Sports, social class, and race (Part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part focuses on providing a framework to understanding the intersection of sports with social class and race.

In the movie Billy Elliot, a young, working class boy from County Durham in North East England finds that his talent is in the girls-only ballet class, much to the consternation of his hyper-masculine, coal-miner father. Billy's father much prefers boxing, which is more popular in their community and a traditionally masculine sport.

When Billy arrives in London to audition for the Royal Ballet, he is unsure how to communicate with his peers from elite backgrounds, and he ends up punching another dancer in frustration after his audition. The judges are horrified by Billy's act of violence and seem troubled that he could bring the violent mores of working-class County Durham to vaunted halls of the Royal Ballet.  

The thematic contrast between boxing and ballet that underpins Billy Elliot goes beyond a simple contrast between combat and artistry, but also makes clear that sports can reflect the preferences and mores of the social classes in Britain. But why is it that sports are classed? 

Bordieu’s Theory on Cultural Capital and Sports

French sociologist Pierre Bordieu helps explain the classing of certain sports through his theory of cultural capital. His theory posits that the consumption of goods helps reinforce social class because individual consumption tends to reflect the values and virtues of the consumer’s social class.

In the sports context, Bordieu theorizes that the aims of upper class sports tend to exemplify upper class virtues likes artistic quality, health maintenance, and individualism; while lower-class sports exemplify lower-class virtues such as competitiveness, violence, strength, and collective discipline. He uses the example of body building versus gymnastics to show this distinction. While body building produces a large, physical form that outwardly reflects the working-class virtue of a strong body, gymnastics is essentially body hygiene and maintenance, which reflects the upper class virtue of a healthy body.

Bordieu also gives significant weight to the perceived social profits of certain sports. The upper classes derive social profit from certain sports because those sports acquire distributional significance. This means that certain sports acquire significance among the social classes because of how their participation is distributed among the classes. For example, golf is available almost exclusively to the upper classes because it requires a large amount of leisure time and significant economic expenditure. With such a limited subset of individuals who can afford to participate, these sports become a technique of sociability, where the upper classes derive social value from mingling among themselves in a privileged space and differentiating themselves from the lower classes.

On the other hand, the lower classes derive significantly different social profits from their sports. For example, most team sports run counter to the strong individualism reflected in upper class sports like tennis and golf, because athletes derive social profit from collective discipline, sacrifice, and working towards a common objective. Combat sports like boxing or wrestling are truly working class because the violence inherent in their execution are anathema to the virtue of respectability in the upper class. Importantly, with the increased commercialization of sports, the social profits for the working class may turn into an economic profit for a talented few, as playing sports professionally can also be a way out of poverty.

In America, the enjoyment of sports is a classed affair. Social class is reflected in consumption preferences of fans, as inferred by advertising preferences, also reflects the classing of sports in America as well. While much attention is paid to which $7,000 to $650,000 wristwatch a golfer wears when they win stops on the PGA tour, the focus in NASCAR is on which cheap, working class beer will adorn the winning car, Miller High Life or Busch. Though class and elitism is less baked in than in Britain perhaps, consumption of American sports often has distributional significance, and remains a strong indicator of social class.

American Sports and Race

Another dimension outside of class that affects the consumption of American sports is race. In the past, consumption of certain sports was almost entirely restricted by race. For example, Major League Baseball was a literal white-man’s-game until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1945. The same was true of other major sports leagues as well. For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) - where today 74 percent of players are Black - did not integrate until 1950.

No explicit color barrier exists in American sports today, but there remain some very large racial disparities in sports fandom. For example, a full 92 percent of National Hockey League (NHL) fans are white, which is second only to NASCAR which boasts 94 percent white fans. Compare these figures to the demographics of fans of the National Basketball Association, where only 40 percent of fans are white and 45 percent are Black.

The fandom of these sports leagues also reflects participation in the highest-levels of the sport. For example, 80 percent of players in the NHL are white, and only 32 out of 800 active players are Black. This year will also be the first time that a Black driver will compete in NASCAR’s full Cup Series Schedule in 45 years. Meanwhile in the NBA, 80 percent of players are non-white.

However, while the NHL and NASCAR are obviously predominantly white sports they don’t always connote wealth. While the NHL has the highest share of fans who make more than $100,000 a year at 33 percent, the solidly middle class NASCAR has only half that at 14 percent. It seems that despite the reputation of hockey as a violent sport suitable for working-class toughs, perhaps a fairer characterization is that of the major American sports leagues, only NASCAR is a truly white working-class sport.

These statistics on race and American sports beg the question: if we are willing to accept that sports are a reflection of social class as Bordieu suggests, are sports also a reflection of race? Is being a fan of the NHL or NASCAR an expression of whiteness, as much as golf is an expression of being upper class?

Based on the extremely homogenized racial distribution of fans of American sports, I would say yes. When being a fan or participating in certain sports remains such a uniformly white experience, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that these sports have acquired what Bordieu would call distributional significance, but in the racial context as well. Participation in these sports helps reinforce distinctions between class and race by showing that someone is white, working class, or possibly both.