Fans Blog Post

Fan communities are one of the most important aspects of sports, especially when it comes to professionals. It is the way that teams make money (ticket sales, apparel, advertising etc). On the other side, becomes huge parts of peoples lives, revolving schedules around watching games, spending money on tickets and apparel etc. Sports create communities of people. For example, I am a really big Patriots fan and when you go to games, the people sitting around you form a community for the 2 hours that we know each other, high fiving when we score a touch down or make a big stop, learning about where each other are from, sometimes making connections of different people. The reason that this practice becomes normal and routine is because our love for a team and our dedication to being a fan. When looking at the fan community of sports, I ask, how do professional sports create communities and how does this practice either exclude or include minorities? In most sports, there is a large representation of black athletes on professional teams, but is the promotion of these athletes and the access to fan community the same for black fan communities? As Levine discusses, even though Olivia Pope, the lead role in Scandal is black, networks still see the man fan audience as white and black men, ignoring the role of black women in the fan community. When focusing on the most visible fan community- the fans attending a patriots game- you can see based on sheer numbers that the majority of attendees are white men. I think this is due to the advertising showed in the video that primarily promotes the white athletes as well as the expense of tickets that white, men primarily have access to. Similar to Scandal, even though the team is very diverse and a lot of the players are black, the black fan community for football games is ignored and therefore are not advertised to and given access to these resources.

I got the video off of youtube and used online voice recorder to attach my argument about this representation of fandom in sports. I also got the pictures offline that show the contrast between fans, an advertisement and the diversity on the actual patriots team and ended with a quote from Levine.