Black Sporting Identities and Counter-Narratives in Men's Recreational Soccer in Canada: Beyond Victimry, Beyond Boundaries?

Drawing from a multi-year ethnography, this paper examines the role of sport in the resettlement experiences of contemporary economic immigrants from continental Africa. Focusing on members of the Black Continental African Soccer Club who participate in a 35+ men's recreational league in a Canadian prairie city, we critically explore how they navigate Black (African) masculinity as a subjugated and stereotyped gendered racial identity. In these spaces, historical neo-colonial racist perceptions of Black masculinity continue to pervade white-imagined Canadian sports cultures in ways that powerfully police Black bodies. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study examines how constructions of Black masculinity are contested, reaffirmed, and reframed through participants’ interactions with referees and league officials. In so doing, we emphasize the influence of structural and systemic racism that sets powerful limits and pressures on their ability to fully embrace their authentic Black selves and to confidently negotiate sporting environments. Using the CRT tool of counter-narratives, we foreground the voices of team members as they reconceive, re-author, and rearticulate the connotations of Black masculinity. Crucially, their counter-narratives allow the emergence of themes that not only illuminate their collective confrontations with painful experiences, but also their endurance and resistance to anti-Black racism.