Black male football players are stigmatized as being aggressive and violent in news media and on campus. The violent behavior of Black athletes is often explained as a result of masculinity “gone awry.” This article examines NCAA Black male athletes’ experiences with structural violence on a university campus in order to complicate this trope. Through ethnographic research with student‐athletes, it offers insights into how Black men experience and respond to daily encounters with racism in a predominantly White university. I show how Black male student‐athletes harbor significant anger, frustration, and sadness where they are aware of their treatment as bodies and not people. This can be seen in how they are expected to meet high standards of physical performance while being marginalized in the university, including lack of access to proper sleep and nutrition, contingent funding, and precarious student status. In addition, these athletes are paraded around the university as specimens of Black prowess, which also impacts their self‐esteem and feelings of power. I argue that we must understand Black male student‐athletes’ behavior through their lived experiences within the structural violence of the university setting. Violent behaviors can thus be read through the context of desires to exert power in relation to their daily lived experiences with racism and structural violence in college sports.

This paper gives explanations to the symbols and rituals of sporting events and how symbols, ritually celebrated and performed through song under the guise of school spirit, normalize and allow for the incorporation of white supremacist ideologies into the everyday lives of a community. These racialized ideologies become normalized as every day, taken for granted meaning without much critical reflection. This paper asks how racist anti-black sentiment becomes normalized as heritage or tradition. As the Black American male football players sang this song to a predominantly white audience the tensions of power, racism, and sport overlapped in ways that seemed to go unnoticed and unproblematized by many. This paper explores ritual and tradition as forms of institutionalized racism framed within the context of heritage and school tradition. I argue ritual symbols, and ritual practice teaching anti-Black and pro-White sentiment becomes learned and passed on through subtle and unmarked practices. School fight songs and sporting traditions are part of the ongoing interconnectedness of race and sport in American college life. This paper demonstrates how white supremacist values become normalized through mascots, songs and rituals imbued with racist and anti-black (along with anti-Native American) sentiment. If we are to see sport as part of a complicated and expansive practice of leisure, then we must also recognize that sport and leisure are always political. Sport is an integral component to normalization of racism even when sport denotes fun and entertainment.

Comparisons of the utility and accuracy of methods for measuring social interactions relevant to disease transmission are rare. To increase the evidence base supporting specific methods to measure social interaction, we compared data from self-reported contact surveys and wearable proximity sensors from a cohort of schoolchildren in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Although the number and type of contacts recorded by each participant differed between the two methods, we found good correspondence between the two methods in aggregate measures of age-specific interactions. Fewer, but longer, contacts were reported in surveys, relative to the generally short proximal interactions captured by wearable sensors. When adjusted for expectations of proportionate mixing, though, the two methods produced highly similar, assortative age-mixing matrices. These aggregate mixing matrices, when used in simulation, resulted in similar estimates of risk of infection by age. While proximity sensors and survey methods may not be interchangeable for capturing individual contacts, they can generate highly correlated data on age-specific mixing patterns relevant to the dynamics of respiratory virus transmission.

This paper gives explanations to the symbols and rituals of sporting events and how symbols, ritually celebrated and performed through song under the guise of school spirit, normalize and allow for the incorporation of white supremacist ideologies into the everyday lives of a community. These racialized ideologies become normalized as every day, taken for granted meaning without much critical reflection. This paper asks how racist anti-black sentiment becomes normalized as heritage or tradition. As the Black American male football players sang this song to a predominantly white audience the tensions of power, racism, and sport overlapped in ways that seemed to go unnoticed and unproblematized by many. This paper explores ritual and tradition as forms of institutionalized racism framed within the context of heritage and school tradition. I argue ritual symbols, and ritual practice teaching anti-Black and pro-White sentiment becomes learned and passed on through subtle and unmarked practices. School fight songs and sporting traditions are part of the on-going interconnectedness of race and sport in American college life. This paper demonstrates how white supremacist values become normalized through mascots, songs and rituals imbued with racist and anti-black (along with anti-Native American) sentiment. If we are to see sport as part of a complicated and expansive practice of leisure, then we must also recognize that sport and leisure are always political. Sport is an integral component to normalization of racism even when sport denotes fun and entertainment.

No abstract