A University of Texas professor who formally advised the school on the January hiring of its first black head football coach gave a speech on campus in 2013 stating that a “white sports media complex” works to further “white privilege” even as it claims to be “post-racial.”
Ben Carrington, an associate professor of sociology at the university who co-wrote a book titled “Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport,” gave a speech in February, 2013 titled “The Global White Sports/Media Complex and the Politics of Sport: Towards a Critical Communications of Sport” as part of the university’s Texas Program in Sports and Media “Summit on Communication and Sport” in which he asserted that “racialized regimes of power are intimately connected to the representational politics of what I want to more specifically term ‘the white sports media complex.’
“I mean by this, the ways in which whiteness is grounded, accepted and established as a normative disposition both within the institutions of sports and the media. And further how the sports media complex works to embed and make invisible the operations of white privilege even as it claims to be non- or even post-racial.”
In a speech that frequently referenced Marxist and “neo-Marxist” sources, Carrington also argued in his university-sponsored speech that “you might think of the sports media complex then as having an important role, a role arguably more powerful than any other social institution, in the ideological transmission of ideas about race and, essentially, of normative whiteness.
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