There, in the dim light of the small boxing room, flies climbed over the heads of fighters and the smell of brick and blood. It was our first time there. Chaflán was taken to a corner of the room where a trainer, talked strong to him, strapping a pair of thin gloves and pulling at his stained drawstrings. It was the way a man talked to his son. I knew this, though I'd never met my own father and would never meet him. I knew this by instinct. Or from the way I always looked at fathers and sons, like a dog at a feast it wasn't welcomed to, where it wouldn't be given even a shred of beef. It was the smell in the room that made me think of that.

This essay asserts that when director Ryan Coogler's two earliest films, Fruitvale Station and Creed, are read together, the sustained engagement reveals how a Black radical imagination acknowledges and dignifies Black life in a context of anti-Black violence. Ultimately, the process that Coogler identifies and articulates in creating Apollo parallels the process of mourning Black lives through protest in a culture where the claim that Black lives matter amounts to resistance.

(Excerpted from Be Holding, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.)

I love sports because it serves my instinctive desire to compete. My affection for writing serves that very same desire, but in the hierarchy of needs falls on the border between esteem and self-actualization. When I combined my passion for sports with my passion for writing, I had no idea it would be the start of an incredible long-distance journey.

By analyzing Colin Kaepernick's kneel using performance theory, we can unlock a more in-depth meaning to his protest and dig into the way freedom is accrued by Black bodies inside the athletic arena of the NFL.

Most white sports fans embrace Black athletes when they uphold traditional ideals of American nationhood and citizenship. However, Black athletes' protests during the national anthem push against America's racial status quo, resulting in ostracism and backlash from non-athletes and their respective leagues. This article addresses how fans and league officials perpetuate white supremacy as a method of silencing those who draw attention to America's racial status quo. I argue that because Black athlete activists challenge assumptions of white supremacy, especially assumptions related to the roles and limits of the Black body in public arenas, many white sports fans and organizations denigrate Black athlete activists in order to uphold white supremacist views about sports. To further this argument, I examine protests by Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Colin Kaepernick. Both protests demonstrate the continuity of racist responses across history in the sports world.