African American Stereotypes In Sports

You have trained your entire life, waking up every morning at 6 and working out for 3 hours, before then practicing basketball for another 4 hours. And now, it’s all up to this moment. Going up, you cross up the defender, and dunk the ball, winning the game for your team. Too bad nobody was watching. Because you are African American, it is taken that you are a great athlete, so you aren’t that special. Because you are a woman, and people don’t think that you, a woman is as athletic as a man. Or because you were a nerd in high school, and nerds will never be athletes. While the world has taken steps to make sports more equal, there is still a lot of prejudices against certain people based on many factors, and these must end. Stereotypes cause …show more content…
These range from the fact that Asians cannot play sports to African Americans are all muscle and no brain. One of the biggest known stereotypes is the idea that Asians are not very athletic. According to complex. com, “....we’ve cast the Asian person as the hard-working nerd who’d rather spend a sunny afternoon with an Algebra textbook than playing sports.” The fact that an entire race would be the same, and everyone would rather be smart than athletic is ludicrous. Thank you, Jeremy Lin, for breaking this stereotype, by joining the NBA and proving that no stereotype can break the will power of a race. In my own school, Asians are much more famous for being the ‘A+’ math student, rather than the one that is on the soccer team. Discouraging players in sports because of race is not the way our society works. We are all meant to have an equal chance at any sport, and it starts with killing the "Asians aren’t athletic" stereotype. African Americans are also criticized at their intelligence, and they are generally considered ‘natural athletes,’ and that they haven’t worked their way to the top, but rather started there. The Huffington Post believes that the problem of stereotypes in sports is that they lead to more general stereotypes. If you say that African Americans cannot get read signals from a defender, you could conclude that African Americans, just cannot read! Would you like to always be at a complete disadvantage to your white counterparts, just because of a false thought that blacks aren’t smart? There are tens of millions of African Americans who have gone to great colleges and thousands of them have made a difference in the world. Some might say that these stereotypes aren’t true, and there are famous African Americans in the world who have made a great difference. Count how many of them you know. Compare that to a number of Whites you know. Your list probably consists of Nelson

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