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Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.
Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.
“Canada’s Tackling the Everyday is an insightful and rewarding read that is certain to generate discussion if included in course reading lists. . . . It offers a particular perspective on capitalism, exploitation, forms of care, and racial dynamics, both in contemporary college football and broader sociopolitical contexts.”
“Canada provides an engaging and detailed account of how the experiences of African-American college-football players are often tied closely to those of their communities and families, with a particular emphasis on the players’ mothers. . . . Canada demonstrates that Black players and their mothers and communities are closely connected to each other through the game of football – an ostensibly violent sport in which care, love, and resistance nonetheless combat racism and prejudice.”
“Canada’s timely volume adopts a Black-feminist lens, examining how the players survive and thrive as teammates, as individuals, as members of a brotherhood, as sons of caring mothers, and in their lives off the field. . . . An important addition to the ongoing conversation about Black college athletes in an era of change.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “I Love Saturdays”: Organizing the Team
2. “I’m an X in Their Playbook”: Concern for Individuals
3. “I Do It for Them”: Bonds of Brotherhood
4. “The Year My Mom Was Born”: Care from Mothers
5. “The Son That Gets a Lot of Whoopings”: Joking through Violence
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index