Abstract
This chapter investigates the intersections of race, religion, and prophetic articulations of basketball athletes related to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. By using Walter Brueggemann’s framework of prophetic imagination, I argue that sports activism shares many of the characteristics of prophetic activity in the modern world. This form of prophetic activity is in a civil religious mode that attempts to call attention to the transgressions of the American society. By locating the social activism of basketball players in the NBA, WNBA, and college, a form of secular resistance emerges revealing an important value of sport within America. In the end, the article offers some reasons why sport might be a principal arena for contemporary, prophetic activity.
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Notes
- 1.
The argument that sport within the United States also consumes black and brown bodies for the entertainment of a primarily white audience is duly noted here. See William Rhoden, Six Million Dollar Slave.
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Shoemaker, T. (2019). Running the Prophetic Point: Basketball, Black Lives Matter, and Prophetic Imagination. In: Shoemaker, T. (eds) The Prophetic Dimension of Sport. SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02293-8_5
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