Sociology of sports - Essay Example

Sociology of Sport Sociology of Sports Racial under representation and over representation is common in the modern day sportsas it was in the earlier years. There are statistics that prove that some sports are majorly represented by a certain race of people. Take an example of basketball in the United State of American where many of its players are black Americans. They represent seventy five percent of those players in National Basketball Association (NBA) by 2008. According to National Consortium for Academics and Sports sixty-five percent of those who play the National Football Leagues are black Americans.

In 2008 Black Americans represented 8.5 percent of the players in the National Baseball League, twenty-nine percent were Hispanics with most of the having a Caribbean origin. Also, racial representation is evident in athletics where most of the athletes who participate in short sprint races are blacks while the whites and Hispanics tend to participate in the long distance races (Floyd, Kimberly and Monika 2013).Edwards (1972) argued that blacks are superior to the whites in terms of physical strength but are inferior in terms of intellectual ability.

Hoberman (1997) argued that physical prowess has become a characteristic of African-American community in sports like basketball. This is as a result of the idolization of famous black athletes such as Michael Jackson. This, he argues has reduced the importance placed by African-Americans on their intellectual and social economic development (Jon 2008).The statistics showing that blacks dominate the whites and people from certain places in the world dominate in different forms of sports raises the question whether genetics have a role to play in this.

Is the genetic makeup of black people different from the white people hence their dominance in certain sports and not in others? Is the genetic makeup of Jamaicans different so as to dominate the short distance races? People might argue that people with a certain genetic makeup would excel in a certain sport more than people with a different genetic makeup.However, there are several sociological concepts that can correctly explain this phenomenon. The idea of self-fulfilling prophesy argues that what a person believes to be true becomes true due to positive feedback between behaviour and beliefs.

Self-fulfilling is in the beginning a false understanding of a situation which then leads to a new behaviour which makes the originally false definition become true. In sports, the misplaced believes that a certain race is best suited for certain sports leads to people in other races to be less determined to perform well in that sport hence they remain poor in it (Jussim 2011).Over or under representation in sports can also be explained by the concept of looking-glass self. The concept argues that a person’s self gets cultivated from the interpersonal interactions with others in the society and how other people perceive them.

Charles Horton Cooley argued that people tend to conform to what people think of them. Because of this, people will view themselves through the eyes of other members of the society and their behaviour will be aimed at meeting the characteristics that other people in the society perceive. This is applicable in over representation of a certain race in a specified sport. African-Americans are born and socialized in a society that perceives them to be good in certain sports such as basketball football and short distance races.

This leads them to grow interest in these forms of sports and aim at conforming to their perceived prowess in the sport. This can also be explained by them getting labelled and associated with the success of certain sports this is because people tend to conform to these social labels.ReferencesTurner, J. F., 2010. Social Work Treatment. New York: Oxford University Press.Khan, A. M. and Elliot, D., 2010. Vision and Goal-directed Movement. London: Macmillan Publishers.Jussim, L., 2011. Social Perception and Social Reality.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Floyd, M. Kimberly, S. and Monika, S., 2013. Race, Ethnicity and Leisure. California: Hoover Institution Press.Jon, E., 2008. Taboo: Why Blacks Dominate Sports and Why we’re Afraid to Talk About It. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.