NASSS Presidential Address 2020
Channel: NASSS Sport Sociology
Date: 2020-11-07

Jeffrey Montez de Oca delivers his talk "Marketing Politics & Resistance: Colonial Governmentality in Sport Media" at the 2020 NASSS virtual conference. I do not own the images shown in the slide show, they all fall under creative commons or fair use.

I use my presidential address to draw together different strands of my research to understand the world we are experiencing now; as Dr. Cornel West recently said to see clearly so that we better know how to direct our fire. This talk draws on radical Indigenous and Black voices to understand how the NFL’s incorporation of racial justice rhetoric and recognition of state violence against Black people can tell us about contemporary white supremacy and racial capitalism. Specifically, I look at the incorporation of radical Black protest in sport marketing and specific programs of the NFL to see how they form a colonial governmentality. Fred Hampton argued the greatest threat to US imperialism is a multi-racial, socialist solidarity movement. For this reason, capitalists inside and outside of the NFL have every reason to fear the current wave of racial justice activism and especially the activism of Black professional athletes. By appropriating the radical Black protest, sporting capitalists route the liberatory energy of radical Black politics into the very system in systemic racism – racial capitalism. Instead, I suggest we should look at the potential of sport co-operative to create community-based sport spaces outside of the market and capitalist accumulation.