Sociology of sports Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Sociology of sports - Essay Example 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