Derby and Race: a 6 (or so)-part series

Over the next few weeks I'm going to explore the relation between race and roller derby. This was prompted by an interview I did with the lovely RayWoWW when, as a follow up question, she asked me, as a nonwhite person, what I thought the role of race in derby was. I ended up writing her a giant text wall of an email back, and I realized as I was doing it that there were all these issues that I couldn't really resolve for the purposes of telling her what I thought about race and derby.

Part of the reason that I'm interested in this is, obviously, because I'm a member of a racial minority. But at the same time, this semester I'm also teaching an awesome class on the Philosophy of Race and Gender, and it is really making me think about this stuff in my spare time. It's weird to just think about concepts like white privilege, for example, independent of any context. But then applying race theory to practice also brings out some interesting results.

Now, I know that there is an amazing blog entry by CRG's Elektra Q Tion on why derby is such a white sport. I think this is a really big contribution to the dialogue on race and derby, and what I'd like to do is build on some of the things that came out of that discussion, in addition to some other thoughts that have been rolling around in my brain.

Here's an example. New York City is a pretty racially diverse place, right? Well, here's a picture of Gotham's All-Star team from 2011:

And here's one from their 2013 team:

Hmm. So there are a few changes, but it still looks predominantly white. Why? I'm not asking that derby teams have to be proportionate to the diversity in the city's population, but what is it that makes nonwhite skaters less inclined to make the team? This might not be a problem, depending on how we think about the issues. I'm not sure what I'm going to be looking for here, but I think there are a LOT questions that need to be asked about what happens when race and derby collide.

So, in the next few weeks, I'll start where Q left off with asking about why derby is so white. But maybe that only works because whiteness is the norm, overwhelmingly, in western culture, where derby is predominantly played. So then another question comes up: what's the relation between derby and nonwestern culture? Does the role of gender and cultural norms have anything to do with it? And if there is a problem with racial underrepresentation in derby, what obligations do skaters (minority or not) have to make derby more diverse?

And down the rabbit hole we go...