Every Picture Tells a Story: Racial Representation on Sports Illustrated Covers

It could be stated without hyperbole that America is a society of "sports fanatics." Each spring hundreds of thousands of people across the country become caught up in the phenomenon known as "March Madness," which is a tournament to decide the best college basketball team of the year. People who possess little interest and even less knowledge of collegiate basketball rush to fill out their "brackets" for office pools and question the wisdom (and parentage) of the tournament selection committee for including Nowhere State while Big Time U. gets snubbed. The Super Bowl is consistently the highest-rated television program of the year and has nearly been elevated to the status of a national holiday. Each year now as the summer wanes, fans eagerly await, and debate, the release of the NCAA college football rankings: and what would the holiday season be without the latest BCS (Bowl Championship Series) controversy? Spring training is the signal to fans from coast to coast that the "boys of summer" are coming back to town: "Do you think the Cubbies will finally win it this year?" Sport is an important social institution in American society. Bloom and Willard write it is a "complex cultural form that operates on many levels simultaneously, gaining new meanings as they are experienced and read within different historical, political, and social contexts" (4). Describing participation levels, Al Neuharth notes that when excluding professional, collegiate, and high school and elementary school athletes, there are still thousands of Americans who participate in various community and workplace-based sports leagues, tens of millions attending professional sporting events each year, and many more watching sports on television (A15). Furthermore, sport has played a major role in both maintaining and deconstructing various systems of stratification in the United States. For example, Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 requires educational programs receiving federal money to grant equal access to women. While this access goes well beyond athletics, this component has perhaps received the most attention, and many argue this piece of legislation has led to an entire generation of girls and women being able to envision and achieve their "sports dreams." Another example, and the primary focus of this paper, concerns the American system of racial stratification. According to Bloom and Willard, sports in the twenty-first century have become a critically important cultural terrain on which most racialized groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and ethnic identities (1). Professional sports have historically been segregated. Though official policies were not always in place, it was "understood": sports were usually reserved for "whites only." Moreover, sports were used to maintain and reinforce the racial status quo. Even as racial barriers began to crumble, de facto segregation restricted minority participation and reinforced notions of white racial superiority. An example of this process can be found in professional baseball. Major league teams, around 1953, operated with what has been referred to as "the fifty percent color line." The essence of this unwritten policy was that teams could field up to four blacks out of the nine total players, but no more than that. Roger Kahn wrote that this de facto color line was to ensure the continued majority presence, and dominance, of whites in "America's pastime": to have "five blacks playing with four whites supposedly threatened the old order" (172). In spite of this sordid history of discrimination and segregation, sport was among one of the first social institutions to integrate, accept, and eventually embrace minority participants. Some examples include Jack Johnson (boxing) in 1897, Kenny Washington (football) in 1946, Jackie Robinson (baseball) in 1947, Althea Gibson (tennis) and Earl Lloyd (basketball) in 1950, and Lee Elder (golf) in 1975. …