Gathering Procedures 191
Appendix B: Individuals in the Study 201
Notes 211
Bibliography 227
Index 239

PREFACE
This project was born out of my personal experiences in trying to make
sense of the world and my place in it. I grew up, second- generation
Kenyan on my father’s side and fourth- generation Croatian on my
mother’s, in a small rural town in North Carolina. According to the
2015 census the county I grew up in is around 85 percent white and 2.5
percent black/African American. The county is named after Andrew
Jackson and borders the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Reservation.
In 2010 the black population was around 2 percent, rounding up, and
things were not any more diverse decades earlier when I was a child.
All of this to say that in the early nineties the only other black person,
let alone African/Kenyan, I knew was my father. My father’s family
lived and still lives in Kenya, and while we visited when we had the
money, I did not have consistent interaction with them until those
who were my age came to the United States for college. My mother’s
big Croatian American family all lived and still live in and around
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was at least a ten-h our drive away,
so I saw them only once or twice a year.
Needless to say, I was rather racially and ethnically isolated from
my extended family and within my rural town—b oth from anything
African or Kenyan and from the very small local African American
population. There were ten black students among the one thousand
students in my high school. To escape this isolation—t o see and feel
like I was interacting with people who looked like me— I often turned
to sport. I played sports, watched them, and even loved the early video
games on my Nintendo and Super Nintendo. Sport and the explo-
ix