“I Want to be the Minority”

Abstract

In this article, the author offers a contextualized cultural analysis of the “youthful” White masculinities constituted in two sites: first, a 1997 Sports Illustrated cover story titled,“Whatever Happened to the White Athlete?” and second, a discourse about the social-psychological development of adolescent boys written in the wake of the rash of school shootings that took place in the United States in 1997-1998.The author’s main contention is that these representations of disadvantaged and victimized youthful White masculinities found both inside and outside of sport discourses signify a new representational strategy of White male backlash politics in the late 1990s—the youthification of the White male as victim trope.