`I want to be the minority': the politics of youthful white masculinities in sport and popular culture in 1990s America. (Leisure, sport and recreation).

K.W. Kusz, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, v. 25, n.4, 2001, pp.390-416.

Kusz contends that representations of disadvantaged and victimised youthful White masculinities produced in a 1997 Sports Illustrated cover story and in a discourse about social-psychological development of adolescent boys written after US school shootings in 1997-1998 signify a new representational strategy of White male backlash politics in the late 1990s -- the youthification of the White male as victim trope. Kusz first points out that that Whiteness is a largely unchallenged racial norm that is often overlooked in research `as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human'. Second, he traces the path of conservative backlash politics in the USA from the 1960s to the 1990s. Finally, he concludes that sport has become important to White male backlash politics because the over-representation of African American males in certain sports enables the fabrication of a crisis narrative about the precarious and vulnerable cultural position of White males that can be seemingly defended by `empirical' evidence. In addition, the youthification of White male backlash politics ensures its future survival.