Race, Protest, and the Olympics: Lessons from a Decade of Activism and Backlash in American Sports
Abstract
In this written version of his 2025 Center for Sociocultural Sport and Olympic Research plenary address, the American sport sociologist Douglas Hartmann uses the last decade of race-based activism and populist backlash in the United States to explore the ways in which protest challenges sport and the Olympic Movement to live up to their high ideals. The talk begins with an overview of the recent history of activism and populist backlash in American sport. Hartmann then identifies three analytical moves needed to make sense of this history that have implications for Olympic theory and practice: (1) situating sport in sociopolitical context; (2) attending to the actual impacts of sport-based movements and struggles, especially in the cultural realm; and (3) grappling with the centrality of subnational collective identities such as race. He develops these points via a “critical dramaturgical perspective” that (a) emphasizes the symbolic and communicative role of sport in modern societies and (b) reveals sport’s fraught relationships to politics, power, human rights, and social change. Hartmann argues that this framework can guide researchers and practitioners toward a more careful, substantive engagement with movements across a range of issues and political orientations in international sport—a perspective that can help the Olympic Movement itself play a clarifying and even unifying role during an extraordinarily unsettled time in world history.
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