Monoracial Athletes

During the last 50 years of competition, Black athletes have become a dominating force in the sport of Track and Field. Olympic track star Usain Bolt, a black athlete, is the fastest man on earth and currently holds the world record time for the fastest 100-meter dash; it is likely that it will never be broken. Through the recent growth of Black dominance in Track, various stereotypes have come about pertaining to both Black and White athletes. Typically, the stereotype states that white athletes are not as fast as Black athletes and simply cannot match up in a race. This stereotype pits the two races against each other and causes a divide to occur through the use of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is a process that “occurs when knowledge …show more content…
Our topic within this paper seeks to find the effects of disadvantageous racial identity primes on Black-White biracial athletes. Do biracials experience a decrease in performance when facing a stereotype, in the same way that monoracial athletes do? Or do biracials experience no difference given that they are a part of both racial groups and can code switch? Biracial individuals are a particularly difficult group to study because possess the ability to code switch and are often unable to be placed into definite categories within the research world. This study seeks to be a roadmap for future studies that will pursue finding out the degree, to which, cognitive function is affected when Biracial athletes are faced with having their identities challenged. Moreover, our research is vital to uncovering the truth about how much of a toil stereotype boost and threat has on the biracial individual. Through our study we want to see if knowing a stereotype about part of your identity can hinder your athletic …show more content…
As spoken about earlier, we have decided to racially prime the white identity in Black-White Biracial individuals because this is the identity that does not dominate track and has historically been given a negatively prescribed stereotype. For this study we used 105 Middle school aged males that are Black-White biracial and participated in Track. The study took place over the span of two days and was housed in an indoor track. The decision to house the study indoors was made in order to keep weather changes and track density from being a limitation of the study. Furthermore, participants were instructed that they would be running the 100-meter dash one time on each day of the study; all seven lanes were to be used during races and automatic timers were put into place to limit human error amongst the recorded times. Additionally, after each race the participants were instructed to fill out a Self-Evaluation Survey with which they rated their feeling after the race on a scale of one (not at all) to five (very much). The survey was modeled after an evaluation survey used by Gaither et al., (2015) in a study pertaining to biracial individuals, stereotype boost, and testing ability. Also, as a consequence for fashioning the study into a tournament based project, it was necessary that rewards be given out at the end of the final race. For those that