The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Nationality in Sport: Media Representation of the Ogwumike Sisters

Black Africans have been one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population; yet, their still relatively small size tends to mean that they go ignored in immigration debates. Currently, African immigrants—a diverse group in and of themselves—make up about 4.8% of the total immigrant population, or about 2.1 million people. The population of Black African immigrants has been rapidly growing since the 1970s (when the population was at only 80,000) owing to immigration policy changes such as the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act, the Refugee Act of 1980, and diversity visa programs. The 1965 immigration act is often thought of as a part of the larger civil rights era legislation and represented a massive shift away from the 1952 Walter–McCarran Immigration Act that set the immigration quota from Africa (all of it) at 1,400 per year, Europe’s quota was close to 150,000 (Anderson, 2015; Arthur, 2000; Bashi, 2004; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007). In 2015, Nigeria was the biggest sender of African immigrants to the United States (327K) with Ethiopia (222K), Egypt (192K), Ghana (155K), Kenya (136K), South Africa (92K), Somalia (80K), Morocco (76K), Liberia (74K), and Cameroon (51K) rounding out the top ten (Anderson, 2015).

Historically, Black African immigrants have served as a kind of model minority in U.S. society. This means that they tend to avoid some of the stigma that plagues African Americans but, like Asians, have their own problems with racism ignored. For example, African immigrants tend to have higher levels of education than native-born Americans (both Black and White). In 2015, college and advanced college degree completion for the U.S.-born population above the age of 25 was 31%, whereas it was 29% for the foreign-born population and 39% for African immigrants (57% for Nigerians and South Africans, 44% for Kenyans, 40% for Ghanaians; Zong & Batalova, 2017). These higher levels of education have often been a point of celebration in popular news outlets and magazines (Pierre, 2004). Yet, despite higher levels of education among African immigrants, and higher levels of labor force participation (80% for men, 68% for women), they have struggled to translate their human capital into higher wages. In 2009, both recent (less than 10 years in country) and long-term high-skilled African immigrants were disproportionately working unskilled jobs (36% for recent immigrants, 22% for long term) compared with U.S.-born high-skilled workers (16%) and European immigrants (16%; Capps, McCabe, & Fix, 2012). In this sense, African immigrants remain highly educated, underemployed, and poorer, with a median household income of US$43,000 (or US$27,000 for an individual worker). This income is considerably less than that of their White native-born peers (US$55,257), whereas higher than native-born Blacks (33,000; Anderson, 2015; Capps et al., 2012; Zong & Batalova, 2017).

Yet, some researchers have looked more closely at the median income of Black African immigrants, and found that when human capital is controlled for (education level, U.S. vs. foreign education, English language ability, etc.), African immigrants are not being compensated for what they are worth, and barely register an “advantage” over African Americans in the labor market (Dodoo, 1997; Dodoo & Takyi, 2002). Although there is no space to get into all the causes for this, two popular explanations point to the devaluation of foreign (African) education and the exploitation of Africans in the U.S. labor market with employers taking advantage of their willingness to work longer hours for less pay. We also should not forget the role of social networks, the lack of access to which may hurt workers who stay in unskilled work for too long. The lack of being able to turn their human capital income to decent employment or income means that we see disparities in home ownership, wealth, and educational opportunities for later generations (Alex-Assensoh, 2009; Capps et al., 2012; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Zong & Batalova, 2017).

The concept of the model minority is an appropriate place to return to the topic of sport and media representation. As a creation in response to the civil rights activism of the 1960s, the “model minority” trope has been weaponized to attack African American communities and dismiss their calls for fair and equal treatment in society. Historically, the model minority in the United States has been the Asian/Asian American population. Claire Kim (2000) explains that the model minority “is diligent, disciplined, possessed of strong family values, respectful of authority, thrifty, moral, self-sufficient, and committed to education” (p. 20). In the model minority stereotype, it is these qualities that explain the success of Asians/Asian Americans in U.S. society, however mythical and problematic that “success” might actually be. Black Africans and West Indians often fall into the model minority stereotype as well even though they are Black. This happens because foreign Blacks do not reflect back to (White) society the lingering racial history of Black oppression in the United States, at least not immediately. In many respects, their foreign otherness grants them a momentary “pass” or “exception,” in that, they are seen as “different” from African Americans. However, as Munene Mwaniki (2017) notes in The Black Migrant Athlete, Western media discourse often manipulates Blackness to suit its own needs and interests. Thus, the seeming “acceptance” of the model minority is always contingent on sticking to the stereotype, most important, avoiding any discussion of racism in society, otherwise the person/athlete/group is in danger of being stigmatized like African Americans.

For the Black female athlete being an immigrant adds another dimension of complexity to how Black women are already stigmatized in sport. In the United States, the representation of Black women remains a holdover from the days of slavery and colonialism. Stereotypes used to describe Black females during this time encouraged notions that they lacked physical and emotional sensitivity, were hypersexual, and possessed “natural” strength due to their “closeness” with apes (Vertinsky & Captain, 1998; Withycombe, 2011). Yarbrough and Bennett (2000) find that the plight Black women faced during slavery and colonialism created a framework stigmatizing them to this day. After the abolition of slavery, African American women were still contrasted with White women thought to signify the essence of “true womanhood” (Withycombe, 2011). Withycombe (2011) furthers this line of thought to explain that Whiteness has always shaped and reshaped the myth of the “Black body” to maintain White supremacy. That the bodies of Black female athletes have historically been depicted both as “hypersexual and muscular with manly strength” (p. 541) is in line with the dichotomous nature of stereotypes in general.

We see the continuation of defeminizing Black female athletes in the provocative cases of Serena Williams and Caster Semenya. Throughout her career, Williams, and to a lesser degree her sister Venus, has dealt with questions concerning her hair (beads), proper attire (the body suit infamously described as the “cat suit”), her musculature, and an obsession with her buttocks. These are all hallmarks of how White supremacy seeks to degrade Black women. Williams’ physical build puts into question her status as a woman and quality/worth as an athlete, while her body is also hypersexualized in discourses about the size of her secondary sex characteristics (Douglas, 2005, 2012; Shultz, 2005). Of course, Whiteness has long been obsessed with the bodies of Black women with no better example than the horrific case of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman in the early 19th century. In the nearly all-White sport of elite tennis, these differences are put into sharp relief and reveal the ongoing racism of the sport.

Perhaps more egregiously, the case of Caster Semenya further demonstrates the lengths to which race, gender, and sport intersect. After winning the 800 m at the Track and Field World Championships in 2009, Semenya was publicly accused of being a man and underwent “gender verification” tests. Although the results of the test were never publicly revealed, it was reported that Semenya had to undergo some sort of “therapy” to resolve whatever kind of “condition” she apparently has. By the 2016 Rio Olympics, Semenya was able to run as herself and handily won gold, prompting another round of debates and unleashing a storm of negative comments from fellow competitors. Besides the absurdity that women must change their bodies, whether through medication or surgery, to compete in sport, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the most recent allegations of “women being men” have fallen on Black and Brown bodies from the global South (Dutee Chand and Santhi Soundarajan are notable here). Because these bodies do not fit the White ideal of body type (limited musculature and athleticism), size (petit), and high voices, they are immediately rendered suspect and indeed criminalized (Douglas, 2012; Dworkin, Swarr, & Cooky, 2013; Shultz, 2011). Although it is difficult for all women to be taken as serious athletes, it becomes almost impossible for Black women to present themselves in even the limited ways that White women have access to.

To collect data, we searched the names of the Ogwumike sisters in the LexisNexis news search engine and found just more than 2,000 media articles directly related to or referencing them. These articles were downloaded into Word documents and precoded to help draw attention to potentially useful information. Terms and words such as the athletes’ names, “Nigeria,” and “athletic,” were highlighted in the Word document(s) as were others as the process evolved. Throughout, a process of taking “field notes” involved keeping track of relevant articles and developing themes within the data. As stated previously, we were particularly interested in articles that touched on the subject matter of this study—the intersection(s) of race, gender, and nationality. The media coverage was examined in chronological order, spanning over the course of 10 years (2007-2017).

Before we begin to understand media representation of the Ogwumikes, we must first understand how the media itself is structured. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport published a study in 2014 demonstrating disparities in who actually covers sport. Overall, entire sport departments of popular newspapers and websites, from the editors and assistant editors to the columnists and copy editors, were 75% White male. In looking only at the editors, they found that 90% of sports editors were male, 83% were White male, 9.6% were female, and just 1.4% were Black women (Lapchick, 2014). The lack of diversity in sport media is concerning because it indicates that minorities lack the agency to represent themselves, even in sports where they are the majority. Because sport is primarily owned and controlled by a patriarchal form of governance from youth to college to professional sport, (White) men are not necessarily faced with the same challenges.

Reflecting the paucity of women in sport media, we also know how little coverage women in sport receive. This problem bears on our study because it means our data come from a small pool of sources with little to no attention from the largest sports media conglomerates in the United States such as ESPN and Fox Sports. Instead, the vast majority of our findings came from more regional publications such as the San Jose Mercury News and the California Contra Costa Times (East Bay Times)—both of which covered the Stanford women’s basketball program. Sometimes, these news outlets picked up and published stories that were written by larger organizations such as the Associated Press. Although potentially limiting, we argue that both the media outlets above (both belong to the Bay Area News group), as well as others in our data, are still a part of (often owned by) larger corporate media structures and, therefore, reproduce many of the same problems of larger (national) outlets, albeit on a different scale. Three main themes emerged through the process of data collection and analysis: (a) contradictory representations and color-bland racism, (b) the model minority trope and its drawbacks, and (c) disrupting diaspora, the global reach of White supremacy. Although divided into separate sections, and subsections, these topics do not exist in isolation from one another, as we will demonstrate going forward.

In her seminal piece on intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) cautions against seeing the discrimination of Black women along a single axis of power (usually race) as such a view detracts from the multiplicity of social identification. Hence, an analysis that does not consider how various social identities intersect constructs an inherently limited discourse that misses the nuances that “multiply-burdened” groups in society face in terms of representation. This point is absolutely essential, particularly as we continue to assess the complicated nature wherein Black female athletes experience racism, sexism, and nationalism/ethnocentrism through stereotypical narratives sensationalized by Western media, fans, and sports organizations.

We found that discourse regarding the Ogwumikes status as second-generation immigrants frequently ignored any discussion about Africa or Nigeria or the socioeconomic and cultural barriers immigrants coming from those places face once they get here. Instead, the media’s portrayal of the Ogwumikes establishes them as model minorities. The inception of this term was coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article titled “Success Story, Japanese Style.” In it, he surmises that the increased standard of living reached by Asian Americans toward the end of the 20th century was a result of their cultural superiority over other minority groups, celebrating their seemingly advanced work ethic and determination. In an absolute tone, he conjects that what prohibits “problem minorities” from reaching the same success as model minorities is their “self-destructive” nature (referring largely to civil rights protests and boycotts) and “self-defeating apathy” (Petersen, 1966).

Although the successes of the Ogwumikes often saw them portrayed as model minorities, we also found that media discourse on racial issues consistently displaced the Ogwumikes second-generation immigrant status to the extent in which it was almost completely erased or forgotten about at times. This was a process that happened over time. In the first few years of their careers, the media struggled with the names of the Ogwumikes. For example their first and last names were given to us in a variety of phonetic spellings, “oh-GWOOM-kay” (Timmermann, 2009), “oh-GWOOM-ih-KAY” (“Stanford Star Goes to Sparks,” 2012a), “oh-GWOOM-ih-kay” (Gardiner, 2011), “o-GWOOM-ee-kay” (Almond, 2011b), “Chiney (Shanay)” (Cantu, 2010), “Chiney (chi-NAY),” “oh-GWOOM-i-kay,” “Chiney (Chin-AY),” and “Nneka (NECK-uh)” (Longman, 2010a, 2010b). These inconsistent pronunciations and shortening of the Ogwumike’s first names (the latter is not out of the norm in the history of immigration, however it tends to be in response to the difficulties of native speakers pronouncing foreign names or attempting to fit in; for the Ogwumikes, it is unclear whether either is the case or whether it is personal preference, but nevertheless, their full first names all but disappear after the first couple of years) act as a mechanism to draw attention to their otherness, letting “us” know that “they” (the Ogwumikes) are from “elsewhere.”

Yet, although the processes of othering and stereotypes of model minority work to keep U.S. society imagined as White and Other minority groups oppressed, respectively, another tactic of White supremacy works to keep Blackness homogenized and Black struggles localized. One way we observed this was from examining media coverage on the 2016 WNBA Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, where Black diversity was homogenized so much that “Black” was equated with African American and African American with “Black.” Even Chinenye Ogwumike collapses her identity (contradicting herself, see below) into an African American when she states, “As a league it’s up to us to portray who we are authentically as individuals. . . And as African Americans, we should be speaking to that community as well” (Altavilla, 2016, p. E7). Complexities of identity aside, by rendering all Blacks as African American, the BLM protests that were so troublesome for mainstream U.S. media are contained as local/national events at a time when BLM protests were occurring throughout European capitals, Palestine, South Africa, and elsewhere.

This containment of Black struggle supports what we refer to as globalblind racism: the inadvertent contribution to racist ideologies that result from an incapacity to conceive racism as a global phenomenon rather than a local one. A similar type of containment occurred during the 1960s civil rights movement, whereby fears of communism and social disruption (via the second Red Scare and programs such as the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) kept Black leaders in the United States from developing strong transnational, diasporic, links with other oppressed peoples (Iton, 2008). In fact, we see a similar response and reformulation of the Black political threat to White supremacy in the relatively new use of “Black Identity Extremist” by the FBI in 2018 (De Bourmont, 2018). Although perhaps not as severe in this circumstance, our argument is that, although we are indeed more likely to be in tune with social issues and current events that take place in close physical proximity to our inhabitants on state and national levels, it is fundamental to remember that we also live in the era of globalization where our business, politics, economies, news, and cultures are intertwined.

Thus, the presumption that White supremacy is localized to one specific geographical context (here United States) and does not manifest itself through intersecting lines of oppression on a global scale is at best an illusion. Postcolonial and neoliberal economic developments have allowed a continuation of Western White-supremacist oligarchical rule over many African, Latin American, and Caribbean countries through political interference, resource exploitation, corporatism, and militarism. The intermingling of unregulated corporatism, White supremacy, and globalblind politics often results in a recipe that perpetuates disparities between majority Black and majority White nations regarding income, employment, social stability, and environmental health. One way in which we see this with the Ogwumikes is how the sisters were turned to for their opinion on the #BringBackOurGirls moment, when the militant group Boko Haram kidnapped almost 300 women in Nigeria from a school. By positioning the Ogwumikes as experts on Nigeria, the media inherently places them, their being and identity, firmly in Africa/Nigeria and outside the United States.

This moment also served to bolster the notion that the solution to Boko Haram was U.S. military intervention—or more generally, that the United States should “do” something to save the women. That the moment was specifically seen as an attack on women getting an education, and the involvement of powerful women like Michelle Obama, was reminiscent of similar calls to intervene in Afghanistan (post 9/11) on behalf of women oppressed by the Taliban. By going to the Ogwumikes as “Nigerian women,” the media seeks consent for U.S. intervention by people “from” the country in question. This process is another way in which U.S. media support and validate ongoing military intervention in the name of counterterrorism, something which we are increasingly seeing in the African continent (Hammer, 2016). Throughout all this concern, however, we learn little to nothing about Nigerian history and politics, or how Boko Haram developed, as everything is reduced to “terrorism.”

These practices also extend to how the identities of the Ogwumikes are discussed in ways that essentialize national identity. Although both (and two other siblings) were born in Texas and played basketball for USA Basketball at various points in their career, we find that the media uncritically accepts their self-professed identities as “Nigerian.” Examples from Nnemkadi Ogwumike include, “Who am I? I’m a basketball player, a student and person from an international family from Nigeria” (DiMauro, 2014); “I’m Nigerian, our family are prominent Nigerians” (Jenkins, 2014); and from Chinenye Ogwumike, we are told that,

Although the media’s representation of the Ogwumikes as Nigerian was relatively scarce, their own social media presence demonstrates an emphasis and clear investment in their Nigerian/African identity. This encompasses tweets about Nigerian politics and social (humanitarian) issues, basketball camps in various African countries, African-themed conferences they have attended, and pictures showing embraces with other notable Nigerian/African musicians and athletes including, but not limited to, Jidenna Mobisson, Dikembe Mutombo, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Francis Ngannou. Those residing in the diaspora are often forced to actively seek out resources, information, media, and networks that exist outside or on the fringes of the White mainstream, a primary example being what is called “Black Twitter.” Perhaps more problematically, the type of identity the Ogwumikes (and other famous African migrants) express publicly is a good example of what Anima Adjepong (2018) has described as “Afropolitan.” The Afropolitan, as a type of identity/ethnicity, attempts to combine a positive image of contemporary Africa with Western education, middle-class values, and racial consciousness with postracial aspirations. The trouble with the Afropolitan is that, in its effort to go beyond the boundaries of Africa to find global belonging, it often falls in line with the model minority stereotype, thereby marginalizing from its projects (networks/associations) those who fail to succeed (working class, non–college educated) or are not seen as respectable (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer [LGBTQ]).

Regardless, at issue here are not the identities that the Ogwumikes have chosen, rather that the media silence accomplishes three main things that bolster White supremacy in the United States. First, the children of immigrants (even naturalized first-generation immigrants) are not really Americans in the first place. Second, there is a natural affinity to be with your “own kind.” Third, “good immigrants” (the Black and Brown ones) eventually leave. Taken together, these three aspects of media silence on race and immigration misses an opportunity for deeper inquiry into how the United States (Western nation-state) thinks of itself racially, approaches race/culture in the colorblind frame of naturalization, and fails to see how immigrants of color are often unable to fully realize or see themselves as belonging to this society. In Western media, there is often a lingering postcolonial feeling of “ownership” over Black athletes, usually in European soccer, that feels as though they “owe” it to the former colonial power to play for their national teams, but in the United States, that does not seem to be the case (at least not with African immigrants, perhaps if African Americans had another option; Mwaniki, 2017). We are, perhaps, asking too much of sports media, but we maintain that how these issues are discussed, or not, has bearing on beliefs and actions.