White Property Interests in College Athletic Admissions

Introduction

As social and cultural practices, organized sports provide opportunities to resist and retrench dominant ideologies, norms, and values (Carrington, 2013; Coakley, 2015; King & Springwood, 2001; Messner, 2009). U.S. intercollegiate athletics is a unique form of amateur sport that weds elite sport with higher education (Eitzen, 2016; R. Smith, 2011; Thelin, 2011). As Van Rheenen (2012) writes, dominant narratives position college sports “as vehicles for racial integration and upward social mobility” (p. 551). Integration and mobility are supposedly achieved through a special admission and recruitment process that permits institutions to enroll a “diverse group of students, many of whom might be unable to attend college were it not for their athletic abilities and corresponding sports scholarships” (Van Rheenen, 2012, p. 551).

Harry Edwards, a sociologist and organizer of the 1968 Black athlete Olympic revolt, authored the foremost critique of college sports’ integrative and mobility potentials. His research centered the experiences of Black athletes and concluded that sport more often functions as a “treadmill than the fabled escalator providing escape from the deprivations afflicting the black community” (Edwards, 1979, p. 117). Edwards, and a legion of scholars to follow (e.g., Allison et al., 2018; Azzarito & Harrison, 2008; Beamon, 2010; Singer & May, 2010), criticized the mobility potential for sports with a two-pronged approach. In the first prong, Edwards (1979) demonstrated the “infinitesimal” odds for someone to ascend in sport (p. 124). In today’s context, a men’s high school basketball player has a 1% chance and a men’s high school football player has a 2.8% chance of transitioning to a Division I team (National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA], 2019). Of those who become college athletes, 1.2% of men’s basketball and 1.6% of men’s football players continue to the professional leagues (NCAA, 2019). The low chances for hierarchical advancement indicate that professional sports is an elusive mobility pathway.

The second prong examines what happens to athletes who do not advance. Edwards (1979) argued sport advancement requires a unilateral focus that comes at the expense of pursuing more viable opportunities. The unilateral focus develops a narrow skill set that cannot easily translate to other areas. This critique lives on in today’s research into college athlete exploitation who point out that athletic departments recruit students who are academically underprepared for college course work, provide students few meaningful opportunities to explore their educational interests, steer students into majors in which they have little interest, offer few to no opportunities for professional development outside of athletics, and isolate them in athlete-only environments (Beamon, 2010; Hawkins, 2010; Jayakumar & Comeaux, 2016; Sack & Staurowsky, 1998; Van Rheenen, 2012). The culminating effects of these processes leave few chances for a college athlete to access and activate the educational opportunities promised in exchange for their athletic labor. Under this frame, even recent proposals to permit college athletes to receive limited compensation for their talents would not create an egalitarian relationship between universities and players (Osburn, 2019).

In this conceptual piece, I use a different point of departure embedded in Edwards’ original theorizations to examine college sports’ mobility potential. Edwards (1979) also suggested that the overrepresentation of Black men in several sports “obscured the fact that virtually all other American sports remain largely [racially] segregated and lily white” (p. 117). Forty-years later his insights hold true. The big-time sports presented as integration and mobility engines compromise only 3% of college athletics (NCAA, 2018). The vast majority—nearly all—other roster spots are filled by mostly White, middle-class, second-generation college-going athletes (Farrey & Schreiber, 2017; NCAA, 2016, 2018). Shulman and Bowen’s (2001) study of 90,000 students across 40 years at 30 universities determined special admission practices favor predominately White and middle-class athletes. Today, White women occupy 71.7% and White men occupy 63.7% of the NCAA’s sports (Lapchick, 2018). These data may underestimate the prevalence of White athletes as they only count one third of college athletes or those who receive athletic aid (NCAA, 2018). The overrepresented yet underscrutinized White-majority college athlete population reflects how White dominance becomes a taken-for-granted feature of organizations (Harris, 1993; Leonard, 2017; Leonardo, 2009).

Few studies examine the particular conditions of whiteness in college sports. Those that do explore the unique identities and privileges Whites incur in sport rather than the active ways the institution grants greater rights, benefits, and access to Whites (e.g., Gill, 2007; Vadeboncoeur & Bopp, 2019). As Hextrum (2020b) noted, these approaches undertheorize how Whites secure unique material and symbolic advantages in ways that harm People of Color. Researchers have yet to consider how whiteness as a relation of domination pervades college athletic admissions in ways that advantage Whites.

In this conceptual article, I apply Cheryl Harris’ (1993) whiteness as property framework to identify the institutional conditions within college sports that protect and normalize Whites’ privileged access to college via sport. Harris’ framework is suited to explore the interrelationship between integration and mobility as she theorized how racial power is an intertwined relationship of material and symbolic inequality. Whiteness as property refers to the legally protected rights of Whites to full civic membership including greater social, political, and economic rewards always at the expense of People of Color (Harris, 1993). By incorporating Harris into a review of special athletic admission, I argue that college sports offer limited mobility and integrative opportunities. Instead, contemporary practices, if left unchanged, will ensure that Whites retain greater access to sport, education, and in turn mobility.

Whiteness as Property

All stories of mobility begin with the central premise that the United States operates as a free society in which one’s initial social standing and/or individual encounters with hardship should not limit one’s ability to ascend. This premise dates back to the founding of the United States as a country intended to be free from the aristocratic and monarchical constraints of its colonizer, Britain (DuBois, 1935). Prior to the nation’s founding, White settlers enacted their own colonialization of Native peoples and enslavement of African peoples. The challenge for U.S. founders was how to maintain these lucrative economic systems based upon the removal of rights from Natives and African peoples while simultaneously creating a political system that grants inherent rights to its citizens (DuBois, 1935; Harris, 1993; Mills, 2003). Harris (1993) traces how the founders reconciled this primary contradiction by defining civic membership through property. The law defined property and the right to ownership through a White supremacist ideology that positioned Whites as inherently superior to all other races (Harris, 1993; Mills, 1997, 2003). The U.S. legal system in turn removed rights from non-Whites by stating natural not legal causes for the “degraded status” for Black People and Native Americans (Harris, 1993, p. 1745). Harris (1993) documents how the law, not nature, produced whiteness as a form of status property—a material and symbolic resource only available to those deemed White by law—that ensured White superiority across all U.S. institutions (Harris, 1993).

Status property safegaurded White supremacy by intertwining racial hierarchy with legal claims such as rights to land usage, ownership, and profit accumulation (Harris, 1993). Legal claims to the ownership of labor and land were filtered through notions of White supremacy and in turn became only legible through “the cultural practices of whites” (Harris, 1993, p. 1721). For instance, many Native American communities defined their land possession through environmental stewardship. The state deemed this an unrecognizable form of ownership. Instead, the state defined land ownership as productive use of the land like building infrastructure or housing communities (Harris, 1993). U.S. law defined property as an accumulating resource, one through which its owner could keep and grow their economic rewards, contributing to a vastly unequal class system (Harris, 1993). Those White by law received rights to develop land, profit off of land, and to own and profit off the unpaid and extracted labor of enslaved peoples. Cumulatively, these property laws enacted whiteness as the precondition of the U.S. economy (DuBois, 1935).

Property laws also provided rights to property-less Whites to stymie a class rebellion (DuBois, 1935). Chattel slavery also defined who could be enslaved (African Peoples) and who could not (Whites) (Harris, 1993). In this way, the law invested both material benefits (your labor must be paid) and immaterial benefits (the right to self-determination and freedom from slavery) into whiteness. These early interpretations of whiteness as status property became “institutionalized privileges” existing across every facet of U.S. life. In so doing, Whites’ greater access “became part of the settled expectations of whites—a product of the unalterable original bargain” (p. 1777).

After detailing the legal origins of the United States’ White supremacist economy, Harris (1993) turns to the present. The contemporary manifestations of racial inequality such as the racial wealth gap, Harris argues, are not passive accumulations of benefits from past centuries. Instead, Harris introduces the concept of whiteness as modern property to describe how the benefits granted to Whites are actively maintained through state laws and policies that legitimate Whites’ continued domination of People of Color. The 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education overturned status property by ending state-sponsored (de jure) segregation in public schools. The Court saw segregation as the primary cause of racial inequality. The ruling prevented segregation rather than ensuring equal access. The Court set no standard to ensure Black Americans received the same educational benefits as White Americans. Furthermore, subsequent rulings regarding how to integrate schools catered to White Americans’ demands who fought remedies such a busing and redistricting (Donnor, 2011; Harris, 1993; Leonardo, 2009). This legal approach to equity created five decades of court cases that set the “parameters of appropriate remedies” to White supremacy not through “the scope of the injury to the subjugated, but by the extent of the infringement on settled expectations of whites” (Harris, 1993, p. 1768). Put differently, the Civil Rights Era ended government sponsored status property, like overt segregation, but it also relieved the state of any responsibility to remedy the true and totalizing consequences of racism (Harris, 1993).

Modern property, therefore, explains how the law permitted Whites to retain their 300+ years of accumulated benefits while also allowing Whites to create new opportunities to secure their overrepresentation in all areas of society. Whiteness as a form of property refers to how the law “defined and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is white); of privilege (what benefits accrue to that status); and, of property (what legal entitlements arise from that status)” (Harris, 1993, p. 1725). Under modern whiteness, the law does not uniformly guarantee greater access to all Whites in all circumstances. Poor Whites, in particular, are marginalized through capitalist exploitation. But, legal conflations of property and whiteness permit Whites the opportunity to access exclusive racial membership not offered to racialized minorities.

In the remainder of the article, I examine how the property rights of Whites are protected through athletic admissions. I trace the rise of amateurism—the governing principle for U.S. college sports—as a form of status property. Changes to amateurism followed modern property and protected greater rights, benefits, and privileges for middle- and upper-class Whites. I conclude by considering how current legal standards permit colleges to design seemingly “neutral and fair” admission practices that in reality are “unequal and unjust” in ways that maintain Whites’ property rights (Harris, 1993, p. 1777).

Status Property: The Advent of Special Athletic Admissions

Property and race share a common organizing principle: exclusion (Harris, 1993). The origin and contemporary context of college sports are also organized through exclusion. While on the surface, this exclusion is predicated upon ability—only the best athletes can compete for a university—access to compete is guarded by one’s position along social hierarchies (Coakley, 2015; Martin, 2010; Messner, 2009). The first intercollegiate athletic contest was a match in 1852 between the Harvard and Yale rowing teams (R. Smith, 2011). The athletes composing these crews came from universities that helped colonize the Americas as the campus founders sought money and resources from the British crown to build a missionary presence (Wright, 1997). Harvard and Yale also provided the labor, knowledge, and infrastructure to expand the slave trade (Wilder, 2013). Harvard’s and Yale’s early students, faculty, presidents, trustees, and patrons were slave holders and traders (Wilder, 2013). The professoriate at Harvard and Yale also produced the knowledge systems that justified the expansion of the U.S. White supremacist-capitalist government. Professors at Harvard and Yale produced the racial “science” that grounded race in immutable phenotypical and behavioral characteristics, of which the White race was the pinnacle and all four others “degenerated progressively” (Skiba, 2012, p. 5). Faculty successfully extended their ideas into national policy and created laws shaping all aspects of public life, including college admissions (Harris, 1993; Mills, 2003; Rothstein, 2017; Shabazz, 2015; Skiba, 2012). The knowledge produced in the academy justified restrictive college admission practices that would prevent racial and ethnic minorities and women from entering universities and sports until the mid-20th century (Guinier, 2015; Martin, 2010; Skiba, 2012; Thelin, 2011).

Sport organizations also perpetuated status property by protecting access for White, elite men by adopting amateurism as the governing principle (Pope, 1996; R. Smith, 2011). College students at Oxford and Cambridge first used the term amateurism and defined it “synonymously with ‘gentleman’” (Pope, 1996, p. 295). The elite college students “alleged that their ‘social inferiors’ could not comprehend the ethos of amateurism and fair play” and therefore did not deserve to compete against the Oxford and Cambridge gentleman (Pope, 1996, p. 295). In both the British and American context, gentleman was synonymous with White and constructed in opposition to the filth, disease, and moral corruption of “degenerate classes” of colonized subject, ethnic minorities, women, and lower-class Whites who were portrayed as “departures from the normal human type” (McClintock, 1995, p. 47).

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was founded in 1906, all member institutions were predominately White universities and no historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were invited to participate (Carter, 2006). While the NCAA did not enact an overt ban on Black athletes, the organization invoked the exclusionary characteristics of the gentleman amateur, or someone with the wealth, prestige, status (and whiteness) to participate in sports for pleasure not for profit (Martin, 2010; Pope, 1996). The original rules required that athletes fill out an eligibility card to certify their amateurism—a process that continues to this day (Carter, 2006). The eligibility rules restricted access by prohibiting matriculation to any student who answered “yes” to the following questions:

Have you ever at any time competed for a money prize, or against a professional for any kind of prize? Have you ever received money or any other compensation of concession for your athletic services, directly or indirectly, either as a player or in any other capacity? (quoted in Carter, 2006, p. 224)

The card concludes with the language: “On my honor as a gentleman I state that the above answers contain the whole truth, without any mental reservation” (quoted in Carter, 2006, p. 224). To become a college athlete, one had to be an amateur and a gentleman.

Throughout the 20th century, universities cultivated consumer markets around men’s football and basketball (R. Smith, 2011; Thelin, 2011). The exploding revenue potential for football and men’s basketball pushed university leaders to modify amateurism by permitting special admission and scholarships in exchange for athletic talent (R. Smith, 2011). Universities could now look beyond their campuses to recruit athletes. Still, athletic teams remained largely White into the 1960s (Martin, 2010). From 1900 to 1946, no school in the United States, outside of HBCUs, had more than seven Black men in their entire athletic program at one time (Lumpkin, 2013). Universities that did admit Black students actively limited or prohibited their involvement in sport enacting quotas also known as gentleman’s agreements (Martin, 2010). Student activism, coupled with several high-profile matches in which integrated teams defeated all-White teams, slowly induced universities to begin to admit Black students and athletes (Martin, 2010). As with the Brown ruling, Black students received no legal protections nor guarantees to receive the same access and experiences as White student and athletes.

Instead, Whites retained their overrepresentation in all areas of college sport. Black athletes have only gained significant access to three sports—track, basketball, and football (Lapchick, 2018). Black men are concentrated in revenue-producing sports and must overperform their athleticism to receive admission (Coakley, 2015; Hawkins, 2010; Washington & Karen, 2001). Despite Black men’s overrepresentation in revenue sports, Whites remain the decision-makers and beneficiaries of college sports as most coaches (86.5%), athletic directors (86.1%), and university presidents (89.2%) are White (Lapchick, 2018). Whites have used their control of college sports to strip the rights and benefits from athletes. Today, there are 700 NCAA rules related to amateurism and recruitment that ensure these exceptional admission practices create parity across institutions (NCAA, 2017). The NCAA has recently branded their exceptional admission and recruitment practices as a “pathway of opportunity” that expands college-going opportunities for those from underrepresented college backgrounds (NCAA, 2018). However, Hextrum (2018) examined the language and implementation of these regulations and found that they still uphold the initial impetus of amateurism. The athletic recruitment and admission process is overregulated for lower-income and revenue athletes (the majority of whom are not White) and underregulated for higher-income and athletes in nonrevenue sports (the majority of whom are White) (Hextrum, 2018). In this sense, changes to amateur regulations have yet to remove the organizing principles that elevated the rights and privileges of White elites.

Concurrently, over the past 40 years, the rise of commercialized pay-to-play youth sports have supplanted low-cost, public opportunities to learn athletic skills (Coakley, 2011). The majority of college athletes must travel through pay-to-play leagues in order to be recruited (Coakley, 2011; Eckstein, 2017; Hextrum, 2018, 2019). Changes to amateurism such as permitting athletic scholarships never addressed whether all American youth have equal opportunities to play sports and in turn compete for university spots. In October 2019, the NCAA voted to institute the most recent changes to amateurism and permit athletes to “benefit from the use of their name, image, and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model” (Osburn, 2019, para. 1). These changes assume that an athlete is talented enough to be paid by an outside organization. They do not ensure an equal playing field nor pathway of opportunity to college via sport. In the remaining sections, I argue that changes to amateurism permitted the gentleman to retain and further the benefits he accrued through whiteness. Harris (1993) identifies four modes through which whiteness functions as a modern property right: disposition; rights to use and enjoyments; reputation; and the absolute right to exclude. In the forthcoming sections, I correspond each mode to contemporary athletic regulations and practices to argue that athletic recruitment protects the propertied interests of whiteness.

Disposition: How Sports Become White

While most property is considered alienable—separable from personhood—Harris (1993) identifies aspects of the law that protect one’s inalienable (inseparable) property rights such as educational degrees and licenses. Inalienable property also has an accruing value but cannot be transferred from one individual to the next. Harris (1993) characterizes this form of property as disposition (Harris, 1993, p. 1731). Whiteness in this form is an identity characteristic (someone is “White”), enables group membership (someone is of the “White race”), and cannot be transferred to others (a White person cannot bestow their whiteness to a person of color). The law imbued whiteness with inalienable characteristics by using various racial tests such as phenotypical, blood, or genetic (Harris, 1993). Legal disputes arose that solidified the bounds of racial membership as individuals fought to be seen as White by law and obtain the inalienable rights, privileges, and benefits associated with it (Harris, 1993; Leonardo, 2009; Mills, 2003).

The centuries of legal wrangling over who and what could be considered White by law grounded race in physical body (Harris, 1993; Mills, 2003). In this way, “political domination becomes incarnated” as it “roots itself in the biological” and “invest[s] the physical with social significance” (Mills, 2003). Sport is a central cultural terrain to normalize physical racial associations (Carrington, 2013; Coakley, 2015; Eitzen, 2016). Leonard (2017) explains how “sports become a staging ground for the creation, production, articulation, and dissemination of the signifiers of whiteness” (p. 8). A prominent signifier of whiteness is the “brains-over-brawn trope” that presents White athletes as more desirable team members because they possess intelligence, work ethic, and scrappiness whereas Black athletes possess only limited, exaggerated physical capacities (Leonard, 2017, p. 7). This trope reflects the eugenics-era racial science that positions Black bodies as inherently physically gifted in certain aspects such as sprinting and jumping (Skiba, 2012) and invincible to physical harm (Haslerig et al., 2020). The associations of White athleticism grant greater access as these characteristics could apply to any sport (e.g., all coaches would want a hard worker) whereas the association of Black athleticism are narrow and rooted to particular events or positions (e.g., explosive speed suited from sprinting events). These narratives influence coaching and recruitment decisions as Black athletes are more often slotted into certain sports and positions based upon their race (Carrington, 2013; Coakley, 2015; Washington & Karen, 2001). These narratives also influence athletes’ decisions about what sports and positions to pursue and invest their time and energy into (Hextrum, 2019, 2020b).

Sport access is further restricted when entire sports, events, or positions become associated with White dispositions. The symbolic affiliation of a racial identity and physical activity is achieved in part through historical precedent. Segregation in the United States was so rampant and widespread that Black activists had to strategically use certain sports to fight against inequality (Martin, 2010; Wiggins, 2014). Early 20th-century activists centered sports that were already present in Black communities and in which Black athletes had gained moderate public followings such as football, track, and baseball (Wiggins, 2014). The present-day celebration and elevation of Black athletes in football and track reinforces positive associations between Blackness and these sports (Lumpkin, 2013). Negative racial associations also shape sport participation. Harrison (2013) explains how sports as cultural and familial practices become encoded with racialized collective memories of trauma that inform access. Living members of Black communities can recall when Whites actively fought against desegregating sporting spaces like pools, golf courses, and ski resorts and may steer younger generations away from these sports (Harrison, 2013; Mowatt, 2009). Furthermore, the public celebration and overrepresentation of White athletes in sports like swimming, golf, and skiing normalize the decision for potential Black athletes to select other activities with greater racial diversity (Coakley, 2015; Harrison, 2013; Mowatt, 2009).

Symbols of White supremacy are also brought into sport to restrict access. Newman and Giardina (2011) explain how NASCAR, American car racing, has cultivated a cultural presence attached to the celebration of whiteness using supremacist symbols like the confederate flag, embracing its lack of racial diversity, and encouraging White fans to engage in illegal behavior such as public drinking and violence. These actions demark the sporting terrain as White while also displaying the cultural privileges associated to whiteness, such forgiveness for legal transgression (Leonard, 2017). In sports with racial diversity, White supremacist symbols are also displayed to contain blackness. Love and Hughey (2015) describe how White men reclaim their space in the now predominately Black sport of college basketball and forge communities with other Whites through racist-inflected sport commentary on online message boards. Others found that colleges reclaim football as a White space by investing in symbols of White terror, colonialism, and cultural removal like confederate icons (Leonard, 2017; Ternes, 2016) and indigenous mascots (King & Springwood, 2001) displayed throughout the pageantry of the sport. White efforts to defend their space in college football and basketball represent how whiteness is the normed identity in sport. One of the benefits of being a member of the dominant group is a sense of universalism, or the ability to see oneself recognized everywhere (Leonardo, 2009). The visibility of some Black bodies in certain sports disrupts this universalistic sense for Whites in sport and invokes a response. Whites need not use these defensive tactics in most of college sports because there is no significant threat to their dominance as they retain the vast majority of amateur sport roster spots (Lapchick, 2018; Sabo & Veliz, 2008).

Associating most sports and positions with White identities creates a natural baseline for the prevalence of Whites in athletics. Dispositional dimension of whiteness grounds race in the body, positioning White and Black People as differently capable of athletic endeavors. These faulty racial associations also construe sport participation as a “choice” rather than the product of political processes. Black youth are seen as choosing to play certain sports based upon their inherent physical aptitudes. A more progressive reading of sport access may position Black youth as avoiding certain sports due to their association with White cultures and identities. In both cases, the language of choice individualizes and cloaks systemic processes that narrow the opportunities for already-subjugated populations and expands the opportunities for already-advantaged populations (Harris, 1993; Messner, 2009; Mills, 2003).

Rights to Use and Enjoyment: Unequal Athletic Access

Disposition exists in a “passive” form until it is activated to “fulfill the will [of the owner] and to exercise power” (Harris, 1993, p. 1734). Property claims are evaluated on whether and how the entity is used. A White person “used and enjoyed” their “whiteness whenever she took advantage of the privileges accorded white people simply by virtue of their whiteness” (p. 1734). Therefore, a key component to enliven whiteness beyond a “mere belief or preference” is whether and how whiteness is used and enjoyed by its beneficiaries (Harris, 1993, p. 1734).

Sports are a conduit between whiteness and property as they require a terrain of play. Whites enacted their legal benefits to control land and its use to secure greater numbers and types of physical activity. Studies continuously point to proximity to athletic venues including facilities, parks, and club and school teams as a correlate for higher rates of athletic participation (e.g., Coakley, 2015; Cohen et al., 2013; Moore et al., 2008; Powell et al., 2006; Sabo & Veliz, 2008). In the United States, one’s race and/or class position shapes one’s likelihood to access these benefits. Moore et al. (2008) compared the demographic composition of communities to the prevalence of public athletic facilities and parks. They found that Hispanic and Black communities were seven to nine times more likely than White communities to have no athletic facilities. Similarly, Powell et al. (2006) examined the prevalence of privatized sports including club teams and found that White areas were five times more likely than Black areas to have a physical fitness club and 58% more likely to have a club team. Importantly, Moore et al. (2008) also examined the quantity and density of sporting opportunities across neighborhoods and found that minority and lower-income areas had 61% and 84%, respectively, fewer activities available within their recreational spaces than White and higher income areas. In examining neighborhood characteristics, these studies demonstrate how majority-White suburban areas have greater numbers of athletic opportunities for White youth.

The linkage between income, race, and residence is secured by historic and contemporary legal practices. Today’s White suburbs are products of centuries of property laws that permitted the emerging U.S. government the right to “seizure and appropriation” of Black labor and Native land (Harris, 1993, p. 1716). In the 100 years following the end of slavery, the state permitted Whites to retain the wealth earned through slavery and broken treaties with Native peoples and transfer that wealth intergenerationally (Leonardo, 2009; Mills, 2003). Following World War II, the state provided subsidized housing loans to White returning soldiers and denied these benefits to Black returning soldiers (Katznelson, 2005). The state also enacted redlining policies that permitted Whites to increase their property values by virtue of excluding People of Color (Katznelson, 2005; Kurashige, 2008; Rothstein, 2017). Kurashige (2008) documents how the suburbs are a particular state product through which cities funded housing projects to accommodate White flight. Cities subsidized suburban housing projects by offering developers discounted land and permitted communities to have tacit racial covenants to maintain all-White neighborhoods. Thus, White suburban communities, which include the physical land, natural resources, and human-made infrastructures such as building, schools, and athletic fields, are created and secured by legal property ownership.

The state permitted Whites to retain and accrue benefits from these historic laws through property taxes. White communities created and utilized the phrase taxpayers’ rights to argue in court that those who pay taxes in a given area can control how the money is used regarding land use and facility construction (Nelson, 2008). This funding model vastly favors White-majority communities. The properties in White-majority communities hold greater economic value. Whites are more likely to live in larger houses, on larger lots, and in recently built or renovated homes (Perry et al., 2018; Zonta, 2019). White communities also retain the symbolic elements which translate to greater property values such as safety, prosperity, and security (Harris, 1993; Kurashige, 2008; Leonardo, 2009). The community racial and income patterns persist as the state permits White communities to keep, protect, and accumulate resources within their borders while depriving other communities of much-needed public funds (Nelson, 2008; Rothstein, 2017; Shabazz, 2015). By permitting funding to flow through the property values of a community, White neighborhoods can raise greater revenues for public recreational facilities.

Becoming a college athlete requires access to opportunities to play sports prior to college. Property rights have ensured that not all youth in the United States have equal opportunity to play sports and develop the athletic talents desired by universities. Colleges exacerbate this scenario by the sports they sponsor and the number of spots available on each team. Division I NCAA athletics currently sponsors 38 sports (18 men’s and 20 women’s) many of which are associated with White, suburban areas (Cheslock, 2008; Harrison, 2013; Hattery, 2012). The NCAA also sponsors sports that have smaller youth populations, such as rowing, beach volleyball, and fencing, giving athletes in these sports greater odds at earning a spot on a college team (Dubner, 2018; Eckstein, 2017; NCAA, 2019). As a result, a greater number of spots available on college teams align with the property resources secured in White suburbs.

Reputation: White Sporting Networks

Whiteness became a resource available to certain individuals and not others through legal cases that protected one’s right to a reputation (Harris, 1993). The law long recognized people’s rights to a reputation—how they are perceived by others—as a defensible asset. Court precedents imbued one’s racial reputation or “being regarded as white [is] a thing of significant value” (Harris, 1993, p. 1735). The law recognized as much by granting Whites the right to claim injury for being mislabeled as Black, whereas the same was not afforded to a Black person mislabeled as White. The law “presumed that no harm could flow from such a reversal” indicating whiteness’ symbolic and material superiority (p. 1736).

The previous two sections described aspects of reputational whiteness or how one’s proximity to whiteness provides one with greater symbolic and structural athletic access. Here, I raise another dimension of reputational whiteness or how Whites forge relationships among one another, based upon reputations, that secure and protect benefits for their members (Leonardo, 2009). College athletic recruitment validates the reputations of members of White suburban communities by offering them preferential access in admission.

Athletic departments are not required to craft uniform nor transparent criteria of how athletes are evaluated (i.e., no equivalent to the SAT exists for athletic admission). Studies indicate these evaluations are subjective and favor athletes with connections to high-status coaches, teams, and private clubs (Eckstein, 2017; Hextrum, 2018, 2019, 2020a). Coakley (2011) explains how privatized club sports have secured higher reputational status during the neoliberal era replacing low-cost youth leagues. Eckstein (2017) found that where the college footprint grows (i.e., more teams sponsored by universities) so do commercialized private clubs. These clubs “try to separate families from their money. . . [through] promises that only certain products and services will guarantee a successful trip through the pipeline and into a subsidized college education” (Eckstein, 2017, p. 10). Pay-to-play clubs build their reputations through marketing efforts that promote their connections with college coaches and success at placing college athletes (Eckstein, 2017). Association to a pay-to-play club has become a tacit requirement as colleges use these teams as recruiting pools (Eckstein, 2017; Hextrum, 2019). Sabo and Veliz’s (2008) national study of youth sport participation found that White suburban youth are the most likely group to participate in pay-to-play clubs. By valuing affiliations to private clubs in their admissions processes, colleges validate the cultural and economic characteristics of White suburban communities.

Sabo and Veliz’s (2008) study of sport participation also identified the accumulating characteristic of opportunities to develop athletic talent. Suburban youth did not join private sports instead of public sports such as those offered by local schools and communities. Rather, suburban White youth were also the most likely group to combine their sports opportunities playing three or more sports across three or more setting, such as school, community, and pay-to-play club (Sabo & Veliz, 2008). In this sense, White suburban youth are activating the accumulating benefits of whiteness, pursuing multiple and supplementary athletic opportunities in ways to enhance their athletic talent. These expansive terrains grant Whites a wider socialization and recruitment network as they develop relationships with teammates and coaches across multiple sports and teams in ways that advantage them in college recruitment (Hextrum, 2018).

The NCAA’s amateur regulations preference reputation as a form of exchange. The NCAA has over 162 rules monitoring the cost and frequency of interactions between college recruiters and potential athletes (NCAA, 2017). The NCAA does not regulate interactions among other areas of an athletes’ social network such as high school coaches. Hextrum’s (2018) study of 47 rowers and track athletes who successfully earned spots at top Division I programs identified how college coaches solicited club coaches’ recommendations as measures of merit. College coaches granted greater weight and preference to athletes affiliated with prestigious clubs, teams, and coaches regardless of their record of athletic achievement. Hextrum (2018) found that White athletes could underperform compared with athletes of color and still receive athletic admission based upon a high-status coach’s recommendation. Relatedly, researchers have long found that athletes of color, and Black revenue athletes in particular, must overperform compared with White athletes to receive the same benefits of admission and/or competition time (Anderson & McCormack, 2010; Carrington, 2013; Washington & Karen, 2001). Recruitment regulations, therefore, permit White athletes to utilize their coach’s reputation to enhance their own property interest through college access. These reputational exchanges are occurring within an athletic world that is run by predominately White college, club, and national team coaches (Eckstein, 2017; Lapchick, 2018). These exchanges are a modern investment in whiteness as universities permit social networking across the high school and college planes that disproportionately advantage those from White, suburban areas.

Absolute Right to Exclude: Athletic Admissions

The three previous characteristics of Harris’ (1993) framework culminate in the “nucleus” of property and whiteness or the absolute right to exclude (p. 1714). The boundaries of property ownership are established by demarking who is and is not allowed to use the entity (Harris, 1993). The law also defined Whiteness as such. Whiteness does not have an “inherent unifying characteristic” but is instead defined by “the exclusion of others deemed to be ‘not white’” and therefore ineligible to claims the benefits of whiteness (p. 1736). For much of U.S. history, legal claims to whiteness were based upon “racial purity” tests like the one-drop rule that positioned Black blood as a “contaminant” to whiteness (p. 1737). These tests policed the benefits someone could claim through their White legibility such as the freedom from enslavement and indenture. Laws also punished those who submitted false claims to whiteness, and its corresponding benefits because these actions would devalue the exclusivity. As Harris aptly states, “the courts erected legal ‘No Trespassing’ signs” to guard whiteness (p. 1741). In barring certain members access, these mechanisms of exclusion create a hierarchical form of difference that elevates whiteness (Harris, 1993).

Harris (1993) turns to college admission practices to explain how whiteness in its modern form uses the absolute right to exclude. College admissions also demonstrate how exclusionary practices are hierarchical. Higher education promises access to advanced curriculum, not present in K-12 education that can prepare students for a wider range of careers and possibilities for greater economic return. College graduates are less likely to be unemployed, are paid higher wages, are more satisfied in their job, and are more likely to receive health and retirement benefits through their employer than high school graduates (Baum et al., 2013; Pew Research Center, 2014). Not all college graduates equally share in these rewards. College selectivity—whether one must apply, and the expenses, rigor, complexity, and competitiveness associated to the application—is a cultural and economic good that individuals differentially trade for greater or lesser social rewards (Davies & Guppy, 1997).

Athletic admissions are embedded within but deviate from the standard college selection process. Athletic admissions do not utilize publicly available admission portals and do not have trained admission officers reviewing all the possible applicants (L. Smith, 2019; R. Smith, 2011). Instead, coaches and athletic administrators create the pool of applicants based upon athletic recruitment and generate a final list to then be reviewed by admission officers (Shulman & Bowen, 2001; L. Smith, 2019). If an applicant’s name is placed on this list, they have far greater admission odds than is offered through the standard process (Shulman & Bowen, 2001; L. Smith, 2019). In this sense, athletic admissions can offer an easier, exceptional, and semi-guaranteed form of exclusive college access to those who are endorsed by college coaches.

Current legal standards protect universities right to use this exceptional admission process even when it grants exclusive benefits to Whites. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court expanded property interests of Whites to college admission (Harris, 1993). The Court stated universities cannot allocate certain slots for minorities because White people have a right to compete for all admission slots (Harris, 1993). Bakke along with cases in the early 2000s limited universities’ ability to use admission to rectify past racial discrimination and permitted Whites to retain their overrepresentation in higher education (Donnor, 2011; Guinier, 2015; Leonardo, 2009).

While Bakke forbade universities to allocate slots for race, it permitted universities to allocate slots for student characteristics such as the offspring of prominent alumni (legacy students) and athletes (Harris, 1993). In 1990, the Department of Education clarified that universities can hold spots for athletes or legacy admits—even when these characteristics favor White applicants—so long as the admission practices align with “legitimate institutional goals” (Jaschik, 2018, para. 34). Sponsoring athletic programs creates the need for athletes which in turn positions special admission as a legitimate institutional goal (Shulman & Bowen, 2001; L. Smith, 2019). These cases granted universities the right to create special admission for athletes since the policy assess a skill—athletic talent—and is therefore race-neutral (Jaschik, 2018). However, the previous three sections of this article argued that possession of this skill is guarded by whiteness and therefore not race-neutral. The race-neutral language only disguises and obscures how athleticism is a White property right.

Conclusion

This conceptual piece applied Harris’ (1993) whiteness as property framework to re-examine whether college sports function as racially integrative and upward social mobility vehicles. Harris (1993) defined whiteness as a material and immaterial valuable resource available to some (Whites) and denied to others (People of Color). Whiteness is perpetuated through four interrelated features: disposition; the rights to use and enjoyment; reputation; and the absolute right to exclude. Using this approach to whiteness, I identified the social and legal mechanisms within and surrounding sport that limit social mobility and contribute to Whites’ overrepresentation in college athletics. While I centered the U.S. historical context and American college sports, whiteness is a global relation of domination (Leonardo, 2009; Mills, 2003). In this final section, I consider international applications for this frame and possibilities for resistance.

Harris (1993) weaves historical precedent into contemporary context by considering the relationship between status and modern forms of exclusion. The U.S. nation-state was founded through the interrelated processes of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. The state justified and expanded these exploitative processes by wedding them to racial hierarchies. Whiteness as status property embedded Whites’ cultural practices and identities into the law and granted those legible as “White” higher status and benefits across all areas of U.S. life (Harris, 1993). I located the advent of amateurism and college sports in the era of status property. Amateurism became the controlling ideal of college sports that governed one’s right to access. Amateurism centered a White, male, elite athlete with the privilege to participate in sports for pleasure not for profit as the default subject (Carter, 2006; Pope, 1996; R. Smith, 2011). Amateurism was imported from England and was exported to international competition including the Olympics (Llewellyn & Gleaves, 2014). Additional research could consider how whiteness as status property became embedded in amateurism globally, in England, and in other western countries.

Social movements in the mid-20th-century United States created a crisis for whiteness that upended status forms of property. The Civil Rights era ended the legal protections for Whites to overtly rule over People of Color in separate and unequal conditions. Harris (1993) re-examines the Civil Rights laws and introduces the notion of whiteness as modern property to explain how racial inequality persists today. She offers four modes through which the law protected Whites 300-year accumulation of benefits and permitted Whites to retain their dominance. I connected each mode to college athletics to show the conditions that normalize Whites’ overrepresentation in sport.

In Disposition, I considered how White identities and characteristics overtake entire sports normalizing Whites’ presence in these athletic terrains. The lasting intergenerational historical trauma associated to segregation, media representations, faulty racial science, and coaching decisions coalesce to present most sports as White (Harrison, 2013; Leonard, 2017). The minority of sports, and positions within sports, are associated with athletes of color. College-going opportunities for minority athletes are severely limited by these associations as they have fewer chances to test out their interests and aptitudes in sport. In contrast, Whites have all sports and positions available to them. Much of my claims here were speculative and generalizing in nature. Future research should consider whether these findings apply to all “White” sports or whether there are distinctive contexts and conditions that vary across White sports that work to actively exclude People of Color. In addition, researchers could consider the unique national context of how whiteness unfolds. While a sport may be associated to “whiteness” in the United States, this same sport could be associated with “Blackness” in another nation. Considering these specific national and racial differences may provide unique and deeper insights about the global terrain of whiteness.

While the law imbues property and whiteness with symbolic and material value, both only become valuable when their holders enact its worth. In Right to Use, I described how access to sporting facilities activate whiteness through their property requirements. Numerous studies show that White people are concentrated in resource-rich suburban areas with plentiful sport opportunities whereas People of Color are more likely to live in urban and rural areas with few to no sport opportunities (Cohen et al., 2013; Eckstein, 2017; Powell et al., 2006; Sabo & Veliz, 2008). I discussed the specific legal conditions that created and perpetuate this racial residential inequality that shapes sport access. In Reputation, I considered how Whites further their advantages by pursuing pay-to-play sports and creating exclusive social networks. Whites trade favors among each other by recruiting within these White-majority neighborhoods, sports, and teams. Current legal regulations offer no restrictions on this behavior and permit college coaches to tailor their practices to select from these insular communities. In the United States, unequal exposure to sport and the ability to develop relationships with coaches impacts one’s ability to matriculate to college. Global studies could consider the extent to which their respective countries enact property laws similar to the United States that restrict mobility in professional or Olympic sports.

In Absolute Right to Exclude, I considered how property, admission, and whiteness are definitionally predicated upon the fact that some, not all, can access their exclusive benefits. By protecting universities’ rights to create special admission processes that favor White applicants, the federal government secured rather than disrupted the 300-year plus accumulation of benefits for Whites. The overrepresentation of Whites in these categories becomes a “legitimate and natural baseline” and protected property right from which any racial remedies must be measured (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). In reality, these admission standards reflect the concerted effort by institutions to protect Whites’ predominance in athletics and beyond. Future researchers should consider what coaches use to evaluate athletes, how these evaluations are informed by whiteness, and how more equitable forms of evaluation could be implemented.

Sport remains a complex and contradictory terrain which can simultaneously restrict and expand social opportunities (Carrington, 2013; Coakley, 2015; Eitzen, 2016; Messner, 2009). This article emphasized how the incorporation of elite sports into higher education enables the domination aspects of whiteness. Outlining how whiteness structures college athletic access is a necessary first step as Harper (2012) notes higher education researchers too often use colorblind and race-neutral approaches to explain admission and retention. Whiteness from a domination frame in college sports remains an understudied terrain in sport research (Hextrum, 2020b). Lack of inquiry into whiteness is one mode that transmits and normalizes White dominance (Leonardo, 2009; Patton, 2016). Harris (1993) concludes her study by stating that undoing the totality of whiteness requires nothing short of a redistribution of “power and resources” across all facets of life “to rectify inequities and achieve real equality” (p. 1788). Since sport access is linked to resources within families, communities, and schools, a redistribution across these facets is needed to approach the “equal playing field” that mobility narratives invoke.

With the encompassing nature of whiteness in mind, the institutional arrangement of college sports still holds liberatory potential. The NCAA receives government subsidies like tax breaks based upon their promise to deliver equity and inclusion in educational opportunities (Colombo, 2010). This promise poses a potential site for mobilizing and activism. Anti-racists movements can work within and beyond the law to argue for the NCAA to achieve their promise through redistributing monies to subsidize youth sport opportunities in underserved communities. Furthermore, college sports remain under the purview of higher education. Educational institutions could take progressive action if actors and leaders adopt anti-racist ideologies and practices. Patton (2016) explains that higher education is primary site to train workers and leaders across all areas of public life including future educators and researchers and those who shape the law such as lawyers, policy makers, and judges. Sport researchers who work in the academy are also training current or future athletic administrators, coaches, and staff. While the primary imperative of these spaces may be to retain whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), they can still be harnessed by anti-racist educators to infuse liberatory approaches. Rather than training future leaders in race-neutral terms, classes should incorporate curriculum that addresses the full scope of White supremacy’s injury to the racially subjugated. In this article, I offered one assessment of whiteness’ depth and breadth in college athletic admission that could be used to educate students on where to disrupt White supremacy’s reach in athletics and beyond.