Sport, Race, and Grassroots Activism: A Contextual Analysis of Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp as a Sporting Social Movement Organization

Abstract

This dissertation engages Know Your Rights Camp for Black Liberation (KYRC) – founded and led by athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick – as a case study for critically analyzing the contemporary intersections of sport, race, and grassroots activism. Among other related initiatives, KYRC hosts “camps” across the U.S. designed to facilitate empowerment, solidarity, and critical education about structural racism for Black and Brown youth in marginalized communities. KYRC is illustrative of the recent resurgence of sporting activism in the 2010s and early 2020s, in conjunction with the broader Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement. Not only is Kaepernick a symbolic figure of both athletic protest and Black resistance more generally in this era, but KYRC is representative of how contemporary sporting activism has evolved in more radical, coordinated, and grassroots directions. Because these emerging sporting initiatives more closely resemble the character of social movements organizations than traditional sport-for-development or sporting philanthropy initiatives, I propose conceptualizing these grassroots organizations as Sporting Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Borrowing from social movement frameworks, I examine KYRC as a Sporting SMO, defined as an organization that utilizes its connection to sport or athletes to pursue social, political, or cultural change in a coordinated, strategic, and sustained manner. While scholars within Physical Cultural Studies and related fields have outlined the historical significance of and public reactions to this resurgence in sporting activism, there remains a considerable lack of theoretically and empirically rigorous research into Sporting SMOs, let alone with data collected in collaboration with organizations that can speak to their inner workings and on-the-ground mechanics. This project fills these gaps. The underlying research question is: in what ways, and within what broader sociopolitical contexts, does Know Your Rights Camp conduct grassroots sporting activism? First, based on in-depth interviews with KYRC associates, content analysis of KYRC’s social media, and textual analyses of KYRC’s public-facing pedagogical documents, I conduct a micro- and meso-level sociological analysis of KYRC’s mechanics, logics, strategies, messages, tensions, and challenges of KYRC’s model of grassroots activism. Second, based in the methods of radical contextualism and articulation, I conduct a macro-level cultural studies analysis of the social, political, economic, historical, technological, and ideological contexts within which KYRC is situated. Overall, this dissertation contains a precise sociological analysis of what KYRC is and does, as well as a broader cultural studies analysis of what KYRC tells us about sport, race, and politics in contemporary America. To summarize the key findings, I suggest that KYRC is simultaneously a Black Radical political project, a form of celebrity sporting activism, a team-based Sporting SMO, a grassroots pedagogical project, and an anti-essentialist progressive conjunctural response to racial capitalism/neoliberalism. KYRC’s blueprint of grassroots activism can be characterized as the symbolic mobilization of high-profile celebrity association and the material mobilization of philanthropy/donor contributions for the purposes of youth empowerment, collective community uplift, and critical public pedagogy. KYRC is propelled by the Kaepernick Brand – referring to Kaepernick’s stature as a global commercial symbol of bold and authentic political resistance – which uniquely affords the organization material and symbolic resources that the KYRC team strategically channels into navigating the non-profit sector and serving its communities with critical education and rapid community response. Based on these findings, I argue that KYRC reveals the political and transgressive potentials inherent to the immense economic and cultural expansion of sport, in ways that urge us to reconsider our assumptions about sport’s emancipatory potential and heighten our expectations of Black (celebrity) athletes. More broadly, KYRC demonstrates how the Left can intervene through the terrain of popular culture to resist neoliberalism and the Right’s reactionary authoritarian populism, and instead articulate a vision for America based in abolition, solidarity, and liberation from all forms of oppression.