Paper short abstract:

My paper deals with the influence of sports media on the (re)affirmation of dominant ideas about race. I analyse the mediatic discourses of a South African mixed martial arts promotion to reveal their contribution to the racialization process of black African migrant fighters in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The Extreme Fighting Championship (EFC) is a mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion funded in 2009, in Johannesburg. Among its many professional fighters are migrants who face economic, administrative, and social issues related to both their migrant status and their harsh working conditions at the EFC. Being interested in the influence of sports media on the (re)affirmation of dominant ideas about race, I analyse EFC’s mediatic discourses to reveal their contribution to the racialization process of black African fighters. To do this, I rely on 16 videos produced by the EFC and 61 semi-structured interviews with 35 male black African fighters. First, I show how the EFC builds a dangerous otherness narrative using (a) essentialist racial assignments and (b) the rivalries between citizens and foreigners embedded in South African society. Second, I show how the EFC builds a reassuring otherness mobilizing meritocratic and colour-blindness ideologies. Finally, I show how both these narratives reflect EFC’s discriminatory structure and thus reconfigure black African fighters’ hardships. My work aims at understanding how media reflect sport promotion oppressive dynamics, how they feed racial hierarchies and how they contribute to sports migrant’s precarity.