After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Define race, ethnicity, minority group, and national identity and distinguish between them.
• Explain how the concept of race is a social construction and how racial categories are grounded in social meanings rather than in a valid biological classification system.
• Explain how the concept of race has been defined in the United Kingdom, and how dominant racial ideology has influenced ideas about the relationship between skin colour and human potential.
• Explain why scientists and others have searched for sport performance genes in bodies with dark skin and why this is a misleading and futile exercise.
• Explain the authors’ sociological hypothesis about the relationship between skin colour and athletic performance.
• List some of the ways that whiteness influences the choices that people make about sport participation.
• Outline major themes in the history of sport participation among: Black Britons, Asian Britons.
• Discuss the challenges faced by a Black Briton with disabilities when she participates in a sport such as swimming.
• Identify the major challenges related to race, ethnic relations and national identity in sports today, and explain how they are different from the challenges faced through most of the 20th Century.