What is the study?
Kelly E. Wright is a Ph.D Candidate in Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where she studies Sociophonetics, Neurolinguistics, and Historical Sociolinguistcs, focusing on the link between Linguistic Production and Perception. Her work on linguistic racialization and sport, includes an algorithm that predicts an athlete’s race based on the words written about them. This study has appeared in The Undefeated and been discussed in Deadspin. In addition, Wright was featured in a podcast episode, for The End of Sport, where she speaks about linguistic racialization in the world of sport and sports media.
Her study evokes fascinating conversation about the psycho-social and political dynamics of language and how they play out in discourse around sport. Wright offers both an accessible introduction to a complex field of study and a sophisticated and interdisciplinary account of how language contributes to the production of race but also can be used as an instrument of anti-racist resistance. Her study is the first in-depth approach to examining overt racialized language in sports broadcasting. Her work is trailblazing and offers an American Studies perspective to the explain the racialization present among mainstream sports broadcasting networks.
Why it matters?
It’s important for broadcasters to be aware of these implicit racial biases in linguistics. By reporting equitable information and commentary on athletes of all races, broadcasters dictate examples of appropriate discourse when it comes to talking about sport. Because the individuals often in upper echelons of broadcast media are White males, the portrayal of sports through media is often homogenized. Some sports fans feel unwelcome to perceive sports news in the sense that so much of the coverage is created by a specific subset of our population: namely White men, most of them straight, the vast majority cisgender. In fact, the homogeneity of sports media cannot be overstated. “89 percent of sports coverage is written by men” (Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson). Sports media leaders remain largely white and largely male, which means that there are many voices and perspectives that are not being heard in this mainstream delivery of media. The uniformity in sports reporting has consequences to communicating accurate knowledge. It affects the narrative of what is shared and how. Sports fans are robbed of the fullness of truth. By ensuring an equitable, representative style of language is being used, systemic racist language can begin to be disabled.
Why it’s important to me?
I am deeply involved in sports media at the University of Notre Dame and feel it to be a charge of mine to communicate equitable, entertaining, and enthusiastic content to audiences. I am a sportswriter for our student-run newspaper The Observer, the sports director and marketing head of Notre Dame Television, the only female sportscaster for Notre Dame’s student-run radio WVFI Sports, and an employee of Fighting Irish Media. I hope to integrate the principles and practices derived from the study by Kelly E. Wright in my own endeavors of broadcast sport media on campus and beyond.