“This is a really sweet, full-circle moment for me,” said Tracie Canada, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology.
Canada’s first book, “Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football,” published by the University of California Press in February, has roots in her days as an undergraduate at Duke.
When she was a sophomore, Canada started asking questions about the experiences of students who participate in college sports — especially the high-stakes, lucrative worlds of football and basketball. Encouraged and inspired by Lee Baker and Orin Starn in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, she went on to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia before returning to Duke in 2022 and joining her mentors on the faculty.
Duke, renowned both for its campus sports culture and research excellence, is a natural environment for her to ask important questions at the intersection of sports, health, race, education and the place of football in America.
“Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football” is about relationships, specifically the relationships that sustain and nurture the young Black men who make up the majority of players in what is arguably the most dangerous of college sports.
Canada was particularly interested in two types of close, supportive relationships: those between the players and their mothers, and those Black teammates form amongst themselves.
“There’s been a lot written about father/son relationships and football, because often fathers or other male relatives are the main reason someone starts playing,” Canada said. But her interactions with football players showed that mothers play a special role in their sons’ lives, one that is focused more on care and support than concern for success on the field.
“There’s a closeness, partly because these moms recognize the very particular experience their sons are going through, being valued on the field because of their bodies and often stacked into playing positions that are tougher on the body because they’re dubbed ‘skill’ positions,” Canada said. “The players live in big, strong, tall bodies that are needed for football because this sport is quite violent, but that same body can be stigmatized and viewed negatively in the world outside of sport. These moms are watching this whole situation and hoping their sons are okay — not just okay playing football, but okay as young Black men who are going to graduate from college and live a life after this.”
Canada stressed the reciprocal nature of these relationships. “It's not just mothers loving on their kids. Their sons are loving them back openly, letting people know they have close relationships with their moms, which isn't what you would necessarily expect from this ‘hyper-masculine’ group of young men.”
In her book, Canada draws a distinction between the team managements’ “corporeal concern” for athletes’ playing bodies, where keeping players physically healthy, well-fed and academically supported hopefully results in winning teams, and the spontaneous, holistic and selfless “kindred care” that is enacted between players in their everyday lives.
Canada was struck by the beauty of these friendships. “These are quite intimate relationships that students sustain not only during college, but also after,” she said. “The deep relationships and the way they care for each other are aspects that are not usually considered when discussing young Black men, especially football players.”
In 2017-2018, when Canada was conducting her research for “Tackling the Everyday,” football — and Colin Kaepernick in particular — was front-page news.
The intersection of race, free speech, institutions and individuality expressed through his protests against police brutality and the public’s reaction highlighted the way in which sports reflect society. “Sports are inherently political,” Canada observed. “It's hard to turn on the TV and go for a whole news cycle without hearing anything sports-related. Sports are so integral to the way we live.”
The public was also more aware than ever of the physical risks of playing football.
“In 2015, the Will Smith movie Concussion came out,” Canada said. “There was also a 2017 study at Boston University about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in retired football players’ brains. At that time, there was a lot of conversation around concussions, brain injury and football injuries in general.”
Canada’s current research moves her deeper into questions about how sports, health, injury, safety, family and race all come together to inform the choices of high school players. “There is so much data now that shows playing football is not great for your brain or your body,” she said. “What does it mean when we look at Black students who are still making the decision to play high school football, still deciding to play on a college team? Who's helping them make those decisions?”
In 2024, as she put the final touches on “Tackling the Everyday,” Canada also founded the
Health, Ethnography, And Race Through Sports (HEARTS) Lab at Duke. With three projects in the works, Canada envisions the HEARTS Lab as a space for undergraduate and graduate students to experience the supportive research environment that laid the foundation for her own career.
All three of the lab’s current projects are focused on different aspects of football in North Carolina and cover a wide range of experiences, from Black players integrating college football in the late-1960s to a local high-school team to Black athletes navigating their first year on college campuses.
“These three projects, looking at different generations of athletes, make an interesting argument about how football has — and hasn’t — changed over time,” Canada said.
Through the HEARTS Lab, she hopes to show students in different disciplines how the methodology of anthropology and ethnography can help them excel in any career they pursue.
“It’s valuable to engage students who might not think the social sciences have anything to give them. I love working with students who come from other disciplines, because they think about things so differently. I know what an anthropologist might say about the research I'm doing, but I have no idea what someone in biology might say about it,’ Canada said. “I want to hear different students’ perspectives and make the HEARTS Lab a place where researchers from all majors work together on these important issues.”
Tracie Canada will take part in the conversation, On Race, Exploitation and Hope in Sports, with MacArthur Fellow and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, presented by The Ethics of Now, on April 24 at 7 PM at the Durham Arts Council, 120 Morris St., Durham, NC. The Ethics of Now is a program of the Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics and is hosted by Adriane Lentz-Smith.
