The Undergraduate Committee on Global Thought (UCGT) Talks with Professors series allows undergraduate students to engage in casual and meaningful conversations with distinguished scholars in a laid-back, informal setting. Join Frank Guridy, Associate Professor of History and of African American and African Diaspora Studies, for a conversation on “Sports and Politics in a Time of Political Polarization.”
In recent years sports has re-emerged as an arena of political struggle for progressive movements and for governments who seek to contain them. The mobilization for pay equity by the US Women’s National soccer team, the efforts of the Trump regime to repress black athletic protest, among other struggles, show how sports remain an important site of political contestation. This session places today’s struggles in sport and politics in historical context by revisiting the 1960s and early ’70s, another era when sports emerged as a site of contestation, especially for the Black Freedom and Second-Wave Feminist movements in the United States.
