The Black Continental African Soccer Club as a diasporic resource: (Not) playing to the whistle in men's recreational soccer

Abstract

This study explores the centrality of the Black Continental African Soccer Club (BCASC) as a “diasporic resource” for members of the new African diaspora who play in an over-35 men's recreational soccer league in a Western Canadian city. Drawing from a multiyear ethnography, we critically examine how the BCASC serves as a crucial Black sporting institution for its members to collectively navigate anti-Black racism and the set of limits and pressures that come with being typecast as model minorities—the dominant representational figure for multiculturalism in the Canadian political economy—as they aspire to be, and live, as their fully fledged, and culturally authentic Black selves. Like other historic Black and ethnic sporting institutions, the BCASC and its related practices of fraternal sociality and solidarity serve as identity-affirming and redemptive, sanctuary sites where team members confront dominant and exclusionary forms of whiteness and its subordinating customs, all while palliating “homing desire” through nostalgic expressions of home.