Issue 48 The Sports Justice Movement with Dr. Shaun M. Anderson
I hope your week is going well.
This week on the FutureX Podcast, I speak with Dr. Shaun M. Anderson, author of The Black Athlete Revolt: The Sport Justice Movement in the Age of Black Lives Matter. Dr. Anderson’s book examines athlete activism before and since the BLM movement. As a scholar, he examines how sport has influenced business, politics, and society.
We talk about the role of Black athletes as protestors and social change agents. We’ll also talk about how Dr. Anderson is building a community around his book.
Dr. Anderson digs deep into the history of sports and athlete activism. His book tells the story of protest and activism among athletes like Althea Gibson, Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, to name just a few. And it traces this history of activism and protest to the present day, to athletes like Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid, and LeBron James.
He answers the question of why the Black Lives Matter Movement moved athletes to speak out about systemic racism and police violence, and he draws a line from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, discussing the price each paid for their activism and their social justice wins. We bring in Nike and the NFL and how they’ve supported Kaepernick (or not!) and whether we might look to those organizations for social change.
Dr. Anderson’s book is available on Amazon or bookshop.org. Here’s a list of books I’ve recently discussed on podcasts.
What’s Ahead on FutureX
Next week on the podcast, you’ll hear my interview with Bernice Chao, an award-winning creative director, author, and public speaker. She is a co-founder of Asians in Advertising, a community with four thousand global members that strives to create opportunity for Asians in the advertising world and helps elevate Asians to higher leadership positions. Bernice is an adjunct marketing professor at LMU and the curator of TEDxCulverCity. In 2022, she was inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement. In 2023, an organization called She Runs It named her Working Mother of the Year.
We talk about building community and representation in advertising, on the TEDx stage, and online. That’s in edit now and will premiere next week.
Where to Find the Show
Listen to The FutureX Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Transistor.fm or wherever the finest podcasts are distributed. I post a closed-captioned version of the podcast on YouTube.
Thanks for listening,
Lee
