Excessive Celebration? The Racialization of Recruiting Commitments on College Football Internet Message Boards.

The current study analyzed comments posted on Internet message boards devoted to U.S. college football. The investigators collected comments (N = 3,800) about instances in which a player initially announced intent to attend a particular university, but later changed his mind and signed a National Letter of Intent to attend a different university. While few posts included explicit mention of race (n = 11), commenters more frequently used forms of "color-blind" racial rhetoric that invoked racialized meanings without the overt use of racial terms (n = 346). Comments often reflected a white colonial framing of football players' decisions, behaviors, and abilities, expressing a number of common racialized assumptions, including beliefs in the natural superiority of black physicality, doubts about black intellectual ability, and expectations about whites possessing skill, technique, and mental capacity. The presence of these racialized assumptions points to the continued salience of race in an era that is often claimed to be "color-blind" and free of racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]