Introduction to Special Issue College Sport (In) Equity: Working Within and Beyond the Law to Achieve Intersectional Racial Justice Praxis

In October 2020, we submitted a proposal to the Spencer Foundation for a field-building grant to gather an interdisciplinary and innovative group of college sport scholars to envision and work toward radical changes in intercollegiate scholarship, practice, and teaching. Fall 2020 was plagued with efforts of higher education to ‘return to normal’in the face of growing globalized and interrelated threats of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Blackness, and authoritarianism. As no surprise to sports scholars, intercollegiate athletics were central sites and symbols across these interrelated current events. During the brief lockdown of college sports–the shuttering of the Winter and Spring 2020 NCAA championship season–high-profile athletes used their platforms to draw attention to a range of movements. Athlete activism connected the ongoing and unprosecuted police killings of Black people and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Brown communities to the exploitative labor relations embedded in amateurism and revenue sports–where Black athletes are hyper-concentrated.