Second of two parts – read first part >
Author and anthropologist Tracie Canada talked to Black college football players, their families and others, and her findings later became the basis of her first book, “Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football” (University of California Press, 2025).
“I’m an anthropologist and an ethnographer, and that’s how I define myself,” explained Canada in a recent MSR Zoom call. “When I think about my work related to race and sports, I am most interested in the lived experiences of Black college football players as an anthropologist. It means their relationships with each other, their relationships with their families, how they navigate their everyday lives, dealing with what I deem to be an exploitative college system, and being a college student who happens to play football.”
NCAA racial demographics show that 40 percent of FBS football players are Black, and their graduation rates have risen in recent years, now at 82–84 percent.
“I’m not someone who loves to watch football,” continued Canada, an assistant professor at Duke University, where she also attended as an undergraduate. It was there that she once lived in a dorm with some first-year Black football players and only went to games to support them.
These young Black men arrive on campus fresh out of high school and are quickly thrust into the BMOC track, tasked not only with playing football but also navigating life on a Southern PWI campus. It is likely the same at many PWIs, where football players also serve as major revenue generators for the school.
“I spent the 2017–18 football season doing most of the research,” she recalled. “The more that I studied the topic and read about it, I realized the ways that college football kind of runs college sports. And if we zero in on what’s happening with football, and specifically with the Black men who play it, because they’re overrepresented there…”
When asked if being a Black woman made it easier for players to open up to her, Canada said, “I think that the fact that I was Black, that I was young, that I’m a woman, and that I’m also from the South, these are layered parts of my identity that mattered when I was interviewing people.” She added that it also helped when speaking with players’ mothers.
“I have a whole chapter in the book about moms and their relationships with their sons,” said the professor-author, “because they’re usually the ones who sign off on their sons being able to play, as they are concerned about the dangerous and violent nature of the sport.”
Without disclosing the ending, Canada said her book “is helpful in explaining and peeling back the layers of what it is like to be a Black college football player at this time, when college sports have kind of exploded. They are still students, right?
“I’m hoping that my book humanizes not just these people, but also their experiences and adds another dimension to what we often hear about,” she concluded.
Language, perception and who defines the narrative
“Code switching” surfaced a couple of weeks ago at the University of Minnesota’s Maturi Pavilion, an all-too-convenient explanation sometimes offered by White college basketball coaches regarding the physicality of Black female players.
“There were a couple plays where Lauren (Whittaker) is literally being bear-mauled, and I think that’s common in the SEC,” said Lisa Fortier, head coach of Gonzaga Bulldogs women’s basketball, during her March 20 postgame comments after her team lost to Ole Miss Rebels women’s basketball in a first-round NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament game in Minneapolis.
Gonzaga has just one Black player, while Ole Miss’s entire roster is Black. The Southeastern Conference is also a leader among Power Four conferences in Black female head basketball coaches.
Fortier’s comments went viral afterward and drew widespread criticism. Andscape writer Ken Makin, in a March 25 commentary, noted that such language reinforces harmful stereotypes.