Chosing My Question

My research question took a long time to develop. One might ask, “Why have I chosen football?” I am not an athletic person—I am dangerously clumsy and have never been good at sports. I do not particularly care for football; I find it somewhat repetitive and boring. However, I am deeply interested in social dynamics. I firmly believe that the Atlantic slave trade continues to affect modern daily life in ways that are often inconceivable. College sports—football in particular—caught my interest because, to me, the undertones of racism seemed blatantly obvious. For that reason, I chose to investigate this topic.

How My Question Has Evolved

My research question has remained fairly similar throughout my writing process, but it still feels somewhat clunky, so I am continuing to narrow and refine it. In my original topic-generation exercise, I wrote: “How do the drafting and national sports systems connect to the legacy of the slave trade and contribute to keeping young Black athletes uneducated for entertainment?” Since then, my focus has shifted primarily to college athletes, as this angle connects more directly to education and supports my argument more effectively.

As I've been thinking about it and I think I'm more intrested in how to stop these systems of opression. College football (especially in the south) is so ingrained in popular culture that it's almost impossible to sperate from one another. The end goal simply cannot be to end college football, thats an impossible task, so what can we do to "fix" a system that is inherently broken

MY Question: How does the atlantic slave trade connect to the modern process of college athletics how does this affect education and how can you fix the inherently racist nature of collegiate sports when pretaining to Black Students

My Sources

• Historically White Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives Matter Era
• Plantation Logics at the NFL Combine
• Still Running My Life as the First Black Football Player in the SEC

"Historically White Universities and Plantation Politics" provides a large array of information on my research subject, including insightful knowledge on how the current education system came to be and how it is systemically tied to oppression. The authors dive deep into the idea that “The Black cannot be human and is not simply an ‘other’ but is other than human.” This directly ties into my working question of whether it is even possible to separate a system from the racism to which it is deeply connected. The article also explores how, because Black people are seen as “other,” the commodification of their bodies for sport is not considered inhumane, as they are viewed as subhuman. The authors state, “Under this arrangement, Black people are set apart from whites and other ‘races’ through the insistent narrative that Black people pursue sport labor as a way out of poverty,” thereby reinforcing existing class structures.

"Plantation Logics at the NFL Combine"provides interesting insight because of the nature of the article being written from firsthand experience at the Combine. I found Canada’s observations on how the naming conventions of popular college football games tie to how the South’s economy grew through slave labor particularly compelling. In the same way, college football is a massive market—especially in the South—and until recently, college athletes were not allowed to be paid for their labor, even though it is incredibly strenuous and profitable for the institutions that benefit from it. The Combine specifically interests me because it holds striking similarities to slave markets of the past: measuring and sizing up predominantly Black bodies for the sake of determining who will best suit the mostly white people in charge and generate the most profit.