Interrogating inequalities in Sports Media: Examining race representation in Sports Illustrated

            For this entry, I’ve done a quick racial breakdown of every cover of Sports Illustrated from the year 2013. This includes all of their multiple-edition covers that they published for certain events (the MLB season preview, for example). I’ve tried to focus on the athlete(s) that is (are) the “focus” of the cover shot. The swimsuit issue has not been included in this calculation.

            More than half of the covers were individual athletes, and there were an even amount of white and black cover athletes (30). There were four half-white/half-black cover athletes, which were actually the same two athletes used twice each: Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers as well as Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Both of the Latino athletes were baseball players (Mariano Riviera and Alex Rodriguez). Of course, football and basketball were the dominant sports, with baseball being covered fairly extensively as well. Sports like tennis, NASCAR, and soccer are not featured on the cover at all, while hockey gets a few covers around playoff time. 

            These findings demonstrate that SI is helping to market certain stereotypes about sports, namely that the big US sports are dominated by black and white men. There were nine covers that showed more than one black man and nine that showed more than one white man. Combining this with the number from earlier, that’s a total of 78 covers featuring white or black athletes. SI had 102 total covers last year. If you add the multiracial pictures, all of which had some mix of white and black athletes (with a handful of Hispanics), this makes over 90 covers from 102 that feature white or black athletes. This is not at all proportionate to the general population: Asian and Asian-American athletes are completely absent, despite making up around 5% of the United States’ general population. African Americans make up 12%, while whites make up 72%. Yet on SI covers they are 50/50, which demonstrates that race doesn’t matter in sport nearly as much as talent. It also demonstrates how sport performance can become tied to racial identity as black men make the cover of SI and other sports magazines far more often than they make the cover of TIME or other more "serious" news magazines. 

Sports Illustrated covers 2013: a breakdown

Multiple black men: 9

Black man: 30

Multiple white men: 9

White man: 30

Half black/white: 4

Latino: 2

Multiracial: 15

Other: 2

Sources:

Covers can be viewed here: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/photos/1305/si-covers-2013/1/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity