Playing with Race:Right to Playand the Production of Whiteness in ‘Development through Sport’

‘Development through sport’ organizations use sport, physical activity and play as tools to facilitate social improvement in nations and communities targeted for development. The international movement supporting development through sport operates within two overlapping, yet distinct discursive frameworks: that of sport and play as universal and integrative social practices, and that of international development as the benevolent deliverance of aid, goods and expertise from the northern, ‘First World’ to the southern, ‘Third World’. This essay offers a critical analysis of the implications of development through sport with respect to the construction of racial knowledge, particularly ‘Whiteness’ as a standpoint of privilege and respectability. Foucault's notion of discourse, and critical race theory, are used to investigate published testimonials from volunteers of Right to Play, an internationally recognized development through sport organization, and to illustrate the ways in which overlapping discourses of sport and development provide a grid of intelligibility that produces and constrains racial subjectivity. The results suggest that encounters and experiences within development through sport serve in the (re)construction of particular knowledge: Whiteness as a subject position of benevolence, rationality and expertise, confirmed in opposition to marginalized, unsophisticated and appreciative bodies of colour.