Joseph Darda on Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt
October 28, 2025
In 1998, President Bill Clinton hosted an ESPN town hall on race and sports. A half hour into the event, network anchor Bob Ley, serving as moderator, asked the president whether he thought professional athletes had a “special responsibility” to give back. Clinton didn’t hesitate. Yes, he said. “Anybody with a special gift has a special responsibility. If you have a special gift, if God gave you something that other people don’t normally have, and no matter how hard they work they can’t get there, then you owe more back.” The gifted athlete owed an ambiguous debt, and that gift had something to do, the event suggested, with race.
In Gift and Grit, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, Joseph Darda unravels the assumed relation between race, athletic giftedness, and social debt to which the president alluded and, apparently, subscribed. Darda, a professor of English at Michigan State University, has written three previous books about the history of racial formation in the United States. Gift and Grit is his first to address the sports industry, which he argues is not merely racialized but racializing: it structures new racial categories and redraws racial lines. Sports are built on the appearance of fairness, and they inform, he writes, “how we talk about equality in other domains,” including immigration, crime, education, and labor.
Darda’s interest in the politics of sports stems from his own athletic background. He competed in track and field for the University of Washington in the late 2000s and has raced almost fifty marathons since.
His next two projects pick up where Gift and Grit leaves off. He is currently developing a group biography tentatively titled “Athletic Revolutionaries: Jack Scott and the Jocks Who Brought the Left to the Locker Room” and editing a volume on running culture in the United States titled “Distance: On Running, and Not Running, in America.”
At the 1998 town hall, President Clinton acknowledged, “America, rightly or wrongly, is a sports crazy country.” Darda plans to continue investigating what lies beneath that obsession.
