Along with showcasing the world’s best athletes, the Olympics offer a unique glimpse into history and race relations.
When TV news images showed pro-Tibet sympathizers dramatically disrupting the international Olympic torch relay in multiple cities earlier this year, Dr. Yosay Wangdi’s faculty colleagues throughout academia flooded her with e-mails. “They wanted to know how my students were responding,” says Wangdi, an assistant professor of history at Grand Valley State University. “Over and over, they said their students were very passionate, very sympathetic to Tibet.”
With the eyes of the world focused on the Olympic Games in Beijing this month, Wangdi, who’s of Tibetan ancestry, expects to hear from colleagues again. She also expects her students this fall to continue discussing Tibet’s longstanding conflict with China, just as they did this past spring when news reports surfaced of a crackdown that sometimes turned violent against anti-Chinese demonstrators in Tibet.
For many Americans, TV and other media provide their only contact with the Olympics. Yet scholars who incorporate sports into their class lessons believe the broadcasts offer a unique glimpse into history and race relations. Indeed, the modern-day games are known as much for politics, civil rights, anti-apartheid, terrorism and boycotts as they are for seemingly superhuman sporting feats.
Dr. Peniel Joseph, an associate professor of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University, believes the social and political undercurrents surrounding Olympic history can teach college students lessons that supplement what’s covered in a classroom.
“Jesse Owens and his four gold medals are an example of citizenship and meritocracy,” Joseph says, referring to the U.S. track star who gained worldwide stature in the 1936 games in Berlin. “The Olympics show the global nature of sport. They’ve been ahead of the times in terms of race.”
