Sports and Society Spring

R333 Sports and Society Spring Semester 2022
Essay Two Race and Sports in American Society
Length: 1000-1400 words
If you would like comments on ONE draft of your paper, I will need a draft by
Look at the information sheet for this unit of the class particularly the three arguments made at
the bottom of the first page: 1) That race is a social/political construction, and there is a dominant
racial ideology; 2) Sports have been both system supporting and system challenging when it
comes to the role of race in American society, and 3) Sports have always pushed the envelope,
causing many people to say that things are changing too far and too fast. What I want you to do
is to take these three assertions and craft your own argument about race and sports in American
society.
The main purpose of this assignment is to ask you to take a range of the course material for this
unit of the class, and make a clear, specific, developed argument and then use the reading,
lecture, and video material to support that argument. Think of the three arguments above as a
guide to get you started but you need to make your own original argument or assertion.
Along with crafting your own thesis/argument, the other challenge with this assignment is how
to use a range of the course material as supporting evidence of that thesis. You need to strike a
balance between using a diverse set of course material on the one hand, but not trying to do
everything on the other. You must include something directly from the reading (and a one-
sentence reference to one of the readings isnt enough), something directly from the lecture
videos, and something from one or more of the YouTube videos. How much material should
you include? Thats part of your challenge! Doing this effectively revolves around having a
clear, specific, spelled-out thesis with that, it becomes much easier to select evidence to
support that thesis/argument.
A final very important point you cannot, cannot, cannot write about Colin Kaepernick,
the NFL protests of the last few years, or Black Lives Matter/the protests of the last year
and a half. Why? Because the last time I didnt restrict this, literally 90% of the class
wrote about this so Im banning this as a topic for the paper. I would also strongly,
strongly, strongly encourage you NOT to write about Jackie Robinson after banning
the BLM topic last semester, thats where almost half the class went to. There are
hundreds of other historical and current topics and issues you can address, and you all are
writing a discussion post about this.

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