NASCAR asks fans to put away Confederate Flags. F1 star Hamilton to set up commission to increase diversity. Racing without a race: How motorsports never integrated. Jim Crow Journey Stories: African American Driving as Emotional Labor. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), 597–611.Īlderman, D. Mobility as Antiracism Work: The “hard driving” of NASCAR’s Wendell Scott. Michael Jordan’s Big Play in NASCAR Could Help Diversify Its Fan Base. Importantly, Wendell Scott opens up space for us to think about motorsports as being part of a wider politics of Black mobility and self-determination in America, especially in light of NASCAR’s continuing struggles with diversity and associations with a White supremacist past. The work of racing and driving was part of Scott’s geographically situated political practice and important to the struggle to access and move about the sport of stock car racing and hence the larger US landscape of citizenship. Scott did not represent his efforts in terms of civil rights activism, but it is important to contextualize Black resistance outside the confines of formal protest to include the struggle for survivability and material reproduction. Here we offer a critical (re)reading of Scott’s racing career as antiracist counter-mobility work and focus on the bodily, social, and technological practices he employed to maintain and even enhance his ability to move around tracks and to and from races. He raced throughout the segregated Jim Crow South and in what was otherwise an all-White sport, facing discrimination, humiliation, and violence. Scott was the first African American driver to win a race at the elite division of NASCAR.
This chapter explores professional stock car racing, specifically the US-based National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), and the racialized struggles and resistant driving of Wendell Scott (1921–1990) of Danville, Virginia.
We work to recover the Black geographies of competitive driving that have long existed in opposition to White supremacy and centre the practices, contributions, and movements of people of colour in the history of motorsports. Yet, racism in motorsports has received limited academic attention along with the history of African Americans challenging White supremacy in auto racing. Sports cultures are deeply involved in reinforcing but also in challenging racial identities, hierarchies, and inequalities.
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