Papers by Assistant Professor of Sociology Alex Manning were recently published online by Sociology Compass and the European Journal for Sport and Society.
“Racialized parenting in the United States” appears in Sociology Compass and focuses on how Black parents approach raising children in the racialized worlds in which they live.
Manning said that “to mitigate the disadvantages caused by racism, Black parents use various intentional racialized parenting approaches to instill in their children a resilience to a racist social world.”
He summarized academic research on how Black parents in the United States teach their children about race and racism and how racism structures their parenting strategies. He noted that parents’ understanding of race, class, and identity have an influence on the approaches they use to cultivate resilience to racism.
“Their strategies are not monolithic,” Manning said, “but Black parents across class backgrounds try to protect, teach, and instill forms of resilience to racism in their children.”
Manning was also the lead author of “Discursive footwork on the hardwood: players’ negotiations of the NBA as a contested racial arena,” published by the European Journal for Sport and Society. Written with Stephen Cho Suh of the University of Colorado and Kyle Green of SUNY Brockport, the article appears online in advance of its inclusion in an upcoming special journal issue.
Using The Players’ Tribune, the authors interpreted how NBA players discuss race within a racialized sporting organization that they say is “celebrated and marketed as cosmopolitan and a model for social engagement.”
They found that during certain times of racial tension, “players draw on and move between varied visions of sport, the NBA, and its relationship to race.” But the researchers also found that “players affirm notions of the NBA as removed from social problems and a leader for positive racial dialogue. These discursive shifts and collisions indicate that while individualistic and less critical conceptions of sport and race persistently circulate, they are also vulnerable to more race-conscious, structural, and critical articulations.”
