This paper examines racial messages in sport and how racial ideologies may be communicated through media sources dedicated to sports coverage. Our research specifically explores the changing participation levels of black and white athletes in professional basketball and football, and the extent to which these athletes were featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine between 1954 and 2004. As an institution, sport has played a major role in both revolutionizing and reinforcing racial attitudes. Since the 1960s, corresponding with the Civil Rights Movement, the number of professional minority athletes has increased greatly. Their representation on the cover of Sports Illustrated has also increased, but not necessarily in relation to their participation rates.Americans love their sports and we know how to prove it. They spend billions of dollars each year on sports related activities and items. They fork over the cash on everything from tickets to live sporting events to special cable and satellite packages. For those who splurge to see a live event, the opportunity to spend continues.

Eric Primm is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Pikeville College in Kentucky. In addition to studying racism in football card collecting, he presently is expanding his research to other sports and to other areas of popular culture such as the motorcycle subculture. Summer DuBois is a graduate student in the sociology department at the University of Colorado. Robert M. Regoli is a Professor of Sociology at University of Colorado. He has authored eleven books and more than one hundred scholarly articles. Professor Regoli is currently studying the transmission of racist ideology within sport card collecting. He is former president and Fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the recipient of two J. William J. Fulbright Awards.

Several studies have examined the impact of race and the value of baseball cards, but few have investigated the role of race on football card values. Copyright (c) 2010 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

The current political debate over guns and gun control is a relatively recent phenomenon going back only 40 to 50 years. To many observers today, the partisan lines drawn on this issue seem perfectly logical and inevitable: just another front on the ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives. However, few observers seem to critically examine the origins of this particular battlefront and the way these lines were drawn. How and why did those on the political-left become crusaders for "sensible" gun control laws while those on the political right became defenders of the Second Amendment? Our research suggests a combination of factors, including demographic shifts and the historical linking of racial and ethnic minority groups with violent criminal behavior ultimately led to this political division.

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