In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by sorting athletes into two broad categories. The gifted athlete received something for nothing, we're told, and owes the team, the fan, the city, God, nation. The gritty athlete received nothing and owes no one. The distinction between gift and grit is racial, but also, Joseph Darda reveals, racializing: It has structured new racial categories and redrawn racial lines. Sports, built on an image of fairness, inform how we talk about advantage and deservedness in other domains, including immigration, crime, education, and labor. Gift and Grit tells the stories of Roger Bannister, Roberto Clemente, Martina Navratilova, Florence Griffith Joyner, and LeBron James – and the story their stories tell about the shifting meaning of race in America.

‘Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Gift and Grit demonstrates how sports function as a rhetorical laboratory producing racialized ideas that shape the way we think about fairness and advantage. Weaving together stories of familiar athletes, Darda constructs a compelling new tapestry offering a stark and insightful portrait of race, sports and American society.’

Amira Rose Davis - author of Can't Eat a Medal: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow

‘Darda’s Gift and Grit is a masterful interrogation of the myths of racial meritocracy in sport. He shows how categories of giftedness and grittiness became core principles that sustained a system of white male domination in the world of sport and beyond. The book illuminates the logic and illogic of racial hierarchies on the field, in the stands, in the sport media, and in the front office. Darda exposes racialization as a dynamic ever-changing process-not as a stubborn relic of the past-and he dares to argue that sport has a profound impact on how race is made and understood in the society at large.’

Frank A. Guridy - author of The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

‘With race at the center of the origins, growth, and cultural power of present-day sport, critical and historical perspective is needed now more than ever. Gift and Grit delivers just that-and establishes Joseph Darda as a leader for the next generation of sport scholars.’

Douglas Hartmann - author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath

‘In this groundbreaking work, Joseph Darda weaves together erudite and poetic readings of critical theory and sports culture to explore the profound relationship between athletics, race, and neoliberal capitalism. Brilliantly tracing the metaphors of ‘gift’ and ‘grit,’ he offers us an incisive new framework for understanding the integral role of sport in constructing and normalizing our ever-shifting notions of race and inequality in American society.’

Theresa Runstedtler - author of Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA