SSI Research Chair and sociology professor Chris Knoester recently wrote in The Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com about the Cleveland baseball team name change, the elimination of Native American team names and mascots in sports, and how the activist and resistance processes involved parallel other contestations around antiracist initiatives in sports and society. 

His op-ed primarily drew from his research with Carter Rockhill, published in Socius, on how U.S. adults’ public opinions about Native American team names and mascots represented case studies of how antiracism initiatives are encouraged and resisted in sports and society.

They found that dominant social statuses and in-group identities, traditionalism, and beliefs about the existence of racial/ethnic discrimination in society were central in shaping public opinions. Notably, these dynamics involved social structural, group, and identity factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation, education, and rurality.

Rockhill received his Ph.D. in Sport Management from OSU and is now an assistant professor of management and marketing at Carthage College.

The authors used data from the SSI-funded National Sports and Society Survey. In addition, Rockhill’s work on the project was supported by a 2019-20 SSI Student Research Grant.