Ballers of the New School is one of the first and best books to come along that effectively explains contemporary athletes and the public response to them. It asks readers to consider the role of race in the sweaty as well as the sweat-free zones of sport. It challenges the well-worn narrative of sport as America's most significant site of racial progress by scrutinizing the true role of sport in mobilizing and shaping definitions, social relations, and public life.American sport culture performs and propagates rituals, symbols, and expressions of fear and difference that sustain racism, and notions of racial supremacy and block bridges to racial progress.
The text encourages a restructuring of the power of the racial subtexts thrust into sporting arenas, upon the bodies of athletes of color, and into the mind and hearts of spectators via the racial contract. The book's impetus is for readers to emerge with more truthful narratives, more honest dialogues, better American values, better social relations, and hopefully, using this new vision of sports culture as a model, real change.
