Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

A Black feminist take on exploitation and care in America’s favorite game.

A Cappella Books and the Auburn Avenue Research Library welcome anthropologist and author Tracie Canada in honor of her new book, “Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football.” Canada will appear in conversation with Carl Suddler, associate professor of history at Emory University.

This event is free and open to the public; copies of “Tackling the Everyday” will be available for purchase.

About the Book

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.

“Tackling the Everyday” shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading “football family” narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America’s favorite game.

About the Author

Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and is affiliated with the Sports & Race Project at Duke University. She is also the founder and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab. As a Black feminist anthropologist and ethnographer, Dr. Canada’s work uses sport, specifically American football, to theorize race, kinship, care, and gender. In her first ethnographic book, “Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football” (University of California Press, 2025), she analyzes the performing athletic body to reveal how processes of anti-Blackness, injury, violence, and care impact the everyday lived experiences of Black college football players. In addition to her academic publications, her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as The Museum of Modern Art, TIME, The Guardian, and Scientific American.

About the Conversation Partner

Carl Suddler is an associate professor of history at Emory University. His publications, teaching, and public scholarship have placed him among a small number of African-American scholars who study the intersections of Black life, crime, and sports since the late nineteenth century. Suddler’s first book, “Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York” (2019), is widely used in college and graduate classrooms across the country.

In 2021, Suddler worked with Harvard University’s Global Sports Initiative to help professional athletes become more informed on how to maximize their platforms to contribute to social justice efforts across the globe. With his recent op-eds and articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, HuffPost, and Brookings Institute, Suddler has built a name for himself outside of the academy. His expertise is in high demand from scholarly communities and media outlets such as CNN, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Black News Channel, and NPR.

In addition to a number of public-facing projects, Suddler is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled “No Way Out: The Carceral Boundaries of Race and Sports,” which uncovers the hidden fingerprints of police power in sports over the past 150 years and tells the stories of how Black athletes have been forced to navigate the constantly growing police presence in their daily lives

Host or Publisher Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History