Honor in Eye-gouging: Sports and Leisure as Means of Racial Enforcement in the Antebellum South
Far from being politically neutral or silent, norms surrounding sports and leisure—and often the activities themselves—work to encode and enforce sociocultural ideas surrounding class, race, and gender. In this paper I argue that the Antebellum Southern sporting and leisure tradition, especially through its modes of violence and social reaction to said violence, functioned as means to encode and enforce racial hierarchies and chattel slavery. Closely surveilled and policed access to, and performance in, sports and leisure served to reinforce ideas around honor, freedom, and right; all of which are directly tied to the racial-capitalist society of the Antebellum South. By analyzing local legislation, narratives of the enslaved, sporting newspapers, plantation journals, and personal correspondence, it becomes clear that play and recreation did not simply reflect but also reproduced and ritualized ideologies of racialized freedom and honor embedded into the racialized class system of the Antebellum South.
HIST 340, History of Sports, Gender, and Race in American History
Stephen Andes
10:30 – 10:55 AM
Goodrich 103